Normally I don’t like Kotaku because their journalism is pretty crappy, but wow, they just laid into Miyamoto hard and called him out on his bullshit! This is awesome. When did they grow a pair? I want to see more of this:
http://kotaku.com/nintendo-all-these-sequels-dont-mean-were-playing-i-514267102
Basically, they called him out for recycling the same content over and over again and then calling it a new “experience.” They’re right, and Miyamoto is flat out wrong.
Miyamoto’s problem is that he devalues content and overvalues gameplay innovation. That’s why he no longer creates new worlds. He’s a lazy old man who does what he wants.
Oh wow. Look at Miyamoto’s response. He says…
To me the question really comes down to: What is new IP and, by definition, what is a new game? And I think there’s a lack of understanding about the difference between the two.
This is a diplomatic way of Miyamoto calling Totilo and the rest of us stupid. Nintendo keeps saying they want our feedback and when we give it to them, they reject it. Remember during E3 2011 when Iwata showed pictures of himself of all these people in front of computers ready to ‘analyze the Internet response’ and then when it was uniformly negative, he said that the feedback doesn’t matter. Nintendo is in a bubble of their own ego. Not even the abysmal Wii U sales is puncturing the bubble. They just say, “They don’t understand it yet…”
You really need to be focusing on creating a new gameplay experience that’s fun and unique.
I’ll grant new gameplay experiences with the creation of games such as Super Mario Kart for the SNES. Even though that game used familiar characters and locations, it was definitely a new type of gameplay as we never raced with Mario before. Some might say Super Mario World with the addition of Yoshi was seen as a new experience as well as being 16-bit. I might go with that.
But what Nintendo is putting out now? Come on.
This wasn’t as much as a problem with the Wii because motion controls did change up things (for better or worse). What exactly are we to get from a new Mario Kart experience where the game plays more and more like F-Zero and less like the innocent go-karts mucking up in Chocolate Land tracks?
Nothing feels new because these new ‘features’ are cannibalizations of gameplay features from games Nintendo doesn’t want to make sequels. For example, Mario Kart 8’s direction is absorbing F-Zero gameplay. This is bad because it means Nintendo has no interest in continuing F-Zero anymore. I’d rather Mario Kart remain Mario Kart and we get another F-Zero in the future. Another example is 3d World absorbing 2d Mario gameplay. This is done because Nintendo doesn’t want to make more 2d Mario games. Everyone I talk to, both 2d Mario and 3d Mario fans, want 2d Mario to explore 2d Mario gameplay and 3d Mario to really explore 3d Mario gameplay and not to cross the streams.
But I am silly. Nintendo doesn’t want our feedback. They just want us to respond to Nintendo games as if we are responding to cults of personality (Miyamoto, Aonuma, Sakamoto, etc.).
And, because in Nintendogs the character was a dog, people didn’t really view that as new IP from Nintendo, and it was. And with Wii Fit, the same thing, people didn’t really look at that as new IP.
IP is a legal word, not a gaming word. This is why I don’t like people using terms like ‘intellectual property’ and should instead say ‘mythos’ or ‘content’ or ‘universe’. Miyamoto is technically correct that Wii Fit and Nintendogs are new ‘intellectual property’, but no one sees Nintendogs or Wii Fit as a mythos or universe or even as creative fictional worlds. Those games are like ‘non-fiction’. People want new ‘fiction’.
Nintendo is like that fantasy author who keeps making more incarnations to a book series whose adding number makes the series more and more ridiculous. How about a new series?
Because even something like Nintendo Land that I thought was very fresh and offered unique ways to play games, people don’t recognize as being a new IP or taking a risk simply, because we didn’t build a new story around it or introduce a new character around it.
Nintendo Land as a new IP? Nintendo Land is nothing but a collection of old IPs. Miyamoto is not this stupid. He knows what we’re saying. Why is he being so stubborn?
The answer comes from interviews of lower profile Nintendo developers. They say, with pride, that Nintendo is different from other game companies. Most game companies come up with the mythos or content first and then develop the game that way. Nintendo, instead, comes up with the gameplay concept first and then designs the mythos or content around that.
One of the biggest Malstrom arguments that I’ve made over the years is that gamers respond to content, not gameplay. To put in another context of the fictional novel, the content is a book’s adventure and story while the gameplay is the book’s rhetorical style. Now, style is very important to make people want to read a book. However, the reason why readers buy a fictional book is for the story, not for the writing style. There are authors who spend their careers trying to exact their writing style instead of coming up with new content. What we get is the old content written in new ways. Readers become frustrated and stop buying. The exact same thing is occurring with Nintendo. The writers who do this are not well disciplined and somewhat egotistical. They can get new readers but not retain the old ones hence their reliance on expensive marketing campaigns.
Miyamoto keeps talking from the premise that gameplay sells games and not the content. If this were true, then why do licensed games sell so well despite using known gameplay? The entire rise of Blizzard wasn’t because they made new gameplay but because they made refined content.
Was Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and Nintendogs success due to ‘new gameplay’? The gameplay was old and tired. Everyone knew what ‘tennis gameplay’ is. It is as old as PONG. Nintendogs gameplay is not that different from Tomagotchis of the mid 90s. What if their success was more due to the content? Wii Sports was stripped clean of every Nintendo reference. There was no Mario in any of those games. People resonated with a Nintendo game without the typical Nintendo IP bloat of Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong. This is a big reason why Nintendo Land failed because people buy for content, not gameplay.
It is also why the 2d Mario games are despised because they offer no new content. They only offer new rhetorical ‘gameplay’ while they exist in the same exact content pioneered twenty five years ago. Yawn. People loved Super Mario Brothers 3 for places like Giant World. They didn’t care that the raccoon tail and the Tanooki Suit were largely identical, they liked both! People liked Dinosaur Land when it could have just been named ‘Mushroom Land’. I prefer Dinosaur Land because it makes the game seem more like an adventure.
If content doesn’t matter and gameplay does, then why is the Zelda timeline measured by each Zelda game’s content and not their gameplay?
Totilo says the same to Reggie Fils-Aime. His response:
You know that I like you a lot. I think that’s actually a superficial analysis.
That’s another diplomatic way of Reggie calling Totilo (and us) stupid.
There are places that try to go into more depth of analysis as to why we don’t respond to Nintendo games as we used to. Such places would be, oh, say this blog?
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