Everybody Votes Channel

~ the goodbye ~

in 2007 i was twenty-three and everything i played was on a PC. the Wii was the console my part of the world mostly met in somebody else's living room, landed here at an import price with the tax stacked on top of it, and the Everybody Votes Channel is a thing i know the way you know a neighbor's television schedule. it is on this list anyway, because the format it invented is one nobody has managed to rebuild since.

it appeared on 13 february 2007, free, with no announcement of any kind. you downloaded it from the Wii Shop Channel and it installed itself into the grid of channels on the home screen, next to the weather and the news. you registered up to six Miis, one for each person in the house, and then it asked you a question. two options and no comment box. there was no way to explain yourself, qualify your answer, or see what anyone had written, because nobody had written anything.

national questions rotated three times a week and worldwide ones came around twice a month, each running about two weeks while the count moved. the questions were deliberately harmless, which season you liked better or which of two things you would rather be able to do. the result came back as a crowd, two hundred Miis arranged into a pie chart, and then as a map of your own country shaded by which way each region had gone. the first worldwide poll took half a million votes inside two days. japan's first national poll took around a hundred thousand.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the prediction ~

the part worth remembering is that you could also predict the outcome. before the result came in you guessed which side would win, and the channel kept a running score out of five hundred measuring how well tuned in you were to the people around you. that quietly changes what the thing is. your opinion was not being graded, because an opinion cannot be wrong. what was being graded was your model of everybody else, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a console to offer a family in 2007, and something no polling app since has bothered to copy.

~ the day it died ~

nintendo switched off WiiConnect24 on 28 june 2013. that took the news and forecast channels with it, along with Check Mii Out and the Nintendo Channel, and it took Everybody Votes because there was nothing left underneath. the channel was the servers. without the count coming back from Kyoto it was an icon on a home screen that opened onto an apology. consoles that had never been connected in the first place lost nothing, which is its own comment on how much of the Wii's charm was rented rather than owned.

~ what got buried with it ~

what died is a format rather than a game. a low-stakes question asked at national scale by a machine with no comment section attached, answered by people sitting on a couch who were not performing for anybody. every replacement the web produced comes with replies underneath, which turns a poll into an argument before the result is even in. the Everybody Votes Channel could not be argued with. it counted, it drew the map, and then it asked you something else on thursday.

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