Safety Warnings from the Wii Japanese Manual

Someone at Gizmodo noticed the oddness of the warnings in the Japanese version of the manual for the new Wii gaming system and posted them online.

These are funny if you think about them as representatives of actual actions that might be performed by an idiotic or drug-tripping user of the new Wii.

They are brilliant if you think of them as attempts to break through years of built-up apathy with regards to reading any kind of safety literature for consumer products.


They are iconic because we already know not to do these things; they are reminders that attempt to do something different so that their message might actually make it through to us. They take the warnings to the next level of abstraction. They are, in effect, drawings of those original, basic warnings - which were themselves drawings of imaginary actions. The imagined reality becomes a dream about what had already been, in the strictest sense, fiction.


Okay, except this one. The sign reads "Burnable Garbage." The spirit of play is making itself apparent...

Okay, and this one too. Those Japanese game designers are just crazy!

[Link to even more|Thanks, Matthew!]