BBC: Does Nintendo discriminate against northerners?

Wednesday 6th February 2008 - 11:00

Watchdog TV show questions the accuracy of popular voice recognition software and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 screens

Watchdog, the BBC consumer show has aired a report on Nintendo's Dr Kawashima's Brain Training on the Nintendo DS. No it hasn't delivered a cutting-edge reportage on the number of commuters who have missed their stop as a result of trying to complete one more mental exercise. No, instead it opines that the game discriminates against northerners. No, really.

On what must clearly have been a slow news day Michelle Livesey, a radio reporter at the Manchester radio station Key 103 FM, compiled a reports based around the brain training game's inability to recognise her northern accent.

Michelle told the BBC, "Basically you have to say the different colours that flash up on the screen as quickly as possible. I'm saying, blue, blue, blue and it's saying no, even though it was blue. Then it got to yellow. I'm going, 'yeller' and everyone's saying to me you need to be a bit posher. You need to say, 'yellow' and as soon as I did, it picked it up.. I don't know what's wrong with the way I say 'blue'. I can say it as many different ways that I could try and it just really wouldn't pick it up."

This grievance was given the best part of five minutes on the prime time show Watchdog on Monday evening. Host Nicky Campbell questioned if Nintendo ignored the northern accent when producing the game. Nintendo was quick to respond. A spokesperson told the BBC: "Over 2.5 million copies of the Brain Training series of games have been sold in the UK and the company's customer services department has received only a very small number of calls from people with regional accents who have indicated that they've been affected when using this function. Of course, Nintendo understands the frustration experienced and would like to apologise for this."

Is Nintendo in the wrong or is this really a case of Tabloid TV looking to fill five minutes? We can't honestly believe a team of Japanese developers decided to have a dig at regional UK accents - but perhaps we're misinformed.