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Everybody Votes on the Wii
Wired's Game|Life blog has up a post pointing out a surprise from Nintendo: a cute voting application now available on your Nintendo Wii. Unannounced and easy to understand, Everybody Votes appears to be attempting to gain a gestalt view of the Wii-owning population. The app gives you several multiple choice questions to answer, and allows you to submit your own. Chris Kohler hopes that this might be the beginning of downloads for small, entertaining programs Nintendo fans may have never otherwise seen. "If you've ever been to an E3 or read about Nintendo's booth, you know that they often show little demos or applications that never get released. Well, with Wii, it seems that we might actually start seeing those little experiments thrown out to the public. Since Nintendo as a game developer uses this first-prototype-something-fun style of design, we could see all kinds of things that ordinarily wouldn't ever make it out of Nintendo headquarters." I personally hope we get a full-fledged version of the conducting game that Miyamoto used to demo the system at last year's E3.
Damn this sounds amazing! I've often wondered if doing a test level with test gameplay mechanics and demo'ing it wasn't THE WAY to produce the best games.
I wonder if all the polls will have only two possible responses? Slashdotters complain when they are fewer than... well, infinity.
It would be cool if they accepted user poll ideas. Here is my Everybody Votes poll submission: What is your favorite gaming console: Playstation 3 or Xbox 360?
I hadn't heard of it, so I just had to look for it: Here's a link to the aforementioned "conducting game" demo by Miyamoto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwzmnAOf1C8
kinda cool.
I think you are talking about Wii Music.
:(){
Cheaper, less prone to corruption, and cuter, too.
Sounds like an attempt to gather marketing/survey data.
Well no shit, that's but better game development is what "survey data" is all about.
I get the feeling that there is a master plan behind all the moved Nintendo have been making for the past year or two.
Everything with the DS and Wii, the specific features they have, the marketing. They have made it clear that the want to bring non-gamers into the fold (blue ocean??).
This latest channel seems more than something random or just cool, I think they are making chess moves and soon their master plan will unfold, something great with be revelled and then checkmate!
(Or maybe I've watched too many movies)
When I downloaded this thing yesterday, I was really confused about it. I mean, I know Nintendo is known for being quirky, but this is just odd, you know? What possible purpose could there be in a Wii polling application? Once I played a little with it though, I saw the genius behind this thing. By spacing out the polls to one every other day or so, Nintendo ensures that we'll play with our Wii every couple days to check out what the new poll is, and what our results were for predicting the last poll. Then, once they have us checking our Wii every couple days, we are more likely to think, "Hmm, I guess I should get a new game for this thing, since I'm always just fiddling with the channels."
This is to say nothing of the sheer treasure trove of demographic data Nintendo is getting out of this. Think of it: Nintendo has shipped 6 million Wiis world wide. If even 10% vote on the first poll, they just got 600,000 votes. After a couple days, a lot of people will stop using, and it will be down to 1%, but that's still 60,000 people. In comparison, usually you can get a truly significant poll with a random group of 1,000 people. Of course, Everybody Votes players aren't going to be random, but with 60,000 results, if you ask, "Who do you like better, Mario or Luigi?" the result effectively will predict whether Mario 128 will outsell Luigi's Mansion 2, non-random sample be damned. Nintendo have come up with an awesome but strange window into the hearts of their demographic.
Imagine, using a online computer to conduct *polls* with *multiple-choices*. It a mind-boggling idea !
And you can send "suggestions" too, don't figure that's ever been possible before !
Of course, someone's going to ruin this great new technology by answering every question with "CowboyMario"
Because Nintendo has never, ever done marketing and surveying in the past. =p
Hey, Nintendo is out to make money. And if that strategy for doing so involves neat little things like this, more power to them. I'd love to see more stuff like this (that is if I could get my Wii online... I have a dongle for that, but it turns out it doesn't like my MAC address...)
and not even a comments thread to complain about! Nintendo, you insensitive clod!
DON'T PANIC
Everybody Votes is unique in that it really is a game. You don't just vote, you also make predictions on how other people will vote. You get scored for "distance from popular opinion" and for your prediction accuracy.
Of course, like Brain Age or Wii Fitness scores, the values reported make no sense... I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
Article stated there was no notification and that it was simply discovered in the Ship. I got a nice Wii message from Nintendo telling me about this.
I think the release of things like these small channels is how Nintendo can best stave off the impending "short lived gimmick" status that most people keep trying to apply to the Wii. There have been many implications (primarily by the fanboy crowd) that the Wii's novelty will quickly wear off with the general dearth of games between now and the third or fourth quarter. If Nintendo can keep throwing out little updates like this that will keep the Wii's slot blinking blue, people are going to keep it out and ready to find out what the next new thing is. This should help sustain people's interest until the next wave of AAA titles starts hitting the console.
