The Pit of Pat

The legendary Miyamoto describes the gaming industry’s trap of having lost sight of the reason we play video games in the first place - Nintendo included - and why the Wii was born.

“… people in the industry ask, ‘Will simulations catch on after the RPG boom?’ ‘What genre is the game play?’ ‘Who made it?’ We’ve lost sight of essential enjoyment, which is the basis of gaming. In developing the Wii, we asked ourselves once more, ‘What kind of game console do people want in their homes?’

We think that game designers, including us, have hit a dead-end. It’s assumed you will develop for a given environment, and [the developers] don’t know what they should make. To break out of this stagnation, we first have to radically change the paradigm,” he explained. “We have to try destroying [the paradigm] ourselves, and see what is born out of its destruction. If this cycle isn’t repeated, nothing new will be created. … We decided to base a product around [this idea] and offer it as a challenge to the game designers of the world. So, although I don’t reject today’s games, if we don’t do this sort of thing, no new forms of gameplay will appear.”

I think this is part of the reason that the DS and Wii appeal to me so much, they seem to be flying in the face of the standard ‘upgrade the hardware, release the next game in the series” mentality which seems very Microsoft and Sony. In the last 24 hours I’ve laser-burned polyps off of somebody’s trachea, played a little hoops with Luigi and friends, and drawn loads of rainbows with my homeboy Kirby, all in ways that weren’t possible before the hardware change. Are these ways necessarily better than traditional gaming styles? Of course not, but they certainly are better suited to the games I’m referring to. Wielding the stylus like a scalpel and drawing an incision point is so intuitive that the thought of doing it with a PS2 controller just about makes me yak my guts up.

Not every game needs to make use of these new tools, fighting games would be a bit awkward with the stylus I would imagine. Likewise some of these new features aren’t being exploited enough - for instance very few games are making use of the DS’s built in microphone, but at least those options are there for developers, so they can take advantage of them. It increases their palette of creativity, in a way. It seems that every interview I’ve read with studios developing for the Wii were excited by the prospect. Most of them are so used to doing straight ports to the various systems, or increasing the realism of the grass textures in their sports games that the chance to actually do something unique is getting them all juiced up.

At the same time there’s always been peripherals you could use for some games, the Taiko Drum Master drums I’ll be playing with soon come to mind, as does the PS2 EyeToy and the new X-Box 360 equivalent. It’s hard to market these peripherals though, since the game selection is often quite limited, which means people don’t know about them, or aren’t interested and they don’t sell as many copies of the hardware, which makes developers less likely to use them when making games. Vicious cycle, innit? Everyone knows the Wii-mote will be standard, so there’s no worry that it might be left in the bargain bin with the Sega Activator Ring, and hopefully consumers and developers will be open to other peripherals like the Zapper and the classic controller, though of course there’s every chance they might not. Am I out to lunch here?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Archived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.