Wii Speak connects living rooms

Nintendo Wii owners can buy a Wii Speak speakerphone and talk to three friends also using Wii Speak. Nintendo bundles Wii Speak with Animal Crossing: City Folk and other software. The social model emphasizes privacy. Your identity is secret. You must exchange Speak IDs before you can talk, and there is no public directory. Wii Speak let's you IM, leave voice messages, annotate video messages, and speak live during some games. In City Folk, your Wii Mii avatars speak your chats with comic strip style balloons. It's a closed system. Only microphones licensed by Nintendo will work with the system. Approved gear will show the Wii Speak icon (on the right) on their packaging. This is not a platform play. But it could be. In-game talk is a fixture of RTS like World of Warcraft (voice chat and conferencing through third parties like Skype, TeamSpeak, or Ventrilo), virtual worlds like Second Life (includes f2f and distance voice chat), and multigame platforms like Xbox Live (voice and video chat). The Wii, however, is culturally different from other online gaming social spaces. Wii folks don't consider themselves as "hard-core gamers". Yet. So it's good for the Wii Speak team to slowly discover what works best for Wiiland. Wii Speak is a good first step.