Who would have thought something called the “Wii” would be out-performing Sony’s behemoth, the Playstation? While Sony kept after the hard-core gaming market, the Nintendo Wii may have successfully tapped a new market of non-gamers.

Why? The typical explanation is that a) the Wii has competed on price ($249, not $499) and that b) its innovative motion-detecting controllers allow you to intuitively use the motion of your body to play games, making the experience more active and hence more fun (see the video above). With accounts of weight loss to boot, the Wii is selling itself on multiple fronts.

But the Wii can also be viewed as a lesson in user interface design and as the latest direction for Web-based, participatory applications (dare I say Web 2.0?). The gaming industry, after all, has developed into a niche provider for tech-savvy (and often adolescent) consumers willing to spend the time to become experts at very complex games. The learning curve is steep, and the rest of us become spectators as a matter of course: I can handle only so many lethal head-shots from my little brother in one day.

The Wii’s adjustment in user interface has opened up participation to average users in much the same way that improvements in Web application interface have invited more participation from less tech-savvy folk. Consider this experiment by Washington Post columnist Mike Musgrove (who also happens to be a former classmate of mine), and its results:

My friend Andy has always seemed to dislike video games, but he was immediately taken by the Nintendo system in a way that I—and he—did not expect. “I’m surprised by how much I like it,” he said. “The controller is so intuitive.”

I’m reminded of Google’s revolutionary minimalism in user interface: the almost-blank page that exhibits, in the form of an inviting text-input, a single function designed for a single need.

Both Google and Nintendo have reduced the distance between users and the tasks they want to accomplish: Finding something on the Web should be as close as possible as whatever keyword comes to mind; playing a video game should be as easy as moving your body.

The lesson here for anyone in media development is that the medium itself ought to be made as thin or transparent as possible: It is a framework for interesting content or useful functions, and not something that should be designed merely to draw attention to itself.