Email: A fallacy about Miyamoto’s defense of 3d

This is something I later realized about Miyamoto’s claim that 3D was how we naturally look at things. His fallacy is that since we see things in 3D, then any 3D is natural. That ignores two things:

 

1. Our eyes ALSO see flat surfaces naturally, so seeing TV and books that way is not really unnatural.

 

2. When we see 3D through our eyes, the eyes are in a natural position, and almost all forms of 3D involve tricking or forcing the eyes into an unnatural position. That is perhaps the biggest reason some people get headaches when looking at 3D too long, and some can’t see it at all. It’s that stereoscopic 3D is not natural. Sometimes when looking at 3DS demos, I can feel my eyes going cross eyed to see the 3D properly. How is that natural?

 

Drop the 3D, Nintendo. Do that, and make the 3DS with a proper battery life, a more comfortable form, and make it feel again like it’s made of “Nintendanium”, and the 3DS will be back near the top of my wish list.
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Miyamoto’s behavior is more telling than his words. When confronted by a journalist that 3d may be harming the 3DS, Miyamoto suddenly becomes defensive. Note that Nintendo did not behave this way when people criticized the Wii and its motion controls.Usually, Nintendo is easy going and responds to feedback. They acknowledge that the Gamecube’s form was ridiculous along with the lunch box handle. They acknowledge that the Nintendo 64 controller was a nightmare.But whenever the subject comes up around 3d, Nintendo becomes extremely defensive and outright hostile. It is amazing to see. Miyamoto is not just defending 3d, he was also defending the Virtual Boy. The Virtual Boy! Good God! If there was anything that was a failure, it was the Virtual Boy. But Miyamoto blames the Virtual Boy’s failure to be the fault of the marketers.

This 3d obsession totally transformed Nintendo into a different company. 2d Mario was ‘gone’ because the 3d obsession said so. Since Zelda is so difficult to make properly in 3d, it is why Aonuma’s “style” of puzzles and ‘stories’, which are considerably easier to develop, prevail.

Miyamoto is really bitter that 3d has never taken off in video games. Yes, 3d took off in terms of game world assets but not in a virtual reality sense. Look at Diablo 3. The game is in ‘3d’, technically, but the camera is still locked like in Diablo 2. “It is because changing the camera changes the gameplay,” Diablo 3’s producer said. And judging from the sales, the market likes this decision.

One other behavior trait I’ve noticed is when you bring up different games to Miyamoto. Any questions about Metroid, he will just tell you to go talk to Sakamoto. Any questions about Smash Brothers, he’ll tell you to speak to Sakurai. Miyamoto’s 3d obsession doesn’t extend to his other developers. Why is this if 3d is supposed to be the future of everything?

It seems like they are treating these franchises, not as commercial products, but as creative fiefdoms. For example, Mario is Miyamoto’s baby. Any eccentricity of Miyamoto is put into Mario. If Miyamoto dreams of vacation, Mario gets stuck outside of the Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario Sunshine.

And where is the consumer in these creative fiefdoms? You are connected to the land, to the franchise. Whatever the Lord does, you have to go along with it because you are connected to the franchise. So if Mario goes 3d, then you, too, are expected to go 3d. If Zelda becomes about trains, then all Zelda fans are supposed to get excited about trains.

If a consumer stands up and says, “Wait! This is not Mario! This is not Zelda!” The response is not unlike the Lord staring down at the tiller with his eyes raging: “Peasant!” With the inevitable: “Mario and Zelda is what I say it is!” It is like the king of France saying, “I am the state” with “I am  the Mario!” or “I am the Zelda!”

The gentle reader asks, “But don’t you think they should be free in their creativity?”

There are CONS and PROS of making a game in an established franchise. The PROS is that you have an already warm market, a pre-installed sales base. The CONS is that the game can only sell to those people’s expectations of what a follow-up game should be. The pattern I am seeing from Nintendo is that they want the PROS of the franchise without the CONS. They fully expect Metroid fans to buy Other M because it is a Metroid game but are ‘shocked’ Metroid fans complain the game is about ‘maternal instincts’. They expect Zelda fans to buy the next Zelda game but are shocked that Zelda fans complain the game is about trains or something else instead.

The more we shine the spotlight on this subject, the more defensive Nintendo gets. If Nintendo wants market performance of the 1980s or Wii, they must answer to the market expectations of the 1980s or of the Wii users.

I sense that Nintendo is entering a state of denial. They are praying, hoping, pleading that I’m just an idiot, that you are an idiot, and that the cause of the Wii’s success really was about ‘surprise’ and ‘casual gamers’. The 3DS failure has them rattled.

There is nothing really complicated being advocated here. But the thing is that my way is not fun for them. They HATED making Classic Mario and Zelda back in the day. Once they got executive power, they made sure that Mario and Zelda were defined as games that were FUN for THEM to develop.

But people like me (and you, the amazing reader) are popping up and telling investors that these games are not fun and are not actually Mario and Zelda games.

Getting the business side of Nintendo to be altered and crack down on what is going on in the creative side is like  informing parents that a wild party is being held at their house without them knowing it. Miyamoto, Aonuma, Sakamoto, etc. come across to me as kids who created an illusion they were ‘responsible adults’ (responsible for Nintendo’s rise) but then threw a party when they got the chance (the post SNES consoles and the Nintendo decline).

Their defensiveness is that they don’t want the party to end. Expect them all to retire when they discover they are no longer allowed to party.