With Project Cafe, Nintendo aims to create the first social game console. What do I mean by this? Well, here's where you have to start imagining the future with me. First off, no more friend codes, that's for damn sure. But start to think about what a company like Nintendo would want to do to have players gaming and sharing together. Take a look at what it's done with StreetPass on the 3DS (where players' items and achievements can be shared with others nearby even when the system is closed) and think about what it could do on its next connected console. Nintendo merely scratched the surface with its Mii parade (where peoples' virtual avatars could migrate to others' machines) and user generated polls on the Wii -- 5 years later, the company has much more ambitious plans. The new console will be designed around the concept of connecting, sharing, and gaming with others. Like you were gaming together in a café, if you will.
I'll take things a step further. Care to guess where the name "Stream" comes from? You've likely seen the supposed leaked image of the system's ability to stream games to its controller screens, but my understanding is that Nintendo aims to take this concept further and stream video of games being played to other peoples' machines so that friends can see what each other are up to. When you look at Nintendo consoles and handhelds, there's often a clear progression of its intent -- what starts as an experimental feature in one generation fully takes form in another. Chris Kohler just pointed out on Wired, for instance, that Project Cafe's touch-screen controller makes perfect sense if you look at Nintendo's past with the GBA to GameCube link cable.
So when I see the current Wii's dashboard of different TV screens, I can't help but think of that concept taken to the next level: seeing all of my friends' games playing in the different windows. You know, not that unlike what OnLive offers with its streaming service. Forget Facebook alerting you to what your friends have been doing in their games -- how about a platform that actually shows you?
But here's where things get potentially even cooler. Imagine seeing your friend's game in one of the screens. You click on it, and -- provided you have the game too -- you then seamlessly join his or her game. No waiting until the next match and no buffering to sync up consoles. Just a seamless online experience, exactly as Nintendo would want it. And the beauty of this is that the concept extends to not only new games, but potentially Nintendo's back catalog of classics. Got a friend racing the AI in Super Mario Kart? What if the game was retrofitted so that you could hop right in at any given moment? That, my friends, may well be the promise of Project Cafe.
And then there's the whole aspect of content sharing. Sony kicked things off nicely with LittleBigPlanet, but there's obviously so much more that could be done with a console designed around social gaming. One of the features I remember Nintendo touting in the early days of the Wii that never really materialized was the ability to push content to the console since it's always on. Sure, we ended up with emails telling us what we played and what not, but the concept was supposed to be so much more -- you were supposed to be able to check your machine each day and have new things waiting for you. So now, imagine checking your Project Cafe each morning and seeing new creations from your friends or even Nintendo. New levels for games, new characters or items to use, new demos for games you're interested in -- there could be all sorts of new things to see and do each time you open your console. I'm telling you, whether Nintendo pulls this off or not, there's a console experience here that's far more enticing than the one we're used to today.
