Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Text Input

Nintendo, being the child-friendly video game company, has tried its best to keep online play as safe as possible. Not only do users not have any real-time voice or text chat in-game, but each and every game requires its own game code. For example, to add a friend to Super Smash Bros. Brawl, users need to perform a multitude of steps that are quite confusing.

The worst part of the entire process, however, is adding friends to play with. To add a friend to play against, users need their 12-digit Brawl code, which they can only obtain outside of the Wii environment. Communicating this code requires writing it down over the phone, or waiting for an e-mail or text message. Anyone who remembers e-mail addresses like 72223.10@compuserve.com knows that randomly-assigned number codes are not easy to pass around. Users simply don’t have the memory for that many numbers, and the sending or receiving of that long number can get easily garbled.

What is absolutely mind-boggling, however, is the way to enter an easy-to-recognize nickname for that person. Firstly, users are limited to only 5 characters with which to name that person - an arbitrary limit. Secondly, the typical expectation for text input is an on-screen keyboard to do the typing. This, after all, is the de facto method of entering text. Instead, users are presented with:

Anyone who has sent a text message with their cellular phone recognizes this: it’s T9. It’s a human factors nightmare even though it makes sense on a phone with only a limited number of buttons. In order to type an “H”, users need to click on the “GHI” button twice. To type an “S”, users click on “PQRS” four times. This is necessary on cell phones because you have a limited number of keys. On a television monitor, you have a LOT of space. Why not make a full-sized keyboard?

After all, this is supposed to be a family-friendly game, but when non-text messagers have to type in a simple nickname, they get confused by the keyboard? Ridiculous! Poor design, through and through.

The entire Nintendo online experience is not a pleasant one, and can be summed up from a snippet from this VGCats comic. Click here to see the rest of it, which is Not Work Safe, not PG, and not Child Friendly. But it is funny!