Shigeru Miyamoto doesn’t seem to listen to anyone. Not to Iwata, not to customers, and certainly not to customers his game design decisions have chased away (like myself) and caused whole-scale destruction and decline for Nintendo (N64, Gamecube, 3DS, etc).
But maybe, just maybe, he will listen to Iwatani. He is the creator of Pac-Man. If the reader would be quiet for a moment, we will be able to hear what he says.
On Pac-Man Championship Edition, he says,
That’s also where the time element came from, to encourage players to keep going for higher scores before time runs out. You fall into this rhythm of gameplay as you refine your style within the time limit, and it makes for this speedy and sport-like experience. To encourage that rhythm, we developed the current maze that switches out halves as you play and also looks visually exciting.
To those who ask me, “What are these ‘arcade elements’ you talk about?” Iwatani describes some of them above. What he is describing above are elements that are not native to PC gaming but are native to arcade gaming. PC gaming doesn’t have ‘rhythm’ or a speedy, ‘sport-like’ experience. PC gaming usually had spreadsheets of people trying to play a strategy game or reading books of text in a RPG. PC gaming was very cerebral. What Iwatani is describing isn’t a ‘cerebral’ experience, but really an orchestra on the Human senses of light, speed, and competitiveness.
The reason I want to emphasize this is that starting last year or so, you’ve had this flood of very simple games on the iPhone and social networks and so forth. They’re very “easy” games, and by easy I mean easy to design and to pump out by the dozen. I think more thought needs to go toward how games present themselves to the user, to how they can be made more fun, and so my GDC presentation was a sort of cautionary message for the industry as a whole.
This sums up my frustration with Modern Gaming. Iwatani might be referring to the so-called ‘casual games’, but the ‘hardcore’ games also ought to be included. There is no craftsmanship in these games. There is no soul lovingly crafting out the gameplay, testing it over and over, and making it interesting and exciting. Games today feel machine made. With ‘hardcore games’, it is no different than ‘casual games’ except there is an oversaturation of ‘production effects’.
One of the reasons why I keep pointing to Nintendo during the NES era and even SNES era is because Nintendo worked the hardest then. Why does Miyamoto complain about making 2d Mario today? Because it is a hard game to make. With 3d Mario, he can just pump it full of ‘production effects’ (oohhh, an orchestra playing the soundtrack), (ooohhh, look how pretty the graphics are with the planetoids) and the ‘hardcore gamers’ all act like clapping seals applauding it.
Above: The hardcore gamer applauds like the seal and wears that facial expression at the end.
I’ve always seen the ‘hardcore gamer’ as an enabler for allowing game makers to not do work. “Oh? This game has better graphics? Instant buy!” “Oh, I’ll buy this game immediately based on the hype alone!” “Don’t worry about the game being bad, I’ll keep buying it!”
Super Mario Brothers Mii is such a great example. The reason why there is Miis there, instead of Peach, is because Peach would require actual work. Any idiot off the street can add Miis to the game. Nintendo doesn’t want to do the actual work.
My issue with Zelda is the same. The complaint about ‘puzzles’ is actually rooted in that they are the ‘easy way’. Nintendo developers don’t have to do actual work to make a linear game with puzzles. Actual use of the sword and shield in fun combat would be much, much harder to make.
I get excited when Nintendo actually does work and doesn’t take the ‘easy, slothful way’. With Super Mario Brothers 5, adding in multiplayer took serious work. Making Wii games like Wii Sports had to be very hard to do (as evident that no other game company has made a decent motion control game). Motion controls are hard which is why game makers, and Nintendo themselves, do not like them.
Iwata once said that when a game developer takes the easy way, it results in a worse game. But if the game developer takes things the hard way, it results in a better game. Note how Iwata doesn’t say anything close to that anymore. Nintendo loves taking the ‘easy’ way out on things. The ‘island concept’ of WuHu Island is nothing more than an ‘easy way’ out where Nintendo gets to copy and paste WuHu island into different games.
