Wii: a little *too* simple, sometimes

I understand the concept of Keep It Simple, Stupid... and consumer goods like the Wii are an excellent place to follow that dictum. What I don't care for, however, is when something is "simplified" so much that it obfuscates what's actually going on, in effect patting you on the head and saying "there there, don't worry your pretty little head about it".

I was trying to do my weekly review of Wii bits tonight (sadly, about all I'm using the Wii for these days, thanks to the PS3, with it's Pixeljunk Eden and Disgaea 3 and the like... but that's another story), when error messages start coming up about being unable to "connect to the Internet". Of course, I was able to prove that I could connect to the Internet just fine with my PC... what it should have said was something along the lines of "unable to connect to server(s)". It seems like a quibble on the surface, but it's more than that.

There are a very, very few people out there that lack the brain power or mental construct to be able to understand "technical" messages... rather, they don't bother to learn what they say, because they can almost always crib that knowledge off of somebody else (like a child or co-worker) when they need it, leaving their mind free to think on other things (or not...). However, just because people don't feel the need to understand, that doesn't mean that engineers and programmers should make those who want to understand unable to do so without consulting their local guru... and most of all, they shouldn't lie outright to their end users to cover up potential deficiencies with their own work. Even for a large company like Nintendo, servers can and will fail, or be overwhelmed by requests... even though, by odds, the problem is likely to be with the end-user, your errors shouldn't exclusively assume that any problems they encounter are their fault.