In a speech eerily reminiscent of Phil Harrison’s ‘Game 3.0’ GDC keynote back in March 2007, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime took the stage at the BMO Capital Markets annual Interactive Entertainment Conference and considered that “the future of any form of entertainment must be considered in correlation to both the changing and turbulent economic climate and in the end, even more consequentially, this exploding world of consumer-generated, active media."

Fils-Aime approached the subject by reminding the audience that in 1996 the top five websites were essentially websearch engines. The best library card going, he put it. Some twelve years on, the five most popular websites today are sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook; "content composed entirely by users for the benefit of other users."

"If you"re in the entertainment business, any form of entertainment, this is the game-changer," he continued. "Because no longer is entertainment a one-way street; content created for audiences that just sit back and absorb it. "

He made two points to this general topic; the first being that gaming has, from its roots, always embraced user-defined content. "Fifteen years ago, game players were already creating, in a primitive form," he said, citing palette-swapping race cars as an early mark of creative, user-generated content.

But his second point to this showed itself to be the driving force behind Fils-Aime’s discussion: "The DSi … has two built-in cameras and the imaging software to manipulate a picture of the guy in the next cubicle any way you want, and then send it via the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection to every other DSi in the office," he said.

He said that Japanese gamers are already embracing the DSi’s ‘Game 3.0’ properties, as users there are creating and sharing music using Band Bros. Deluxe on the DSi. He also mentioned how one of the newest Wario Ware games, the seemingly autobiographically-titled Wario Ware: Myself, let users design their own games and play them against friends.

“The era of passive entertainment is waning and active entertainment is literally where the action is,” he said.