As Nintendo game developers get older, they keep trying to do things the easy way which results in a much worse game. Video games require incredible amounts of work. Perhaps this is not the medium for old men.
They may just be seen as social games or mobile games, but the hardware’s going to do nothing but advance, and more and more things are going to be possible. Making games with this well-thought-out approach to design will help them become loved and fondly remembered for a longer time. When you look at games coming out today, it’s doubtful that any of us will be talking about them in ten years’ time. We have to focus on making games that people will remember a decade from now, or else we’ll lose our audience, probably.
I am that audience that is being lost. They are losing that audience today… even yesterday. My complaint is that these modern games are crap, that no one seems interested in trying to create a good game. All the interest seems to be about game developers trying to make a ‘lifestyle’ for themselves, or gorge themselves on ‘creativity’ (whatever that is, they don’t even know but are convinced it exceeds everything else including making customers).
Gaming seems more about the Industry trying to create ‘more industry’. No one seems interested in making wonderful games like Pac-Man, Gauntlet, Joust, Tetris, Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, and so on. This spirit of game is what I mean by ‘Old School’.
I believe the Wii ‘explosion’ was because of the belief that people thought Nintendo intended to go back to gaming’s roots. Wii Sports was, as Time Magazine said, the best video game ever made. Being the best selling video game ever made, it really is that good. People had great hope for the future. But Nintendo and the embittered Miyamoto decided to keep releasing garbage on the Wii such as Wii Music and more Gamecube games.
The reason why reaction to Wii U was so bad is because everyone knows Nintendo isn’t doing any ‘work’ on this. Wii U’s controller isn’t going to cause Nintendo to do any actual work as, say, the motion controller did (and even then, Nintendo made so many games with the motion controller movements doing nothing more than replacing pressing a button). At Nintendo’s conference, they showed footage of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games because that was the easy route to go.
I didn’t leave gaming. They left me. I consider the 80s gaming to be the standard. Since game companies keep adopting an ‘easy way’, it feels to me that standards are collapsing all over the place. Almost all of Nintendo’s franchises began in one short period of time back during the 8-bit generation and 16-bit generations. Today, Nintendo can’t make anything new. Pikmin was a failure. No one bought that game. Aside from ‘simulators’ (puppy simulator, sports simulator, fitness simulator), the only thing Nintendo has made new over the past couple of decades was Animal Crossing.
I want people to make games that are memorable. Spirit Tracks is not it. Super Mario Brothers Mii is not it. In fact, there is nothing coming out of Nintendo that is memorable. It is just retreads of old formulas. We are doing nothing but playing the oldest games in the newest ways. Gaming has lost its way.
I talked about accessible design, and that’s something I bring up because I always think about how players are going to approach the game.
Developers are creating a work, while publishers are creating a product out of that work. And you can say “Well, games that try to sell themselves as ‘works of art’ don’t make money,” but really, both sides of the equation need to be functioning. Making “products” isn’t something developers should have to worry about — they need to concentrate on making good games, on really pouring their souls into them.
Which is, of course, the product. When you think of customers, you are thinking of the product.
The premise behind Clayton Christensen’s ‘disruption’ is that business schools can be destructive to business. Since business schools taught business only in a sustaining innovation type of way, it created many business heads who did not know how to handle a disruption. But if we accept Christensen’s argument, this means there may be other ‘blindspots’ that affect the business guys.
The villain is the cliche. Many businessmen are running around with tons of cliches. Game developers, who think they are learning business, are actually spouting off a bunch of ‘cliches’. For example, the so-called ‘casual gaming’ is nothing but a series of cliches.
Iwatani is making the statement from his view that the game developer should not embrace that business side but focus on ‘putting soul into the game’. But the issue isn’t the business side, e.g. the ‘product’, but the cliches that everyone thinks that business is (including most businessmen). The art of business isn’t administrative duties, isn’t “business models LOL”, or wearing a fancy suit. The art of business is about creating customers. And this does require passion, it requires soul.
