Slashdot Mirror
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.
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"
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?