You know the message board in your Animal Crossing world? Think that, but in the real world. And a lot cooler.
Nintendo has been busy translating and posting the on-going "Iwata Asks" feature on the various official Nintendo sites around the world. In the most recent update, the Nintendo president and his band of hardware designers discuss the Wii Message Board/Calendar feature of the console, and how its functionality could work online.
Shinichiro Tamaki of Nintendo R&D 4 simplifies it to "sticking a message on the door of the fridge." Anyone who uses the console can go in and post something, with the thinking that it will help families better communicate to each other in their busy day-to-day lives.
Tamaki starts by explaining how games can post messages to the console's message board:
For example, if you’re playing “Animal Crossing", a message like “Concert next Saturday in town" will automatically be posted on the Message Board. The user doesn’t even have to be playing the game. Or take a game like “Brain Age". You could post your results on the Message Board: “Today, your brain age is 50!", or something like that.
Things start to get interesting as he explains how it would work with the console's online functionality:
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.
(In the next sentence, he states that such a feature hasn't been finalized yet. Bummer.)
But wait, what's this?
On top of that, with the Wii Message Board, users can exchange game data or screenshots. Emails can also be exchanged between mobile phones and Wii.
By the looks of it, the Wii Message Board may be to Wii what Xbox Live is to the Xbox 360. Further along the page of the interview, Wii "Play History" is explained, wherein people can see what games they've previously played and for how long...sort of like how the 360 records games played. Ideas kicked around for this aspect include finding out which Wii game was the most played in a given year, "with users' cooperation," of course.
This summary just scratches the surface of the amount of good info in one page, let alone the entire interview. Do yourself a favor and read it at Nintendo's site, and if you haven't yet, read it from the beginning. It's good stuff.
