Check Mii Out Channel

~ the obituary ~

This was for households with a Wii under the television. Mine was a desk with a tower under it, and in November 2007 I was 23 and finishing an engineering degree in Ankara. The distance is not regional, it is furniture.

The channel went out worldwide on 12 November 2007, free to download, called Check Mii Out in North America and the Mii Contest Channel everywhere else. Miis had shipped with the console a year earlier as a way to put a rough cartoon of yourself into a tennis game. This was Nintendo noticing that people had started making them for their own sake and giving that habit somewhere to go.

What it offered was small and complete. You submitted a Mii with two initials and a stated talent attached, and it came back carrying a twelve digit entry number so somebody could search for it. Other people could favorite it and import it into their own plaza, and from there it could be sent out as an opponent in Wii Sports Resort. The Mii you built on a sofa in one country turned up as a spectator in a sword fight on a sofa in another.

None of it was a game. It was the social layer of a console that had no social network, running on a service that Nintendo was going to switch off.

~ the case file ~

~ how the contests worked ~

Contests ran on a theme with roughly a week per phase, marked either national or worldwide. You submitted a Mii you thought fit the brief, and then you judged. The channel showed you ten entries at a time and would shuffle in a different ten if you asked. Out of whatever set you settled on, you picked three. When the results came back they were drawn as a mountain, with entries stacked up the slope by how they had done and the summit reserved for the ones near the win. Then the top fifty were shown in order.

Your judging was scored too. A stat called Judging Eye tracked how well the Miis you had picked actually performed, so voting with the crowd was a skill the channel graded you on. Separately, the Posting Plaza ranked Mii makers every month, and whoever finished first was named a Master Mii Artisan until the next month started.

~ the message board thing ~

This was the first Wii channel to write to the console's message board. If you left the machine connected, Nintendo pushed a note when a contest opened or an update landed, and the channel icon on the main menu scrolled a headline with a picture above it. A console sitting in standby telling the room that a new avatar contest had begun.

You could opt out of the messages in the settings. Almost nobody who was using the thing wanted to.

~ the day it died ~

It needed WiiConnect24 and WiiConnect24 ended on 28 June 2013, taking this channel and four others with it in the same cut. There was no separate obituary for the Mii contests. They were a line item in a service shutdown, which is what happens to features that live on top of infrastructure rather than beside it.

Everything submitted went with it. The plaza was server-side, so the entry numbers stopped resolving and the imported Miis on your own console became the last copies of anything. Wii Sports Resort quietly lost its supply of strangers. Years later a fan project called RiiConnect24, since renamed WiiLink, rebuilt the service for homebrewed consoles and for Dolphin, so the contests run again for the few hundred people who went to the trouble. The original rankings are not in there.

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