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.

Re:Sounds good, a quasi Wikipedia like development

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like an attempt to gather marketing/survey data.

Re:Missing option!

[izzo nizzo]

I like this - wii could become a platform for arbitrary polling almost as powerful as slashdot herself.

Weird, but genius

[earthbound kid]

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.

Re:Weird, but genius

[Rallion]

You're assuming that the people who will choose to vote will constitute a random sample. I'm not convinced. I think the group that will choose to vote probably has some bias. Maybe a lot of bias.

Re:Weird, but genius

[Samuel Dravis]

Still, the fact that they DID vote means that they are most likely in the market for new games. Particulary, the sort of games for which they voted...

The Gimmick Label

[wilbz]

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?

Re:Weird, but genius

[quadelirus]

Yeah, I was recently talking to a professional demographer about something similar to this. To make a long story short I suggested that for the purposes of a study he is doing that he use adopted children who's biological parents had made their information available. He was STRONGLY (to put it mildly) against this. He said that any kind of user choice like that is seen by demographers as very bad and called it "self selecting," I suppose implying that the very fact that some people are opting-in to the demographic that they may share other sorts of non-random traits. I agree that there will probably be a lot of bias in the voting user group. Bias that probably cannot be measured.

Re:Sounds good, a quasi Wikipedia like development

[xenocide2]

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.