【The Pursuit of Lust】

I brought my mom along to check out Nintendo Labo. What a trip.

She's never been a fan of video games,The Pursuit of Lust and always put harsh restrictions on my access to them as a kid. But she came away from the experience coveting Nintendo's new cardboard creations and plotting a Switch purchase. A shocking turnaround.

SEE ALSO: The internet reacts hilariously to Nintendo Labo's cardboard accessories

And that got me thinking. It's 12 years ago, late 2006. My sister and other members of my family -- none of them fans of gaming -- were jazzed about Nintendo's Wii. The motion control gimmick, the ability to play tennis and toss bowling balls from the comfort of a living room, it all had them sold. They were lined up on launch day alongside video game geeks like me.

A few months later, the fad had passed. Dormant Wii consoles gathered dust in the bowels of my family's entertainment centers. It may be one of Nintendo's most successful products to date in terms of sales, but for all the units sold, my own family's experience suggests the thrill didn't last.

The Wii launch was a lightning rod for getting a mainstream audience interested in video game consoles, but the storm passed quickly.

Now we have Labo. The Switch is already a soaring success among Nintendo-loving gamers, and Labo feels like a bid to widen that audience. Setting aside the high cost of entry -- the two launch kits are priced at $70 and $80, respectively -- there's an all-ages appeal to these homemade cardboard constructs and the elements that make them interactive.

As a newly married man who's talking about starting a family, I can't wait to share Labo with my future kids. For my mom, a longtime elementary school educator with a deep personal interest in making STEM/STEAM programs integral to classrooms, Labo seemed like a thrilling taste of the future.

Sitting side-by-side with her at Nintendo's hands-on event, we assembled the Labo's R.C. car kit Toy-Con (that's what each creation is called) as well as a portion of the fishing pole Toy-Con. Although the cardboard sheets feel flimsy at first, the process of folding them into shape leaves you with a surprisingly sturdy finished product.

We learned very quickly that not all Toy-Cons are created equally. The R.C. car is simple, spanning two perforated cardboard sheets and only one multi-part step. The fishing rod, on the other hand, is much more complex: In the hour we had to work on it, we only managed to get through two of the five steps.

Building these things is lots of fun, and an integral piece of the overall Labo experience.

Neither of us cared. Building these things is lots of fun, and an integral piece of the overall Labo experience. Thank Nintendo's smartly designed, interactive "how-to" tutorials, built into the Labo software. Interacting with nothing more than the Switch screen, you can rotate and zoom in/out on animated looks at each step in the building process, and fast-forward or rewind whenever you like.

The actual cardboard pieces are also a delight to work with. They're all clearly marked with fold lines and visual flourishes that help differentiate one side from another. There's always a risk of accidentally ripping one, or creasing it in the wrong spot, but observant builders have no need to worry about mixing up similar-looking pieces.

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Picture the instructions for a piece of Ikea furniture. Now, imagine someone turned those instructions into an app, and that each piece of the item you're building came with clear, easily identified markings. That's what building a Toy-Con feels like: Nintendo made Ikea blueprints user-friendly.

The "game" portion of the Labo experience is harder to get behind at this early stage, and that's where my Wii flashback is relevant. There are five different Toy-Con experiences in one kit (R.C. car, fishing rod, house, motorbike, and piano) and one more in the elaborate robot kit.

I spent a brief amount of time with each Toy-Con. Fishing was the most fun for me; you lower a hook into the water, pull the rod back sharply to snag a fish when you feel a rumble, and tire your catch out as you slowly guide it back to the surface while keeping your line intact. It's simple, but satisfyingly kinetic.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

My mom, a gaming neophyte, loved the robot. That kit centers around a cardboard backpack with four strings coming out of it. Two of them end in cardboard grips, one for each hand. The other two end in foot straps. There's also a headpiece with a goggles-like viewfinder you can lower over your eyes.

Once you get yourself all strapped in and set up, the robot Toy-Con is essentially a Nintendo-powered virtual reality rig. You march in place to make the robot on screen walk forward, lean left and right to turn, punch with either hand to... well... punch, and bend down at the knees to transform into a robo-car. The goggles let you switch between first- and third-person views.

The problem with these two experiences, as well as the others: There's not much to them. Maybe Nintendo's brief window for hands-on play at the event is to blame. It's possible there's a great deal more depth to each Toy-Con experience and I just didn't get to see it firsthand because time was so limited.

My guess, however, is what we saw is what you get. The piano Toy-Con, for example, with its cardboard sound patches that let you play cat meows or choral notes instead of tinkling piano keys, seems to be just that: A simple instrument you can assemble and then noodle around with, but not a video game in the traditional sense.

That's what building a Toy-Con feels like: Nintendo made Ikea blueprints user-friendly.

When the Wii launched, Wii Sportswas a similarly delightful accompaniment that showcased what the console could really do. There wasn't much depth to any of the minigames included on that disc, but as a tool for teaching mainstream consumers what the Wii could do, the simplified takes on bowling, tennis, baseball, golf, and boxing were perfect.

Each Toy-Con feels similar. They offer a sense of how the more non-traditional Switch functions -- features like a built-in IR sensor or variable controller rumble -- can be leveraged for play.

Many of the Toy-Cons, for example, are powered by the Switch Joy-Con's built-in heat sensor working in tandem with included IR stickers. But the "cool tech is cool" factor doesn't last if there isn't a deeper experience to prop it up. As inventive and out-of-this-world as Labo is, it's going to need more to keep the audience interested.

The answer to that issue may be hidden away in Toy-Con Garage, a Labo feature Nintendo hasn't publicly talked up just yet. It's essentially a programming mode that allows tech-savvy users to craft their own Labo experiences, using either the pre-existing Toy-Cons or new constructs of their own creation.

We didn't get to sample this ourselves, but Nintendo's hands-off demonstration showed how Toy-Con Garage users can map each controller input to whatever outcome they like, such as producing a specific sound or causing the controller to rumble.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

While the interface is clear enough based on the brief glimpse we got, the bar for entry here still seems relatively high. Nintendo demoed a "homemade" electric guitar, with the Switch tablet positioned where the strings would be. The user-made programming that let the guitar play just one note will likely be too much of a barrier for a lot of users.

There's a lot to be said for the creative problem-solving that Toy-Con Garage could potentially empower. But its success or failure hinges on a number of factors: Does it teach newcomers effectively? Does it nudge you to create with helpful ideas and examples? Are the programming tools really powerful enough? Will Joy-Con controllers get cheap enough to make owning more than two viable for most households, since you can use more than two in your creations?

Labo may be the most imaginative Nintendo product since the Wii's arrival in 2006, but I have to wonder based on what I've seen so far: Can it keep people interested in the long-term?

Whether or not Labo learns from the lessons of the past remains to be seen. It left my mom dazzled and ready to pick up a Switch, but is the experience it provides built to last or will this be one more Nintendo device that ends up gathering dust beneath the TV?

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