Mission Statement

Doesn't every blog start with a mission statement of some sort? That's the way I've always seen it. Well, I'm not going to take over the world or anything. I don't even expect to get a lot of hits on this blog. Perhaps that's the reason why I took so long in putting this together. Honestly, the only reason I started this was so I could keep track of things myself. I actually am kicking myself for not starting sooner since all of the old data is now lost. What a shame...

Oh yeah, I suppose you don't even know what this is for, do you? Well, I hope this will change in the upcoming days. For those of you who are familiar with the Nintendo Wii and its channels, you probably already know what this is from the title of the blog. For those of you who are unawares, let me give you a brief history. A long while ago (something like 5 or 6 months ago), Nintendo released a little voting game for their Wii console. It's a free download, so it reaches quite a large audience (at the time of this posting, VGChartz shows the Wii as having sold roughly 11.9 million consoles).

Here's the premise of the channel itself. Every few days, Nintendo releases a new question. Anything from "Is it called Soda or Pop?" to "Is the TV you are watching now a widescreen TV?" You only have two options to vote from and afterwards you can make a prediction as to what choice would be most popular. Nintendo tallies the votes and also tracks your prediction success and makes little assumptions about your character based on how you vote. Pretty basic stuff.

Nintendo gives you a small incentive to keep voting every time with a kind of personal voting stat tracker.

This is interesting to me, as little psychological things always are. The prediction part is obviously the most interesting. When I find that I made a wrong prediction, I'm always somewhat shocked to find that people don't think the way I think they should think. Not that that should be all too surprising. And yet sometimes it is.

I figured a long time ago that others might benefit from this knowledge, especially since there's sure to be a large number of people voting, especially in the worldwide polls though Nintendo never releases actual numbers on the amount of voters. If only half of the Wii owners have downloaded the Everybody Votes channel (roughly 6M people) and only half of those vote regularly (3M people), then that is quite the information gathering power. If anything, it is interesting to note the results and I will enjoy going back over them at a future date. I just hope that you will, too!

So, I've meant to do this for a long time and have now paid the price for it. Roughly 5 months worth of gathered data (which equates to roughly 80 lost questions at 4 questions a week, 3 National and 1 Worldwide) has been lost since Nintendo doesn't keep a record anywhere that I've found. No one else has bothered to set up some sort of tracking system for it, so now I'll be the one to bother. My only wish was that I could set up a system to get the questions that go to other nations. I have no idea what Europe gets for their national questions, but I'm sure it has got to be different than us folks in the USA. Same for much of Latin America, Australia, etc. Maybe if this happens to get some clout/hits, I can expand. For now, you're stuck with me in the North American region, specifically the United States. I hope you enjoy it!