Wii would like to play.

Oh, so clever. But to label Nintendo’s new television (and, from the unedited length, presumably theatrical) ad as simply smart and entertaining is to miss a larger shift in Nintendo’s branding, perhaps even in the practice of Japanese-American marketing as a whole.

Nintendo, representative of much Japanese pop culture that has flourished in the States, has long imagined Westward. From the beginning, sending an Italian plumber to save a princess, one imprisoned in castles of European inspiration as opposed to ones following domestic style cues, it becomes apparent Shigeru Miyamoto and his creative associates long ago calculated the greater international potential of Westernized, or at least Westernesque franchises.

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In a generally passé attempt at humorous self-deprecation, I have previously given this blog the attemptedly-ironic label of “pointless.” But a pointless blog is an impossible logical construction, as is the idea of a pointless action itself.

Only pure entropic randomness can produce actions without a point. It is impossible for a cogent human to commit a voluntary act without motivation; even if the motivation is unclear to the conscious mind, it is nonetheless driven by something, somewhere, at some time, be it subconscious or consciously suppressed. A random act is motivated by the desire to commit a random act.

An action may be observed externally to have no apparent point. An action which fails in its perceived goal may be called “pointless,” but while the effect can recontextualize the cause, it cannot reach back and actually change the cause.

Thus, the concept of pointlessness, in the context of human action, is flawed. There is no such thing as an action without a point — only an action without an observable one.

This blog, for example.