It is very clear that Nintendo is taking this whole online gaming idea very slowly.  So slow that very few Wii games have online play.  The next big Wii game, Mario Kart Wii, will offer online play and even offer online communication!  By online communication I do not mean voice chat.  Nope that would be a little too forward thinking for Nintendo.  Instead you get to have text chat in Mario Kart.  That's not too bad right?  Oh, did I mention that you will not be allowed to actually type in your words?  You will have to select from a list of approved words in the text chat.

I realize that Nintendo is afraid of getting some racists or pedophiles on their service but this is a bit outrageous.  Why not take a look at what Microsoft is doing with Xbox Live and mimic their parental controls.  You can limit voice and text messages to only people on your friends list with Xbox Live.  You can even turn voice off entirely if you so choose.  Make these settings the default for your games then allow parents to adjust them.  Really all Nintendo is doing is limiting your options.  Microsoft also has message sniffers to filter out improper words in text.  If Nintendo wanted to they could filter the messages for a specific set of words.

There has been some talk about whether or not the Wii is capable of voice chat.  It may very well be that their online network can not handle that kind of traffic.  This would not entirely surprise me because it is very clear that Nintendo has no interest in making online play a key feature in their console.  It is one area that the Wii really falls behind the competition on because lets face it, playing online against real people is a lot more fan than playing offline against the CPU.

joystiq -mario-kart-wii-features-text-chat-still-no-voice-support
jeffgerstmann - mario-kart-wii-chat-surprised