There is a reason why the entrepreneur is depicted in a romantic fashion as a strong individual overcoming all odds. The entrepreneur is never depicted as mouthing cliches or being a shell. Business class people might. Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption are essentially works that attack a ‘constellation of cliches’. For example, Blue Ocean Strategy is attacking the cliches of business men who think business requires military thinking. What Blue Ocean Strategy is saying is that the focus should be on creating customers, not ‘defeating’ competitors. In a way, disruption says something similar.
Just as there is the (bad) artist who knows nothing but cliches, there is the (good) artist who ‘acts with soul and passion’. In the same way, the (bad) businessman knows nothing but cliches and the (good) businessman acts with ‘soul and passion’. Iwatani’s point is solid, but he needs to differentiate the businessmen as he does the developers.
I think one needs to consider what the player is looking for at all times. You can get the theme for a game by reflecting on that, and once you have a theme, you can start making a concept based on one or two keywords. You keep these two or so concept words in mind at all times as you design this or that part of the game.
If you run into a design aspect that’s giving you trouble, you put it up to the main concept keywords you’ve come up with, and you keep it if it works and discard it if it doesn’t. That’s how you think about it. Developers need to ask themselves “How do I want the player to think about this game?” They need to be able to say “I want them to respond like this.” Answer that question with a simple word or sentence. That’s important.
Note how Iwatani isn’t saying how the developer isn’t concerned about how HE feels, but how the AUDIENCE feels. This is how all good entertainment is done.
There are basically three types of students I teach: planners (game designers, in the West), graphic designers, and program designers. The answer to your question changes depending on each of these sections. For programmers, they need a keen sense of logic, not to mention things like math and physics. With that, a lot does come down to whether you have an innate ability to think logically or not.
With visual designers, you have people with a natural talent for it, and you have people who built it up over the years with their sketches and whatnot. The more you draw, the better you get. For 3DCG design in Maya and things like that, we make them build physical objects with metal plates first, to give them a better idea of what 3D construction is about — what things look like from the rear angle, and how to give things warmth via shape.
Planners, meanwhile, need to have pretty broad knowledge. Everything from the history of philosophy to the last horse-racing results can play a role there — absorbing everything around you. Being able to handle ideas is something you’re born with to some extent, but a lot of it comes down to communication skills, talking with people and forming their ideas into a coherent whole. That’s the important part.
These need to be all together. Logical thinking is needed… by everyone. Broad knowledge is needed… by everyone. Visual knowledge (hello, these are ‘video games’ meaning they are visual based) is needed… by everyone. Dividing it up may be contributing to the decline of gaming.
Note that Miyamoto has strong visual knowledge (industry design). Note that Miyamoto also has strong broad knowledge (e.g. life is show prep from exploring caves to weighing himself on a scale). And Miyamoto also has strong logical thinking.
All of this used to be in the same person. Think of a game like Civilization. It would require broad knowledge (VERY broad knowledge), visual knowledge (to display anything pleasantly), and strong logic.
Well, I’ve said this many times elsewhere, but creation is about getting insight into the hearts and minds of people. You can’t just make games for the sake of self-satisfaction, like a painter might paint for himself; you’re mass-producing for the sake of others, and you need to think about and know what they want. Games are just part of the assorted ways people engage in play within their lives, so you need to think about all sorts of play styles, not just video games proper. That’s the sort of thing I try to get across.
I am thrilled that the creator of Pac-Man is trying to get across something I’ve also been trying to get across. Did you miss it, reader? Read it again.
“Bold me the important parts,” sniffs the reader.
OK.
Well, I’ve said this many times elsewhere, but creation is about getting insight into the hearts and minds of people. You can’t just make games for the sake of self-satisfaction, like a painter might paint for himself; you’re mass-producing for the sake of others, and you need to think about and know what they want. Games are just part of the assorted ways people engage in play within their lives, so you need to think about all sorts of play styles, not just video games proper. That’s the sort of thing I try to get across.