"This has way too many buttons" my sister said as she picked up my Xbox 360 controller.  "You've got a full keyboard [the chatpad], you've got these two buttons [triggers], these two buttons [bumpers], two joysticks, and these four buttons on the front".  My sister isn't the biggest gamer in the world but she and I did spend a lot of quality time on the Atari 2600 when we were growing up so here expressing such distress over Microsoft's Xbox 360 controller was a bit intereting.  I pointed out that she had missed the thumbpad and the fact that the joysticks could be pushed down for an additional button push which caused her to roll her eyes a bit.  Spying the Dualshock controller next on the end table she picked it up and repeated the fact that the controller just had way too many buttons for "normal" people to use.

This was a bit of a shock to me as my sister has a little bit of gamer cred (we both spent a lot of time with our Atari 2600 growing up and she played a mean game of Kaboom! back in the day) .I use both controllers on a nearly daily basis without any hesitance so this was something a bit unexpected.  While it pains me to admit it this does seem to lead some credence to Nintendo's philosophy of changing how people interact with the consoles.  Maybe we as hard core gamers need to realize that not everyone is used to the 10+ button controller and that the Wii and DS really are the way to bring in new gamers.  

We played a bit of Rock Band this weekend and that went over well.  After finally figuring out some of the timing issues we were rocking out in style with my sister and fiancee on lead guitar and bass respectively and myself banging away on the drums. This certainly re-enforces every tidbit I've read about the rise of casual gaming this year.  But the question is, do casual gamers become hard core gamers or does the road end once you get a Wii?  If it is a dead end then will the niche of hard core gamers get left behind in the race to bring new gamers into the fold or not.