Miyamoto on game violence, Wii U reception/sales, online possibilities, more
Shigeru Miyamoto commented on a number of new wide-ranging topics in an interview with the New York Times. While talking with the publication, Miyamoto chatted about video game violence, the Wii U’s reception/sales thus far, and expressed excitement over the “tremendous amount of possibilities” provided by online play.
All of Miyamoto’s responses are posted below.
Miyamoto on video game violence…
That’s a difficult question. As someone who creates games and understands that children play those games, it’s a subject that I’m very sensitive about. We’ve seen through a variety of media that when people see or experience violence on screen, there is a certain amount of entertainment that people get out of that.
Mario is a character that, I feel, doesn’t need to use guns. But when it comes to violence, you then have to ask, “So, if Mario doesn’t use a gun, is it appropriate for Mario to hit people?” And, in fact, when we were creating the game Super Smash Bros., we had very long and deep discussions about whether or not we thought it was appropriate for Mario to hit people.
Miyamoto on whether or not he’s disappointed in Wii U reception/sales…
I think that the Wii U still has a long future. We really view it as being the ideal device that families are going to want to have connected to that screen in the living room that everyone is going to gather around and watch. Certainly in the short term I would want to see it performing with probably a little more momentum. I think in the long term I’m not at a point where I’m concerned yet.
Miyamoto on tablets/phones competition and uncertain state of the industry…
Entertainment is an unpredictable industry. Entertainment is this thing that moves around from place to place. You have a theme park like Disneyland, and that’s a form of entertainment. And at the same time you have small, downloadable software for your smartphone that you can play, and that’s entertainment. Nintendo’s stance, over all, is that we don’t know where entertainment will take us next.
We look at it in terms of what kinds of experiences do families want in the living room in front of the TV? Because we don’t think that families are going to go away, and we don’t think that TVs are going to go away.
The last couple of years in Japan we’ve seen a huge increase in the adoption of smartphones, to the point where in Japan people are saying, “Maybe I don’t need a console, or I don’t need a portable gaming device.” But this past holiday in Japan we released a game called Animal Crossing: New Leaf that’s coming to the United States this year. And in Japan it has really been a big hit. And what we’re seeing is that the people playing it primarily are adult women. And adult women also happens to be the same group of people that has been rapidly adopting cellphones over the last couple of years.
As long as we’re able to provide an entertainment experience that people want to play, they’re more than happy to purchase another device to carry around with them alongside their smartphone.
Miyamoto on games in museums…
I think the saddest thing about video games is that once the hardware that the game runs on stops operating, the game is gone. And the only way to preserve it then is through video. And so, on the one hand, I’m happy that there’s a facility that’s starting to preserve games in their original state.
At the same time it seems a little strange to me. I still look at video games as entertainment. And it seems strange to me to take entertainment and preserve it as a piece of art per se. But I guess MoMA as a museum, they were one of the first to start preserving industrial design products. With myself being an industrial designer, I’m very grateful to see that, and grateful that they’re also preserving games.
Miyamoto on whether his success creates additional pressure for him…
I don’t really think about it in those terms. There are sort of two kinds of people. There are the people who say, “Oh, we can repeat that success.” And there are the people who say, “We’re never going to see anything as successful as that again.” What I always say is: “We can make the rules ourselves. Nobody has done it before. We can make it up as we go along.” And that to me is a lot more fun.
Miyamoto on what is most exciting to him about video games right now…
For a long time at Nintendo we didn’t focus as much on online play because for many years doing so would have limited the size of the audience that could enjoy those features. But certainly now we see that so many people are connected to the Internet. It opens up a tremendous amount of possibilities.
