Nintendo leak reveals why “Friend Codes” aren’t personal

This week a big leak of relatively early Nintendo Wii documents showed a bevy of details on Nintendo's future - most of which were relatively low-stakes. But today we're taking a peek at a piece of the puzzle called "The Friend Code." In this document, it's revealed why Nintendo chose to use Friend Codes instead of "freely chosen screen names". Instead of users being able to choose their own unique names, Nintendo decided it was better the randomly assign codes to avoid duplicates - and to avoid the checking for said duplicates.