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Miyamoto, Garfield, Church To Talk At Smithsonian

Posted by simoniker on from the famous-people dept.

tripmaster writes "I'm lucky enough to have been asked to assemble and moderate a panel at the Smithsonian on May 16th; so I asked myself, who can I ask, given the cachet of an invite to speak at the Smithsonian (prior speakers: Berners-Lee, Cerf, Gates, Streep, Albright, etc.)? We ended up choosing Shigeru Miyamoto for console gaming, Richard Garfield for pen and paper games, Doug Church for PC games. /.-ers in the DC area (or on the East coast) should come see the panel, which will be a meaty 2-3 hours. I'm looking forward to asking questions and getting out of the way -- I think their cross-talk could be especially interesting. It's the weekend after the E3 Expo, which is probably the only time Miyamoto's in the States and available -- hopefully he'll also bring his E3 demos to show." Although a little pricey at $40, this is certainly a rare chance to see game design legends, particularly Miyamoto, in a roundtable.

6 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Why Richard Garfield? by Pluvius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    MtG isn't really a PnP RPG at all. Couldn't you have invited Steve Jackson or one of the White Wolf people?

    The other two are fine, though you might have been better off going with a legend in PC gaming (Will Wright, Sid Meier) considering your choice of Miyamoto in the console field.

    Rob

  2. price... by reluctantengineer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd like to be there, but at $40 I'd rather buy a video game than listen to people talk about them.

    1. Re:price... by L7_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Some people like to discuss game design, criticize and point out flaws in current games and discuss the artwork of said games on web forums (like this one), in IRC or even IRL moreso than they actually like to play the games themselves.

      So for $40, if they can post on slashdot or wherever saying that "when I saw Miyamoto talk about that, he said etc etc" then $40 is small potatoes.

  3. No love for Miyamoto by An'Desha+Danin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article:
    Doug Church, chief technology director, Eidos North America, is the game designer of Ultima Underworld (I & II), System Shock, and Thief: The Dark Project, three games in the top 20 of PC Gamers' recent list.
    ...
    Shigeru Miyamoto, senior managing director, Entertainment Analysis and Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd., Kyoto, Japan, is the inventor of     Donkey Kong.
    ... They give Doug Church credit for three of his biggest projects and all they can up with for freaking Shigeru Miyamoto is "he made Donkey Kong"? Where's the love?
    --
    Anything you might ever need to say about anything has already been said better by Penny Arcade.
  4. Money imbalance in Magic by Ondo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Unlike in the other two cases, though, coming up with a way to get people to spend hundreds of dollars on the same game just to be able to compete isn't that admirable of an innovation.

    He came up with a solution to that problem as well - ante, where the winner of each game gets a random card from the loser's deck. If people actually used it in Magic, it would be okay to lose 90% of the time to someone who spent 20 times as much on their deck, because you'd come out ahead on average.

    Perhaps he should have been able to predict that people wouldn't use it, but he did try.

    But that's a whole other argument.

    Indeed.

  5. Re:No love for Miyamoto by Guppy06 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "They give Doug Church credit for three of his biggest projects and all they can up with for freaking Shigeru Miyamoto is "he made Donkey Kong"? Where's the love?"

    If you don't already know what Miyamoto is famous for odds are you won't recognize any of his other accomplishments.