Spent too much time today playing on my Nintendo Wii. And when I say I spent too much time, it’s official – I have proof.
When you play any game, a message is added to the Wii Message Board for today with the time you spent playing. The message is an itemised list of time spent on each game today, and is entitled “Today’s Accomplishments” (an interesting choice of title – perhaps Nintendo thought that “This is what you’ve been doing when you could have been accomplishing stuff” was a little negative. 😉 )
The Wii Message Board is also the place where you send and receive messages to friends’ Wiis over the always-on Internet connection “WiiConnect24”.
This got me thinking – what if the “Today’s Accomplishments” message was automatically sent to Nintendo at the end of each day? We’ve got a list of how much time has been spent playing each game, in a place where the infrastructure exists to send information across the Internet.
Nintendo could use this to compile accurate games charts: What games are played the most often? Which games are played for the longest amount of time in a sitting? Which games do people keep playing for the longest before losing interest?
As people can tie their Wii accounts to a Nintendo VIP website account, these stats could even be linked to demographics – identifying trends in game-play behaviour across different ages or geographical areas.
I think this’d be very cool. As far as I know, Nintendo aren’t doing this (can’t find any evidence of this after trying to Google for it). But they really should.
Okay, so there are holes in the idea. People more concerned with privacy than I am might not agree with their behaviour being quietly sent to Nintendo. Game developers wanting to boost the ranking of their games could leave banks of Wii consoles running their game.
But pah – it’d be cool. 🙂