Wii Message Board discussion

Basically, we've designed it so that you can exchange information with your registered friends. I'll give an example of the kind of information that could be exchanged. Let's say someone buys a new game. When they switch on their console, a question could appear on the screen: "Do you want to let your friends know you have bought this game?" If you select "Yes", the message "X has bought the game Y!" will pop up on your friends' Message Boards. You can send messages like that from within the game, or you can make your own message to send to your friends. Actually, the example I just gave is still under discussion and has not been finalised yet. But I think it gives you an idea of the kinds of things that would be possible.

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If we chose to, we could allow each family member to have their own account. But that just isn't what Wii is about. To give a very straightforward example, we're aiming at a console for everyone to use, but if we allowed everyone to have their own account, you would need to enter a password to use the console. To switch on Wii and be presented with a screen asking for your user name and password...well for me, that would have been unacceptable. In discussions, pretty much everyone agreed on this point.

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The Play History is another new feature offered by the Wii, and refers to the console's ability to keep track of, obviously, what games have been played and for how long. Originally, Iwata himself pitched the "Outlandish suggestion" of offering parents the option of setting the console to automatically turn off after a set amount of time, but technically, the idea was not feasible.

Instead, the Play History was birthed, and the data collected is unable to be deleted and can be viewed by parents. More excitingly, "It's just really fun for users to be able to see the record of how long they played," said Iwata. "In the future, we could make it possible to plot on a graph how much you've played. Also, with users' cooperation, we could compile data on which game was the most played that year."

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