Sakurai reflects on being a judge for the Japan Game Awards, says there are too many remakes and old franchises
At the Tokyo Game Show last month, Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai led a series of judges to determine the Game Designers’ Award as part of the annual Japan Game Awards. Sakurai wrote about the experience in his weekly Famitsu column this week, in which he said:
“When we started judging, the votes were so split that I thought more than once that we wouldn’t have a winner at all. However, in the end I think we made a good selection, since there are some things to this game you won’t see anywhere else.”
“Me and the other judges are all busy people and we have trouble getting time for games. If we spent time checking out even all the big-name titles alone, to say nothing of smartphone apps and so on, we wouldn’t be able to make any of the games we’re involved with. We’re free to judge as we like, but if you ask us whether we’re taking a fair, in-depth look at every title out there, that’s not the case. Besides, it’s presumptuous to judge someone else’s title, in a way, since any developer has to give his all to produce any kind of good product.”
Sakurai’s comments took a turn later in the column. He spoke about the need of the design award so that there can be variety among the sequels and bigger titles available on the market.
“Is there any industry that relies so much on reusing and reusing their old titles as much as video games? Compared to other media like movies, dramas, animation, novels and comics, the glut of franchises and remakes is at an unnatural level.”
“You have to learn the rules of a game before you can play, and that presents hurdles from the very start. That’s why you have a generally unified approach to control methods between titles, and you can usually play one by taking what you already know and adding a feature or two to it — X means jump, Square means attack, and so on.”
“Good games attract fans, and if you have fans, you have an advantage. You try to use that to make the title something bigger, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to give up on innovation. Popular, well-made games deserve praise, but titles that have some kind of unique creative spark to them also need to be praised in this way. That’s what the judges are trying to do here, and it won’t work if it was just popular majority vote. That would lead to people just voting on names and past performances.”
