I’m curious about all aspects of game design, and found this insight from the master - Shigeru Miyamoto. He is the man who brought us Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Zelda, and is the creative genius behind so many of the Nintendo games. He breaks down his creative vision into four major areas:

Expanding Audiences: One of the challenges that he has been successfully addressing for Nintendo, is designing games that appeal to wider audiences. Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii, and Brain Age for the Nintendo DS are good examples of this. He says his wife wasn’t interesting in video games for a long time, but now she beats him at Brain Age…

Balance: He defines balance as moving forward as a company and creating new innovations, but also keeping true to their history. I personally like Nintendo’s approach in the recent console wars, where they decided not to take Microsoft and Sony on in terms of the level of graphics and technology, but to focus instead on games that are fun to play. In Wii sports the baseball players don’t even have arms, but you forget all about that because you are using the interesting new Wii controller to swing the bat and hit the ball.

Risk: And speaking of that new controller, Miyamoto says it is the biggest risk the company has taken yet. They are breaking with 20 years of tradition and history in game controllers. As new games come out that take advantage of this new controller we’ll see how successful it is. Impressions from staff here and friends so far have been that the Wii is a great “party” console, fun to play games with others. And the Wii remote sort of levels the playing field for all ages making the games really fun to play together.

Communication: When designing a game, he tries to understand the “emotion” that the player will be communicating while playing it. What does the game make you feel?

Miyamoto sums it up by saying “creative vision is not one element of game design. It’s the essence of game design.

I think that has been the problem with some recent educational games. In pursing educational aspects of the games, part of the creative vision was lost. There are, however, some shining examples of games that provide a learning experience and are also really fun to play. The challenge for us as a community of parents, is to influence the major publishers to fund more of these kinds of games, and I can envision a future where there many quality titles for children 4-12 that immerse the players in a fun learning experience!

More interesting links:

Miyamoto Video Interview on C|Net

For more on Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo’s interesting story, read the book Game Over. It is a fascinating read!

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