After suffering through that rather depressing waste of text interview with Aonuma about Zelda, I thought maybe you should balance out the garbage Japanese “wisdom” with some actual Japanese wisdom from one of Japan’s most legendary swordsman (hell, maybe the world’s most legendary swordsman), Miyamoto Musashi. If you don’t know who he is (something tells me you probably do though), Musashi was a swordsman who (according to his own account) killed a man in his first duel when he was only 13 years old. According to himself and legend he then spent a good chunk of his youth wandering around Japan dueling people, never once losing, apparently even laying down a real sword to continue fighting in duels using only a wooden sword and still walking away undefeated.
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Eventually he retired from dueling and went on to study calligraphy and other areas of interest, and then in his later years compiled all of his learning and observations about military science into a book called The Book of Five Rings. I would highly recommend you read this book if you haven’t because it’s very interesting to look at what Musashi says in his observations about martial arts in his time period. The main reason I think you should read this book is something he says at the conclusion of one of the chapters. I highlighted the most important bits:
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“Also, large-scale military science is a matter of winning at keeping good people, winning at employing large numbers of people, winning at correctness of personal conduct, winning at governing nations, winning at taking care of the populace, winning at carrying out customary social observances. In whatever field of endeavor, knowledge of how to avoid losing out to others, how to help oneself, and how to enhance one’s honor, is a part of military science.”
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Never once in this book does Musashi talk about “creativity” but instead talks about winning and losing by adhering to strict principles in the field of martial arts and military science.
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Something else that is very fascinating about Musashi is that he appears to in fact be anti-creativity. He condemns many of the martial arts schools of the time for being more about style rather than substance, even saying that many martial arts focused too much on being flashy with needless gestures and movements being put into attacks and movements, rather than simply focusing on the fundamentals of combat. When it came to his craft, Musashi seemed very much against “doodads” mucking up martial arts. Another thing is that unlike typical game developers talking about “creativity” or Japanese developers talking about their games and development processes as something nobody has ever done before, Musashi likens martial arts to carpentry, illustrating that both carpenters and warriors have to adhere to the principles of their craft, rather than just doing whatever they want.
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But very often he talks about winning. And why wouldn’t he? If you win or lose in a ball game, what does it matter? But if you’re Musashi and lose in a duel, you die. But I think he sees how this attitude can be applied in all walks of life, not just combat (and he even prefaces the book by saying he’s about to turn the science of military science into the science of all things) You don’t seem to see this attitude in a lot of Japanese developers or Japanese entertainment in general these days.
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That is a good way to summarize ‘creativity’. It is ‘style over substance’. As if an ‘art style’ is to change the gameplay of Zelda. Good grief.