As we mentioned in a recent article, Nintendo recently had a massive data leak via a third-party company, BroadOn. Included in that leak is a document that includes, in fairly certain terms, the thought process behind a number of Nintendo’s early design choices as they pertain to Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (WFC), the online service used by the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii. While public reception to Friend Codes was hardly positive and this new information will not likely change that public opinion, it is interesting to see it laid out by these internal documents.
In this presentation, we are presented with what the document calls “Project House Party,” which entails the idea that Nintendo wanted WFC to be a comfortable place to make shared friends. A core issue it believed was that non-core players were not comfortable with playing online. As part of this, Nintendo noted four main obstacles in designing the service:
- Technical difficulties with network setup.
- New player participation was perceived as difficult.
- The player experience would be hampered by bad actors.
- The monetary cost.
To combat these problems, they focused on three core aspects which became central to WFC: free, comfortable, and simple.
Free and simple are fairly straightforward concepts and are easily illustrated by the lack of a fee to utilize WFC and the fairly basic setup procedure of Wi-Fi connections on DS and Wii respectively. That aspect of simplicity does have a little bit of crossover with their principle of comfort as well, though. They dealt with the issue of player comfort by giving them the ability to focus solely on playing with friends should they so choose.
This, however, leads to the Friend Code and its overlap with the simple principle as well. The Friend Code has an entire page dedicated to it from this 17-page document and it fittingly falls between the pages about comfort and simplicity. It mentions that a simple username was, for a time, considered, but ultimately the preassigned, 12-digit friend code was Nintendo’s decision. The thought process behind this was two-fold:
- Simplicity: The high probability of duplicate screen names could require multiple name reentries until a valid name is found.
- Comfort: It would be possible to guess a user’s username based on real-world information or known preferences. This could hamper a player’s comfort online.
While looking at these opinions today, we can clearly see there are alternative methods that can and have been adopted to deal with some of these issues, including username checks prior to submission. In looking at the document, though, we at least see that Nintendo did have a reason and a thought process behind these decisions all these years ago. We may not necessarily agree with them, then or now, but we can at least see the process for how the company came to those decisions.
Sadly, the document does not explain why Nintendo dropped the Friend Code during the Wii U era only to return to them with the Switch the following generation. These documents do not currently appear to contain information regarding Wii U or Switch, but more details are still making their way out, so we may still see some insider information about these devices as well.
