Nintendo published a new addition to its Iwata Asks series of interviews in which Nintendo CEO and President Satoru Iwata questioned the company's engineers on Wii's design. In the lastest installment, the development staff discussed Wii's Play History feature.
"Wii automatically records details of what game was played, when and for how long. This is called the Play History," explained Nintendo EAD's head of User Interface and Effects Tomaki Kuroume. "There's nothing controversial about that, but what did cause discussion was the fact that the Play History cannot be deleted. It's not that we couldn't change it if we wanted to, but at the moment it is not possible to delete it."
Iwata said he "thought constantly about what [Nintendo] could do to stop games being regarded with hostility in the family," so he suggested giving parents the ability to set how long their child could play games. For instance, if a mother only wanted her child to play for an hour, a timer would be set in the console to turn itself off after being on for an hour. However, numerous design difficulties arose from the idea, and Nintendo decided on Play History as a way for parents to monitor how often their children play which games.
"Ultimately, the Play History fulfils the function of telling parents how long their kids have been playing, as well as being an interesting talking point," Shinichiro Takami, a member of Nintendo's R&D product development, added. "It's just really fun for users to be able to see the record of how long they played. That's why we decided to make the Play History impossible to reset. You can imagine users saying: 'I didn't realise I'd been playing that game so much!'... Or, 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. I think all of these kinds of fun ideas show that it was better to make the Play History into a permanent record."
The full interview between Iwata and Nintendo's engineers can be found here.
The Wiire will continue to keep tabs on Wii, so stay tuned.
