Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto wants game developers to find ‘new ways to elicit joy’
The video game designer is the creator of some of Nintendo's most popular franchises (such as Mario and ‘The Legend of Zelda’).
During a recent interview with The New Yorker, the subject of the game ‘GoldenEye 007’ and how Miyamoto was sad whilst testing the game because the number of people the player kills in the game was brought up.
Miyamoto admitted that he thinks “it would be great if developers found new ways to elicit joy in their players” instead of just violence.
He told The New Yorker: “I think humans are wired to experience joy when we throw a ball and hit a target, for example. That’s human nature. But, when it comes to video games, I have some resistance to focussing on this single source of pleasure. As human beings, we have many ways to experience fun. Ideally, game designers would explore those other ways. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that there are studios that really home in on that simple mechanic, but it’s not ideal to have everybody doing it just because that kind of game sells well. It would be great if developers found new ways to elicit joy in their players.”
He added: “Beyond that, I also resist the idea that it’s O.K. to simply kill all monsters. Even monsters have a motive, and a reason for why they are the way they are. This is something I have thought about a lot. Say you have a scene in which a battleship sinks. When you look at it from the outside, it might be a symbol of victory in battle. But a filmmaker or writer might shift perspective to the people on the ship, to enable the viewer to see, close up, the human impact of the action. It would be great if video-game makers took more steps to shift the perspective, instead of always viewing a scene from the most obvious angle.”
