i found this through tinycartridge: ign boards poster beundertaker’s drawings envision a world where nintendo’s, microsoft’s and sony’s game machines are friends, where the wii and playstation bring a bowl of soup to a bedridden xbox. they’re a startling contrast to the vicious culture that has somehow been built around the playing of games. the sixth picture honestly makes me tear up, and judging by what eric and some of ign’s posters have written, it’s not just me. for a long time, these corporations have been pitting their customers - usually young people in search of an identity - against one another as a marketing tactic.
but these machines have no reason to hate one another. they were built to play games with us and our friends! they may as well be children, as beundertaker’s drawings depict them. it’s a sad reflection on “gaming” that we transpose the rivalries of suit-and-tied businessdouches onto these machines of play, that we torture them into some metaphor for warfare. why shouldn’t they be friends?
on the subject contrast, this is the personal weblog of shigeru miyamoto. not the miyamoto of reality, the aging businessman to whom people give meaningless awards as a cursory gesture, the man who’s spent his career rewriting the same two ideas, a corporate lackey who screams at corporate lackeys, who isn’t allowed to discuss videogames without a nintendo representative present - lest we discover the sad truth is that he has nothing to say, any more - but the miyamoto of a world where “nintendo” is still synonymous with “videogames” and mario is an affirmation of the strength of imagination, not a squeaky italian mickey mouse. this blog is a window into another world, where nintendo is a fountain of dreams, not a money-making corporation, a world where shigeru miyamoto makes marvels, not sequels.
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Miyamoto’s English has capslock. It’s terrifying.
Hey, if Ace Of Base made a career out of releasing the same song fifty times, I can’t fault Shiggy the creator or Shiggy the Nintendrone (for you can’t divide a man from the compromises he’s done) for remaking his creations to each new generation of gamers. It’s how he rolls.
Shigeru can’t be every step of the ladder, none of us can. He did his part, and now it’s up to the next generation to take over.
That’s the real problem, I feel. Nintendo needs to assemble new design teams. Like Valve, who only needs to see a cool Youtube video from DigiPen to jump at the phone like it was a orgasm inducing machine.
I’m not sure it’s nice to pick on Miyamoto for being human and lame like the rest of us. And as for his creations? I’ll gladly take the derivative Mario Galaxy to wash my mind out from the Halos of the world, if you don’t mind.
He may be repetitive, but the MESSAGE STILL HAS YET TO SINK IN for the majority. What does that say about *us*?
which message is that, “A RED RUPEE IS WORTH FIFTY RUPEES”? his games certainly give the impression that he doesn’t seem to think it’s sunk in for the player.
to be fair, though, he doesn’t even design those or any games anymore.
People fight about games because they make games part of their identites: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
Game corporations are just fanning the flames.
Yeah, he can’t really be blamed for the latest entries to any of the series he has started.
I’m saying that we can’t really judge his work from our shared position. That is the position of having played thousands of games, analyzed hundreds, and both being a part of the indie community. 90% of the players he designs games for, they don’t have nearly that much experience and do not pick up games nearly as quickly.
Case in point, my parents both play Mario Galaxy. It’s one of the only games they have ever played. It’s taken them a hundred tries (literally) just to get up to and through the first fight with Bowser.
They have neither the skill nor the experience to compare it to anything else they’ve witnessed. Games make up such a small portion of life for the majority of the population, that Miyamoto and company CAN afford to repeat themselves and not alienate much of their audience.
Is it repetitve? Yes. But only to us. And it’s certainly a minority position.
And personally, I think the message (concerning eccentric level layouts, strange game-play ideas like gravity warping, and many other aspects WE take for granted) is something that bears repeating.
Repeat the damn message until it sinks into the general population. Mainstream gaming is a war of ideas that will be repeated and repeated until culture gets with the program. I’d like to see the ideas I like win.
Even if I’m getting sick of it already.
yeah you’re bieng harsh on miyamoto
also you cant blame corporations for all the console wars, people can only afford one console and they grow an affinity towards that console and hate everything else
its the people
this whole anti corporate agenda of yours is really off putting sometimes
Corporations are kinda dickish you have to admit that
yeah but its like the whole CORPORATIONS ARE EVIL EVERYTHIGN THEY DO IS BAD FIGHT THE MAN FIGHT THE POWER thing
its really
i dunno whatever
anyway the last time i remember consoles warring against eachother was SEGA DOES WHAT NINTENDONT thing
i dont really watch tv anymore so i havent seen commericals or anything, but do the companies still trash talk eachother like that?
“GAMES ARE THINGS THAT YOU PLAY WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
BUT YOU MIGHT BE THINKING: WAIT, miyamoto-SAN, WAIT! IF I PLAY A “SINGLE-PLAYER” GAME, HOW CAN THAT BE SOMETHING THAT I PLAY WITH MY FRIENDS?
I WILL TELL YOU NOW!
WHEN YOU PLAY A “SINGLE-PLAYER” NINTENDO GAME, YOU ARE PLAYING THAT GAME WITH A FRIEND: ME!”
awesome
> this whole anti corporate agenda of yours is really off putting sometimes
yeah :\
>do the companies still trash talk eachother like that?
there was that thing the RE5 guy said about “the wii couldn’t even run the title screen lol” but they don’t dis each other in tv ads anymore to my knowledge
Marketing is a funny thing.
