The Wifeometer

GDC 2007 , an excerpt from Miyamoto keynote sharing

Nintendo's vision of accessibility in game design :

I’d like to talk about a personal experience of [mine]: I have a personal way of determining if a product will be succeed with the intended audience, I call it the wifeometer.

[laughter]

This wifeometer measures one variable: the interest level of my own wife. Maybe some of you can remember when you played Pac-Man, or a game like Mario. And maybe you think that these were important moments in your lives. They were not important moments for my wife. But then Tetris came out. The problem was that, when I thought my wife would be interested in this game, she was not, but then when my daughter started playing Ocarina of Time at home, there was a little change. My wife had gone from complete disinterest to a background observer. She watched my daughter play. I thought, oh maybe there is hope!

[laughter]

Then came Animal Crossing. Now when this game came out I assured my wife there were no enemies to fight in this game, so she agreed to actually touch the controller. She was soon happy cutting down trees and exchanging letters with our children. The wifeometer went up a bit more. I thought I’m going to get that thing higher!

As some of you may know we have a dog in our house, and my wife loves cats but I’m a dog lover. This is our dog. He’s 6. He sleeps on a better mattress than I do. If you look at his face, he looks like a guitar pick. So we named him Pick. Now since Pick joined us, we’ve been studying dog training, and we made new friends through the other dogs our dog has met. He brought us new joys and discoveries.
Getting back to my point today... growing the wifeometer.
I was watching our dog friends and my wife, I thought maybe if we could get these people and turn them into game players, if we could interest them, we could expand the user base, there were elements too of dog training that I thought I could turn into a videogame. So when I showed her Nintendogs, she finally saw a different perspective.

Then game Brain Age. This has turned her into a true gamer. She has accepted games as part of her daily life. She understands the unique interactive entertainment found in games. And today we have a Wii in our house. So last month, on Valentine’s Day, in Japan on Valentine’s Day women give chocolates to men, it’s very nice!
As usual I came home rather late from work, expecting her to be asleep. I opened the door and heard the sounds of the Wii, so I thought she waited up to give me chocolates, so sweet, but actually she was just casting her votes on the Everybody Votes channel. So she herself downloaded the channel and voted on her own, this is an incredible occurrence in my household, it would be more normal to get home and find Donkey Kong eating at my dinner table!

[laughter]

This is the second version of Brain Age. It has a mini Mario game in it. Now my wife comes to me and says, I can beat you at this game, anytime. She’s bragging! To me!

[laughter]

Looking at her scores, she’s right. She turned into a hardcore gamer much faster than I expected. Wifeometer has shot up dramatically. So there it is. Now she’s playing Wii sports. Not only that, she invites our friends over to play Wii sports. I don’t know if she’ll stop making Miis - she makes them for everyone in our neighbourhood. This is very lucky for me, see because now she’s getting a taste for what it‘s like to create something. I see this as a first step towards game design. I think we’ll be competing going forward, eventually she’ll come up with a unique idea, and when she does … I can retire!

[laughter]

A strong drive to expand the target audience , coupled with Hard devotion to the entertainment business , and strong creative innovation , That is what define Nintendo as a company.

It is no surprise to see the Wii and the Ds as bestsellers in todays fierce console market.

Ps : Original Article can be found at : http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/03/gdc_miyamotos_k.html#more