The Wii Effect: How Gaming Rewired the Art of Performance

Twenty years ago, millions of people stood in their living rooms and started swinging and waving their arms. They bowled without balls, played volleys without tennis rackets and even led entire orchestras without a conductor’s baton in sight. What each of these living rooms had in common was a small white box that sat beside the TV.

This box, of course, was the Nintendo Wii.

After months of fevered anticipation, the Japanese-made videogame console arrived in November 2006 and, along with it, an all-important wireless motion-tracking controller that demanded you move your whole body rather than just your thumbs. Not only did it challenge you to move, it invited you to perform according to a set of prescribed gestures, preferably with friends and family as audience and participants.

This shift in home gaming had echoes in the performance art of a previous generation and would subtly influence artists’ later engagement with technologies that interpret and work in tandem with the human body.

The Console That Turned Living Rooms into Stages

The Wii’s launch was accompanied by a marketing drive in the US that was its own kind of peculiar performance art. The ‘Wii would like to play’ advertising campaign featured two suited representatives from Nintendo HQ touring markedly different regions of America, knocking on doors, bowing and presenting the Wii controller to households of varying demographics. The delivery was pleasingly odd, but the message was clear: the console was for everyone. Soon, everyone was performing in front of a Wii.

A round of Wii golf in the interactive video game room of the USO centre at Camp Anaconda, Balad, 2008

At a time when rival companies such as Sony and Microsoft were selling immersive experiences through greater computational power, Nintendo bet on a different kind of absorption: not sharper graphics but a new relationship between player, machine and body. The Wii didn’t simply entertain; it trained users to feel what it is like to be read by a device. It made ordinary people fluent in a feedback loop that was once revolutionary but has since become ubiquitous: you gesture, a system interprets your action and you adjust yourself until you become legible to it.

Most Wii titles followed a simple grammar. You stood before a screen, received a prompt, moved your body according to instructions and the console translated that movement into an onscreen act: an uppercut landed, a sword swung, dance steps completed. Just Dance (2009) made the routine explicit. Players mirrored an onscreen dancer’s choreography while the Wii Remote judged the accuracy of their movements. The living room became a dancefloor; the screen a choreographer; friends an audience. It was, in effect, a series of scores and instructions repackaged as entertainment. What the Wii mainstreamed was legibility: learning, in real time, what a machine would recognise as a valid movement and reshaping your body to fit.

Event Scores, Performance Art and Participation

Anyone familiar with the development of performance art from the mid-twentieth century will recognise that this structure of instruction, gesture and interpretation has a long history. During the early 1960s, the Fluxus movement labelled such propositions event scores: simple scripts that activated a viewer as performer, with the artwork coming into being only through its execution. One well-known antecedent, Yoko Ono’s Lighting Piece (1955), consisted of a single instruction: ‘Light a match and watch till it goes out.’ A decade later, the Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT raised the stakes with Tap and Touch Cinema (1968). Standing in a public square in Munich with a curtained box covering her bare chest, she invited passersby to reach inside and touch her. The viewers were no longer mere spectators; they were participants. They, too, were being read. Marina Abramović pushed this further in Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she stood motionless for six hours while gallery visitors were invited to use any of seventy-two objects on her body, including a loaded gun. The artwork existed only through the audience’s willingness to act.

VALIE EXPORT, TAPP und TAST KINO (TOUCH CINEMA), 1968, b/w photograph, 69 x 76 x 2 cm (framed). © VALIE EXPORT / SIAE 2025. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Years later, the Wii echoed this dynamic in a domestic setting, gamified for an audience of millions. Like an event score, it offered a set of cues, asking gamers to complete them with their bodies. But it added something performance art only occasionally foregrounded: a machine that could respond. The Wii didn’t just instruct; it also evaluated, translating messy gestures into data it could interpret as a serve, a throw or a punch. A game of Wii tennis quickly became a kind of performance: turns taken, gestures exaggerated, laughter at misread swings, the peculiar intimacy of doing something slightly ridiculous together. In retrospect, it looks less like a novelty than a rehearsal for the interfaces that would follow – systems that invite participation while quietly teaching us how to be interpreted.

During the decade that followed, many artists made similar dynamics increasingly explicit, not directly influenced by the Wii but drawing on the same wellspring of ideas about scores, systems and participation that the console had brought into living rooms worldwide. Tino Sehgal’s constructed situations turned gallery staff into performers of scripted encounters, while Anne Imhof’s Faust (2017) choreographed bodies moving according to scores beneath glass floors. Philippe Parreno’s Anywhen (2016), commissioned for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, orchestrated an entire environment through automated systems: blinds opened and closed on programmed cues, a floating screen drifted through the hall projecting film sequences and microorganisms in a bioreactor influenced the lighting. Visitors wandered through a space perpetually reconfigured by what Parreno called a ‘score’, executed by machines responding to inputs rather than human supervisors. Here was an artwork that treated its audience as participants moving through an algorithmically interpreted environment, their experience shaped by systems with their own timing and logic.

Ix Shells, No Me Olvides, 2025 (installation view, Art Basel Miami Beach 2025). Photo: Reece Straw. Courtesy Fellowship and ARTXCODE

From Motion Control to Generative Systems

The Wii’s legacy is not a particular game or aesthetic but the way it reframed our relationship to screens and devices. Scores, instructions, the blurring of the game-as-artwork and its performance, the idea of a machine interpreting your actions – once radical notions – became familiar playthings. The Wii prepared a generation for the idea that meaning can emerge through an interface that actively interprets you.

Today, this dynamic is familiar. Platforms, apps, devices and digital experiences operate this way continuously and at scale, reading our gestures – scrolls, clicks, swipes – and translating them into responses – recommendations, personalised feeds, virtual environments. The notion that algorithms interpret has moved from blue-sky theory to a basic condition of daily life.

Lu Yang, DOKU - Heaven (still), 2022, 4K video, 4 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

Contemporary art has followed. Art Basel Miami Beach’s Zero 10 initiative recently featured works including IX Shell’s generative videowork No Me Olvides (Don’t Forget Me, 2025), which uses code to transform archival fragments into algorithmic compositions, and Lu Yang’s motion-captured avatar dancing through a hallucinatory virtual landscape – essentially performance art staged in digital space – in DOKU-Heaven (2022). Debates around authorship, creativity and what it means when a machine ‘collaborates’ in the artmaking were rehearsed at massive scale in those living rooms two decades ago, when Wii players learned to negotiate with an algorithm, adjusting their gestures until the system understood them.

The Wii’s twentieth anniversary arrives at a time when questions about human–machine collaboration have rarely been more urgent. Generative AI is transforming creative practice; VR promises immersive experiences; artists work with systems that have their own agency and unpredictability. In navigating this landscape, it is worth remembering that wildly popular little white box. It taught a generation how to make meaning with machines not by typing or clicking but through the oldest interface of all – the moving body.