Nobody Votes –

Nintendo recently announced they are going to be shutting down Wii features at the end of June so they can concentrate on the WiiU.  Before they flick the off-switch, I figure I would take a moment to reflect on a unique Wii exclusive feature – the Everybody Votes Channel.

Each Wii system came pre-installed with the Everybody Votes Channel, an app that asks users to vote on one of two choices.  For example, one of the first Everybody Votes questions was “Which do you like better, cats or dogs?”  The user would make their selection and then choose which answer they think would be the most popular.  A new question would appear every few days, some being national while others were worldwide polls.

This was an easy question to guess majority vote

It is a wonder why Nintendo created this app in the first place because they didn’t seem to use this collected data for anything… unless you count the addition in the eventual Nintendogs + Cats on the 3DS.  Joking aside, perhaps they just wanted to provide an excuse for users to connect their Wii’s to a wireless WiFi signal.  Or maybe they wanted to introduce a unique feature that Xbox Live or PSN did not have.  Whatever the reason was, Everybody Votes gave an excuse to boot up your Wii once a week to those willing to dabble in useless opinions to stupid questions.

Because I am a member of the gaming media, I always took it upon myself to fire up my Wii at least once a week to see which games, or lack thereof, was released on the Wii Virtual Console and to take notes of any new information that was leaked via the Nintendo Channel.  While browsing through these other apps, I always took the extra two minutes to vote in the Everybody Votes channel.  For some reason, I always felt obligated.  Maybe because I write about games all the time or maybe I just wanted to see how close I was from popular opinion, but taking a couple minutes out of each week to vote in this unique app was just something that I was required to do.

If you look at this screenshot, you will notice that my voter data says that I voted 103 times.

Yeah, I voted a lot

However, I actually voted over 1000 times!  1,032 times to be exact at the time of this screen grab.  I voted so much that the counter actually reset once I reached that fourth digit.  This is proven by counting the Wins and Losses record in the same screenshot.  But at least I was right two-thirds of the time.  It has taken me years to vote this much.

You know what they say about guys who are “in tune”…

Besides tracking every vote, the app also uses some crazy algorithm to determine how “tuned in you are,” and how you stack up against “popular opinion.”  Even after voting more than 1000 times I still have no clue how this formula works.  There were times when I was just a couple mere centimeters away from popular opinion while other times I completely filled my tuned-in head icon with that bright orange hue.  I am not sure how the app generates this data but it is interesting (and useless) nonetheless.

Against or with majority?

One aspect of the results screen that I thought was the most interesting was how often males would answer differently from females in nationwide polls or how other countries would answer different than America in worldwide questions.  To reiterate, this information doesn’t really mean anything but it might make you think “hmm, that is interesting” for about one second before you shut down your Wii and queue up Halo 4 matchmaking.

The Forecast, News, Nintendo, and Check Mii Out channels will also be permanently shut down at the same time as Everybody Votes.  Sure, I liked downloading immature Mii’s from the Check Mii Out channel and enjoyed getting demos of DS games from the Nintendo channel but I will probably miss Everybody Votes the most.  Not because I am a dedicated fool who prides himself of gathering useless voter data, but rather, it will be hard to find the motivation of surfing the Wii Shop Channel and reporting on new content; I cannot use Everybody Votes as my excuse to boot up my Wii anymore.  But the Wii Shop Channel has pretty much been dead for the last several weeks away…

Wii, Rest in peace.