One question that I have, however, is how many of these channels can they actually release before the fill up the minimal amount of system memory the Wii has? Did Nintendo handicap themselves with this, especially as games (at least currently) can't be played directly from the SD Card slot?
Probably the most important feature this has to Nintendo is that it gives everyone a reason to turn there Wii on every day or two, even if they aren't playing a game that day. Once it is on why not check the news and weather there. And the more people using the thing every day the more people think of it when they are out shopping, the more games they buy, the more they talk about it, the more people buy a wii.
The exact functionality doesn't matter. Of course it is a silly little thing that doesn't stand in for an actual game. All that matters to Nintendo is that more people turn their Wii's on every day, if only briefly. And it does that job well.
From what I've seen, you can only answer each question one of two ways, and no write-ins are allowed. You're able to predict what you think the majority of the people are going to vote, regardless of how you vote. Results can be displayed by region (by state here in the US).
Because of the way that the questions are set up, it allowed me to ask the question that's been on my mind for several years:
Who would win in a fight? Pirates or Ninjas
I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
You get modded up on Slashdot?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
You can't write in your own answers, no, but you can write-in your own questions.
...is to get Rocket Jockey on the wii
I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean? /. is still safe though.
It means you shouldn't be allowed within 290 meters of anybody normal. Posting on
Or maybe they are going to use this for future beta testing purposes. If your responses to polls reflect popular opinion, you might get a message asking you to join a beta test.
One other important aspect of the Everybody Votes that isn't brought up by any press releases is that it smoke tests their online services server. Presumably the wiishop and system update online services are different (and secured) than what they intend to be used for mario kart and other online games. Hopefully Everybody votes is using the same tools they intend to give developers, so they can iron out the performance flaws before a million people try out online match making with mario kart. I'm guessing that the Mii parade wasn't built with this in mind, so things like storing user profiles in a database (for comparison purposes) weren't tested. I haven't seen any post-mortems, but I imagine that the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection was primarily pwned by the database backends not being stress tested before being released on the world. T
Just a suspicion on my part.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Of course, like Brain Age or Wii Fitness scores, the values reported make no sense... I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
I totally know what you mean; that measurement doesn't tell me anything. However, with the help of Google, I was able to figure this out: 290 meters = 951.44357 feet. Dude, you are WAY out on the fringe.
I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
I don't understand what your issue is here: it's perfectly clear what they mean. I'm sorry I can't explain in detail, but it's already 65 Roentgens past the hour and I have a bus to catch.
"...if the 360 is any indication."
The 360 is not wireless by default. The Wii is wireless.
That makes the 360 a hell of a lot harder to hook up. Maybe only half of 360 owners are willing to run a cat-5 to their television or buy the wireless upgrade ($100), but any Wii owner with a wireless router is already set.
When I first saw the title of this new channel, I thought to myself, "Not everybody votes." Will the channel or at least the title make it to non-democratic countries?
In this world we live in where you cannot ask questions like if you are pro-democratic or republican, or what religion you follow, the questions I've seen in the Everybody Votes Channel ("how do you like your eggs cooked?" for instance) and simply too redundant to really capture a unique view of the world's stance on many real topics.
Sure, we now know most Wii users prefer their eggs fried - but do we really care?
What better way to get information about the Wii demographic? (But seriously, so far, these polls don't go much further than "Which do you prefer? Cats or Dogs?")
As for the SD card slot and limited space: don't forget that there are two things left that Nintendo could use and no one has really talked about... and they're both USB ports.
In the blink of an eye and a $50 investment (by the user), the Wii could have storage capacity to rival or surpass that of the 360 and the PS3. Oddly, even after such an investment, one could still buy two Wii's (if they can find them;) for the price of one PS3.
It's one of the Microgames, and (when unlocked) the Music screen has an option to conduct the tunes. It's not very good and I've read elsewhere that the "waving" which drives both this version and the original demo is nothing like actually conducting. Apparently real conductors are tapping points in space, sort of like a 3D Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
is the ultimate answer to the hanging chad problem?
Nintendo announed last month they have sold 1.5 million VC games. So even assuming they were all NES games (which they weren't), but if at least $5 each was spent, that makes your numbers a little better.
I think the issue the parent was having is that these downloads are used to satisfy the hard core, but not the casuals. Case in point, I got a Wii for my retired parents as they LOVED WiiSports and are using the other channels regularly. I personally have 10 VC games, and Can't wait to get Donkey Kong Country tonight, however there aren't [m]any VC games that are good for casuals.
Where is Suduku? / Brain Age, or even Tetris /Dr Mario? How about Ms PacMan, Frogger, or Bejewled? Strangely enough I can find most 'Arcade classics' on X-box live and not the Wii which is MUCH more 'casual gamer friendly'. The Wii is a Great system, but there is currently a lull in the software for casual people, and it wouldn't be difficult to fix if Nintendo recongnized this and posted some VC content for this crowd.