It’s a bit odd, if you really stand back and think about it, that we live in a society where we are bombarded by barefaced lies and manipulation on an almost constant basis…
And not even good lies — I’m not just talking about massive, orchestrated campaigns to make people think that your brand of shoe somehow ‘represents’ their favorite sport — even something as petty as slapping ‘Italian Garden Vegetable Soup’ onto a can of soup containing nothing which has ever seen an Italian garden, simply because, while no one is really fooled, it tested 0.02% better than ‘Hydroponic Farm Vegetable Soup’.
You don’t have to ask how much money it takes before these people will start trying to manipulate you, because they don’t make currency in denominations that small. You’d probably have to start cutting up pennies. You’d probably have a hard time just finding numbers that small without resorting to some esoteric branch of mathematical analysis.
But that isn’t even the really weird part. The part that gets me is that we, the people who are being lied to, who are being manipulated, then turn around and start defending these corporate leeches as if it’s normal to just lie constantly and compulsively whenever it’s to your benefit, as if it’s normal to try to turn people against each other in the name of ‘brand identification.’ Of course, it’s just ‘anti-corporate sentiment’ to say you’re just fed up with the whole way things are run.
That is what seriously makes me feel like I am taking crazy pills. The only justification I can ever get out of people is “That’s business,” which is no justification at all, it’s just a description of what’s happening but in different words. It’s like if I asked you why you kept murdering people, and you shrugged and said, “Well, I’m a murderer,” before knifing someone else in the neck.
Can someone fill me in, here? What possible rationalization can you come up with that makes this kind of activity reasonable? What makes someone decide to be a corporate Uncle Tom?
i never said they were innocent
im not gonna start another fight here though
I often feel the same way. Whenever I see an ad for a product, I like to suggest the opposite. “Geico executives think people are bored by insurance and find it too expensive.” “Pepsi’s concerned that people don’t think cola choice is an important part of life.” “Wal-Mart hopes you’ll stop associating lower prices with a shoddy lifestyle.” It’s good to recognize that companies don’t really have any reason to put your best interests before their own.
That said, as bad as our industrial sociopathy has gotten, what else can we do? I’m enjoying the technocratic revolution. I like having a global communications network, numerous transportation options, all my basic needs taken care for a consistently low cost. Our society has its ailments, yes, but I’m still sure I’d rather live here today than in any other culture or era that I’m aware of.
Companies are the way they are because that’s what works in our capitalist culture. Corporations sell “brand” rather than “product” because the companies that didn’t spend enough time on brand aren’t in business anymore. They lie about products because people have to KNOW about products before they’ll buy them, and this is where the equilibrium between “enforceable false-advertising laws” and “suggestive market-researched wordings” stands.
Even if the government started enforcing more rigorous corporate controls to cut back on some of the more egregious excesses, that just changes the nature of corporate selfishness. Instead of competing on the information front, they’ll find some new avenue to undermine one another.
Getting back to your writing; I felt a little sad.
me too.
the funny thing is I bet the first console that can say ‘we play all wii, ps3 and 360 games’ will be the console to win the console ‘war’.
being nice is the best strategy if the suits want to get ahead imo, I know it wont happen, but whatever, perhaps the diehard fanboys are the only thing keeping all the seperate manufacturers in buisness.
as for the Miyamoto stuff, I totally agree, but then how sad are we, that we insist on remaking and replaying the same games over and over?
perhaps its neccesary, or maybe we are all brainwashed, either way, I’ve typed waaaaay more than I intended.
I get it. It’s funny because some ideas are inspired by other ideas. Also people sell them to consenting buyers in exchange for money.
What a disgusting world we live in.
I was thinking this same thing this morning.
WHY DO THEY HAVE TO COMPETE SO? It’s wonderful we have different platforms for games.
Why do you even try to pass off your distain for - ugh - commerce as some kind of progressive stance. You are clearly a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
I doubted the power of the sixth picture…right up until I saw it.
According to beundertaker, they’re not actually his drawings: “I found these pics awhile ago on some other forum.”
(http://boards.ign.com/teh_vestibule/b5296/174936796/p3)
Actually, I think the rush to divest yourself of all your opinions is more of a sign of privilege than taking a stance on something. Proust wrote about it, and I trust his judgement on rich French people, if nothing else.
I think the modern ennui associated with not only being cynical, but being cynical about your own cynicism is kind of a manifestation of that, and it’s definitely something that is being heavily taken advantage of by commercial interests. So I don’t buy this idea that you shouldn’t indicate your disgust with our current socioeconomic situation because it’s ‘played out.’ It’s just awfully convenient that the new way to be a hip intellectual is to shut up and buy. It’s kind of a cop out.
Prio: Those drawings have been circulating for what I’d like to say is at least half a year on 4chan. They’ve been around an awful long time, and I always thought that was where they came from. So, that might be what beundertaker meant by “some other forum”. You know how credibility magically disappears when you mention you’ve been there. Um…oh yeah…
I can totally agree on how stupid the console ‘wars’ are, but the Miyamoto thing is a bit harder for me to swallow. Part of me wants to believe there’s still that crazy smiling man who just wants to make games for fun. I mean, it’s hard for me to not try and defend him; I grew up idolizing this guy, as I’m sure a bunch of kids from my generation have. Sure, his Mario games haven’t been terribly innovative as of late, but what about Pikmin? Or Nintendogs? Do those not count for anything? What about Zelda? What was that a rip-off of?
this may be an incredibly late comment and rather petty, but the absolute irony of the statement “which message is that, “A RED RUPEE IS WORTH FIFTY RUPEES”?” despite having a point about repetition is staggering; indeed the message was never got, since a red rupee is worth twenty and purple ones are worth fifty [/pedantic]
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