Nintendo Demo-Play; what it means to gamers.

It is not unknown that Nintendo has chosen to target a more casual market, but Nintendo has taken it to another level with the newest feature for future Wii and DS games; Demo play.
Demo-play is somewhat misleading in its name. It is not the ability to play demos of new games soon to be released on the Wii or DS. Demo-play is the most recent feature from the Japanese mega-publisher to be incorporated into New Super Mario Bros. For the Wii to start with other games planned in the future. It could more accurately be called auto-play since the idea behind the feature seems to be to allow the game to play itself.
Nintendo is trying to further destroy the barrier for non-gamers to get into gaming by implementing demo-play. The basics of the mechanic seems to be that if a gamer gets to a point in the game that they feel is too difficult they can use demo-play to get past it. Once activated Demo-play will basically play the game for you until you’re past the part that gave you trouble. Some games may also feature an ability to skip levels or chapters or acts at will (a function present in last year’s Alone in the Dark game).
What does this mean for the hardcore gamer? Not a lot it would seem at this point. Since it is an optional feature nobody is forced to use it. It may be argued that Demo-play will give the developers an excuse to crank-up the difficulty in newer games since now if a more casual player comes across one of these harder challenges they can just skip over it. However that is yet to be seen.
Is it the downfall of gaming as we know it? Not really, but it leaves one to wonder what is the point in playing a game if there is a feature available that is designed for the sole purpose of sucking the challenge out of it. Most gamers would agree that the reason we play video games is to face challenges and overcoming them.