Before the Wii came out, I heard a lot about how it was supposed to attract new gamers. I heard that it would be easy for new gamers to pick up and play, and that Wii Sports would be a hit despite it's mediocre review scores from the gaming media. Though I hoped for it, I never thought it would really be that attractive to non-gamers, particularly my family.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

I picked up a Wii at midnight launch (fun story, another time), and took it home, set it up, tossed around a few balls at Tennis, and went off to bed as it was 3:00 A.M. The next day, my parents ask what is so great about this new console that I would go to such lengths to get it. So I take them downstairs to the Wii, and try to show off what it can do. They seemed less than impressed. I thought this was a bad sign for the new gamers.

Later that night however, my sister and her boyfriend dropped in from college. I decided to test out the photo channel with her fancy digital camera's SD card, so I borrowed it from here and got to work, while she took a nap. The photo channel is quite nifty, and the automatic puzzles are cool, so later I decided to show it to her after she woke up, since I did use her card. "That's the Wii? I thought it was a handheld thing," was her response. Obviously not a gamer. She loved the features there. So much in fact, that I decided to show her the Mii channel. At the moment I'd only had two Miis, mine and a friend that had dropped in unexpectedly (another good story for another time).

She took to it immediately. I had to go to a meeting, but I told her to try out Wii Sports with her Mii when she was done, and she called her boyfriend down as well. He'd seen the Wii in his dorm, and apparently Wii Sports had become a bit of a common pastime there as well, so he could show her around pretty well.

Two hours later, I came back from my meeting, amazed to see that they were still playing! My sister had hardly played anything more than flash games and tetris her whole life, but she was hooked on the simple interface and fun technique. So, I joined in, and we played quite a few games of Bowling. Then we played most of the Training minigames, with three players. And then I left them alone again, and came back later. They had ended up playing it for the whole afternoon and well into the night: over 6 hours. This was definately a first.