Collateral Wii Damage and The Law of Unintended Technology Consequences

When Nintendo was testing the new Wii game console remote, they apparently failed to anticipate that gamers would become so intensely involved in using the action imitating remote that they would lose control and cause physical damage (via The Lede). A blog has even been set up to document the cases of collateral Wii damage — he are some examples from Wii Have a Problem:



And my favorite…


Nintendo is now looking into to these unintended consequences:

In a statement yesterday, Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo, said “We are investigating. Some people are getting a lot more excited than we’d expected. We need to better communicate to people how to deal with Wii as a new form of entertainment.�

No matter how much we test new technologies, we never really know what will happen until the real users get their hands on them.