Brain Training & Northerners

Gawd bless Watchdog. In a world where monopolistic companies are allowed to run roughshod over our daily lives, where they can bully their way into making us accept everything they say, the BBC’s tough-as-nails, on-the-consumer’s-side shitfest has picked on a Nintendo game.

Never mind that a supermarket up my road has put all the local shops out of business. Forget the fact that you can’t buy a laptop in the shops that doesn’t have Windows Vista on it. Hell, what about heating bills? Or petrol prices?

But no. Instead, after a no-doubt exhaustive investigation that made full and proper use of the licence fee, the BBC has concluded that Nintendo’s Brain Training game, for its DS system, is discriminating against those with a northern accent. I write this coming from a family of Brummies, whose accents are capable of confusing far more than Nintendo games, I assure you.

Dr Kawashima's Brain Training was, a good year or two after its initial release, the biggest selling single-format game of 2007, and it’s been on sale in this country since June 2006. It’s thus taken some time for the BBC to check the phenomenon out, but nonetheless a good five minutes of its Watchdog programme earlier this week were devoted to the subject. It beggars belief.

Nicky Campbell, that bastion of great TV presenting, hinted that the game could well be discriminatory against those with strong accents, that the game’s in-built speech recognition couldn’t pick up. Personally, when I played it I thought the speech recognition was crap anyway, and did all the other things in the game without worrying out it. In retrospect, out of service to the British people, I should have demanded that the BBC do something about it.

Silly me.

Nintendo apparently has had only a small number of complaints in the eighteen months the game has been on sale. This is no surprise to everyone but Nicky Campbell and his team, it seems.

Sigh.