After spending some time with Nintendo’s upcoming music “non-game” Wii Music at last week’s Nintendo Media Summit in San Francisco, I can’t help but ask the hardcore gamers: Why all the hate?

The title, one of legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s pet projects, has garnered much mockery, disgust, and apathy from forum-goers, especially in the aftermath of E3 (though to be fair, that Wii Music performance at E3 was pretty horrendous). Gaming blog Joystiq summed up the sentiments very concisely with a picture of a baby playing with a Fisher-Price toy.

Wii Music is, as Nintendo has been quick to admit, not a game in the traditional sense. There are no high scores. There are no higher difficulties. You do not need to press buttons in time to anything.

Instead, Wii Music has players imitating instruments. Rather than press buttons, a person will swing the Wii remote and nunchuck up and down to simulate playing a piano, or strumming up and down to simulate the guitar.

The game will come with over 50 songs and over 60 instruments and – this is where gamers’ biggest gripe with the title comes in – every shake and movement is automatically assigned to a note. Basically, it means that you can’t really make a mistake. You can shake the Wii-mote haphazardly and it will more or less produce the song you chose, albeit sloppily.

And that’s where the question comes up once again: Why all the hate? It’s understandable that shaking the Wii-mote conjures up images of a baby shaking a rattle and making noise. However, certain buttons add a good variety to the instruments. For example, just shaking the remote will produce a guitar strum. But, by holding down a button, the player will instead produce power chords, staccato, and so on.

Yes, every shake produces a set sound – the players have no control over that. Simply shaking it like a toy, though, produces a mess. “Sound, but not music” said a Nintendo rep at the summit. To actually create something that sounds good with two, three, or four other friends, takes some musical sense and rhythm. To choose complementing instrumentation and then improvise and tweak a song into something akin to a remix takes much more musical sense on top of that.

Wii Music is by no means a hardcore title. But it is by no means the “death” of gaming, as some commenters adamantly claim, nor does it warrant pawning off one’s Wii. Instead, it’s an interesting idea that Nintendo hopes will pique non-musical people’s interest in learning an instrument (an idea that they hope will end up in classrooms). For the musically-inclined and the more traditional gamer, it’s not that bad, really – at the very least, it’s good for a fun jazzy rendition of the Legend of Zelda theme with your friends.