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Miyamoto Lecture At Smithsonian Documented

Posted by simoniker on from the it's-a-me dept.

Thanks to 1UP for its report on last week's Smithsonian lecture featuring game industry luminaries, including Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, and as previously mentioned on Slashdot Games. After Miyamoto's entrance, heralded with "hoots and hollers [so loud] that you'd think Natalie Portman had just walked out on stage at a Star Wars convention", the article quotes the Nintendo mainstay on his entrance to the industry ("When I originally I came to Nintendo it was to do industrial design... I wanted to make the new Rubix Cube. I never imagined that I would work in video games, especially since I don't like computers"), and his concern over making videogames accessible: ("Everyone should be able to pick-up a controller and play a video game... But still so many people think games are too complex. So I developed the L/R buttons and analog stick to simplify things.")

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Back on the N64... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, that was part of the 1UP.com write-up, although it's enclosed in brackets (implying editorial modification) in quotes that trace back from the author, then to the translator, then to Miyamoto, with who knows how many dimwits in between.

    Same thing for the misspelling of "Rubik's Cube," along with other quoed and non-quoted bits from the write-up. You know, typical game journalist fare.

  2. Re:Back on the N64... by simoniker · · Score: 3, Informative

    The 'controller invention' N64 comment was added, presumably, by the person who wrote the article for 1UP (not by lovely Slashdot editors, although it is in the same bracketing format we use), but I removed it, because you're right, it doesn't seem to make total sense. Doh.

  3. Re:Complex? yes! by tomhung · · Score: 3, Informative
    I have watched old/young people play games. What they usually do, if they're older, is ask what a button does and/or how to play a game. Sometimes you'll come across someone who has completed a 4th grade education and they are able to RTFM. Granted, the toddlers tend to just mash buttons, but they don't understand the games anyway.

    All I'm saying is, you can't satisfy everyone, to few buttons and you limit game play, too many and inexperienced people get confused, at least at first. I'd prefer to have too many than not enough, since like I said not all buttons are required in every game (for example, tetris worlds), but in a game like Unreal, they're nice.

    On a slightly off topic, everyone I know who played video games but doesn't anymore doesn't play them because they can't find games they like. IE: Gone are the 2-D Sonic games, now they have this half-baked 3-D version that's crap, IMHO.