Wii Debate

Someone keeps changing the Nintendo Wii tag back to Wii.

While the "proper nomenclature" may be to simply call the device a "Wii", I strongly feel that NearbyGamers is better served to tag it as Nintendo Wii or even Nintendo: Wii for organizational purposes.

It looks nicer, and feels better grouped to have all the tagged Nintendo Products together, similarly to the way the current D&D Campaign settings are tagged.

Eberron is not called Dungeons & Dragons: Eberron, or Eberron a D&D Campaign Setting. It's title and "proper nomenclature" is simply Eberron. Does that mean we should tag everything by its "official" name?

The same goes for all those Gurps tags.

The Wii is a Nintendo Product, thus despite its official branding should be tagged along with other Nintendo products for the easiest branding experience.

So whomever keeps changing it to Wii and separating it, please give it a rest :-(. Why is it so important to have it listed as just the "Wii" anyway?

Hi, I'm the person who keeps fixing the tag to match the official naming. I can give you a few reasons:

1. You've got to pick one or the other. There are clearly arguments both ways. Neither is overly long, neither is overly short. This is very much a tie-breaking type of issue. I'd love to claim that Wii is obviously right and Nintendo Wii is obviously wrong, but there are arguments both ways. I think you've listed pretty much all of the pro-"Nintendo Wii" arguments.

2. It's a matter of politeness and professionalism. You won't find web stores selling "Wiimotes," because that's not what they're called; they sell "Wii Remotes." When you're a commercial enterprise (like this site is), it's good manners to respect a company's wishes for self-identification. If the site is trying to pull in advertising from Nintendo (and I'm pretty sure that Harkins would love to do so), it seems a good idea to use the names Nintendo chooses for itself.

3. "Eberron" lacks several things as an analogy. Firstly, it lacks the name recognition of the Wii. Second, Eberron is not an independent game system; it is an expansion pack for an existing game system. The Wii is not an expansion pack for the Nintendo system, it is a gaming device unto itself.

4. Because the Wii tag is more popular than the Nintendo Wii tag. Currently, more gamers have tagged themselves as using the "Wii" than as the "Nintendo Wii." This fluctuates a bit, and it's fairly close (especially since people will often use the tag they see on the homepage, so it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy). Obviously, I'm personally tagged using the "Wii" tag, and frankly seeing "Nintendo Wii" on the bottom of my page makes me look like a "doesn't know the style guide" idiot. I might be more sensitive to this because I've worked as a professional game developer; I imagine most people care less.

The only salient reason I can think of to use the "Nintendo Wii" or "Nintendo: Wii" tag is to get all the Nintendo devices listed together. That strikes me as amusingly artificial, as you are the only person to have even tagged most of the game systems. More relevantly, there is no way to group tags, and alphabetization is a poor substitute for a proper grouping mechanic. There's no good way of sticking "Sega Genesis" or "TurboGrafX 16" next to the Nintendo listings, for example, and it obviously belongs in the same group. Rather than artificially using alphabetically grouped tags to label the game systems, I'd petition the site to add some metatags for grouping them in a more coherent and robust way.

I've added metatagging. It's been a planned feature for a while, and this was a nice kick in the ass to get it done.

BrooklynKnight, I noticed you posted to another thread and passed over this one, so I figured you don't have more to add. You're dead right about getting Nintendo stuff together, so I tagged Wii with Nintendo, Video Games, and consoles. I really appreciate that you started this discussion, I think it's great that we've talked through the first contention instead of having a revert war.