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Everybody Votes on the Wii

Posted by Zonk on from the it's-like-democracy-only-more-efficient dept.

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.

4 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sounds good, a quasi Wikipedia like development by blahplusplus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well no shit, that's but better game development is what "survey data" is all about.

  2. All Part of the Master Plan?!? by Pablo+El+Vagabundo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

    1. Re:All Part of the Master Plan?!? by HappySqurriel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      For an example of a bad plan and execution, look at Sony.

      Actually the more I think about it the more I realize that Sony's plan is not necessarily bad as much as it is poorly timed. I think there are two assumptions Sony made which didn't come true that are causing all of their problems, they are that Microsoft and Nintendo would wait a full 5 years before releasing their systems (Q4 2006 release for the XBox 360/Wii at the earliest) and that all of the systems would be nearly identical; Sony could then release the PS3 Q4 of 2007, using a 65nm process and a blu-ray drive that had existed for a year for $400.

      Microsoft's early release bullied Sony into releasing the PS3 a year early and Nintendo's unconventional design has capatalized.

  3. Re:Sounds good, a quasi Wikipedia like development by Falkkin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?