Everybody Votes: Polling as Gaming
In the same way that gaming is revolutionizing other fields (medicine, education, and the military, to name just a few), it is also poised to affect the polling community. Or at least, that’s what my recent experience with my family’s new Nintendo Wii gaming console has lead me to believe.
The “Everybody Votes” channel invites Wii owners to participate in the polling process, both as respondent and quasi-analyst. Your online avatar (a Mii) answers simple, and frequently trivial, binary-choice questions: “Do you consider yourself a realist or a romantic?,” or “Do you prefer to drink coffee or tea?” You are then given the option to predict which response you believe will get more votes. The poll remains open for a few days, and then, upon its close, you can see both how your own response lines up with others and how accurate your prediction was. Response break-downs by gender and geography are also provided. Based upon your answers, you are provided metrics to describe your performance: your prediction accuracy, a score of how “tuned in” you are, and your “distance” from popular opinion. Users may also submit questions to be considered for future polls, but sadly they have yet to use my suggestions of 2008 presidential vote or party identification. (See the video below for a walk through of the channel).
Though wrapped in juvenile shell, the Everybody Votes channel speaks volumes about the modern polling and data analysis industry.
It boldly positions polling as entertainment, something many pollsters have subconsciously felt occurring over the last decade or so. Our fascination with the latest polling results and how they align with our own values can be seen in the success of sites like Pollster, FiveThirthyEight, and Real Clear Politics. It is mirrored in the proliferation of personal polling services for websites, blogs, and social media profiles such as Rypple, Ask500people, and Facebook quizzes. We are a poll-drenched society, quick to proclaim our own opinions to anyone that will listen and innately curious to see how we measure up to our friends, peers, community and country. The Everybody Votes channel satisfies both this urge to be counted AND the urge to show off how “tuned in” we are to our own cultural ethos. It allows all Americans to be both polling participant and predictor. Can we be all that surprised that polling has now become a form of gaming?
But equally important to the cultural direction this pushes polling towards is it’s less obvious role as a data-collection mechanism – one that I suspect Nintendo has yet to come anywhere near fully leveraging. With each vote cast, a rich data portrait is being assembled of the flesh and blood individual behind the Mii. If my own family’s Wii playing is an indication, the device already has an astonishing amount of personal data: the Mii channel has my gender, age, and the gender/age composition of my family; Wii Fit has my height, weight and BMI; the Internet Channel stores my web-surfing habits; the Weather channel knows my location; the system knows precisely how long and how often I play Wii Bowling; and on and on.
With the collection of polling data, the Wii has two equally promising revenue streams outside of gaming: 1) the ability to deliver microtargeted in-game advertisements to specific individuals, and 2) a massive amount of individual and household level data that can be sold to third-parties. From a MicroTargeting perspective, this is a gold mine of data. With the right questions, such data could prove to be powerful predictors of partisanship, likelihood to vote and issue orientations.
There are a number of things Nintendo can do to leverage this medium: 1) allow survey questions with more than two answer choices as well as numeric scale answers, 2) encourage broader participation by awarding Wii points (currency that can be used to download new games and channels) for each response, and 3) give “premium” users’ questions priority and make a full dataset available to them for download.
Ultimately, though the Everybody Votes channel isn’t immediately transformative, it is broadly indicative of the direction of the polling and data industries. Thus it deserves our close attention over these next few years to see how it evolves.
- Alex Lundry
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