How to Polish a Wii Game

This article by MTV's Stephen Totilo is right in line with what I imagined polishing a Wii title would be like: collect data from players as they swing their arms around, then use that to fix up the gestural movements and hit the proverbial sweet spot:

He said a system developed by a Vicarious colleague, Jesse Raymond, a few weeks ago has been crunching the data of dozens of players who have tested the game on the Wii, analyzing the results of requests for players to do 10 swipes in a row or 10 stabs in a row, recognizing which moves the current version of the game fails to recognize as the intended gesture, tweaking the code, checking the pool of data from the gesture trials again for any new misunderstandings, repeat and recode, again and again. The result? "Within a week it went from being 60 to 70 percent reliable to 97 percent reliable," Chrzanowski said.

This is going to be the difference between good Wii input and bad Wii input: the amount of time designers are willing to devote to finding out what players, when given a certain instruction, will naturally do. Bad designers will try to fix this by shoving a lot more text onto the screen by way of instruction; good ones will do the above.