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Miyamoto Gives Advice to Game Design Hopefuls
grenada writes "As reported by Ars Techncia, Shigeru Miyamoto has some good advice for aspiring game developers. Instead of telling kids to focus on video games, he actually says that it's beneficial to diversify your education and personal interests. He says that meeting people and familiarizing yourself to different fields will give you the best perspective of the world in the long run, which will help in your game-developing career. 'While young people are still students, I think it is important for them to not just focus on something like programming or just focus on video games. Instead they should do things that you can only do while you are in college. Get out, meet people, and talk to people.'" As a follow-up, N'Gai Croal at Newsweek has up an interview he did with Miyamoto-san entitled the Artist's Way.
Here's what actually happened:
Miyamoto: What the heck is wrong with you people? Get a life! I mean, I love success as much as anyone else, but I can't stand by and watch this any longer. Video games are supposed to be a side hobby, not something you build your life around. I almost fainted when I heard we'd be licensing Mario bedsheets. I mean, get out there. Get a date. Take down the Kirby poster...
*fat guy in suit waddles up*
*pulls Miyamoto aside*
*starts scolding in Japanese*
*makes huge gestures with his hands*
*makes gesture for "small child"*
*makes gesture for "big house"*
*makes gesture for "money"*
*makes "cutting neck" gesture*
*Miyamoto bows to him*
*returns to stage*
Miyamoto: What I mean is, if you're going to design a game, you should have separate interests...
crowd: *Hm, what sage advice*
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"Get out, meet people, and talk to people."
What are these "people" he speaks of? Is that some kind of new interactive game demo that's outdoors?
More Twoson than Cupertino
"Instead they should do things that you can only do while you are in college."
Translation: Take lots of acid. Then you too can create the next Mushroom Kingdom.
This is good advice for everyone not just hopeful game designers. Seriously everyone, life is too vast to focus on one small thing.
Go run and play with your friends. That'll teach you how to program... I spent the past 10 years programming, you can't say you can learn what I've learned by hanging out with your friends and going to college. It's called experience.
Basically Miyamoto is saying you have to enjoy life while at college because all you will do afterwards is work. So go outside and be social while you still can.
I was a computer and game enthusiast for over two decades. I wrote business software, websites, databases, and soforth. Nothing exciting like gaming supposedly is, and my skillset wouldn't have worked in the gaming world except, perhaps, as a webmaster.
When I became a Project Manager? THEN I got interviews at game companies.
You never know.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
> As a follow-up, N'Gai Croal at Newsweek has up an interview he did with Miyamoto-san
Look, you're writing in English, the name is Miyamoto. This just makes you look like some goofy otaku fanboy.
The link in the article points to a review of "Cooking Mama". What's up?
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Everything he touched turns into gold because it's made by Miyamoto. If others came with the exact same idea as Miyamoto they would be turned down. So even though his advice could be very useful it doesn't mean it'll work.
Besides, Miyamoto was almost crushed by Tim Shafer. He's a fragile little man.
Imagine my surprise when I heard that Miyamoto Usagi was giving advice to game design hopefuls! What, one might ask, could an anthropormorphic rabbit ronin have to teach us about games? Let alone one who supposedly lived almost four hundred years ago...
Then again, I guess you could think of Usagi as someone who studies life and the world around him - perhaps we could learn many things from his unique perspective!
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
It's called experience. In my experience, going to work in the "real world" the programmer with 15 years of "experience" wrote 100% pure www.thedailywtf.com worthy code, he quit shortly after I started submitting patches. Couldn't stand the egg on his face.
Lets not get started with the one with 20 years experience.
I'm not saying that experience is valueless, indeed, the best of the outgoing students are the ones who do their own programming projects, and gain experience that way. However academic study of computer science is very important to be a decent programmer, such academic study can be had from books, but it must be had somewhere.
Less look fast, more go fast.
Game designers or teams go unrecognized, and it's TEAMS not just "designers". Designers are good for vision, but the most recent Nintendo's games on the cube and even TWP prove that Nintendo or it's development teams are losing touch with gaming.
1) Wind waker and TWP, both games that could have been much better
2) The tragedy that was Starfox assault since Nintendo desperately farmed it out (bad decision), most likely killing the franchise even more then it did with the re-badged dinosaur planet.
Miyamoto is over-rated, he let really bad design decisions go in wind waker and other projects. I'm hesitant to ascribe the success of any game to one person when I know that the blood and sweat of teams and programmers and artists are what glue the experience together...
People with:
1) Vision
2) Skill
3) Insane work ethic
4) Time and money to finish the game
That's what makes games ladies and gentlemen, games are enormous undertakings now-a-days, I do not envy anyone creating games while I do hate companies milking their products with expansions or cutting content to make a deadline. When you're flush with cash (epic, iD, etc) you should not be on "sacred" deadlines. IMO while gaming is a business, you're never going to push the genre forward without someone like
That's the thing, so many people who want to be game designers go out and get CS degrees. This is probably about as far as you want to get to break into the video game field. For every programmer, there are like 10 designers behind him: graphic artists, game theorists, UI developers, screen-writers, composers, sound technicians, etc.
It's basically like if everyone who wanted to be in cinema went to study cinematography. Cinematography may be the thing that actually produces the final product, but a film is worthless without everything else involved.
You'd be way better off studying commercial design philosophy, getting a liberal arts degree, and maybe some psychology under your belt. Those things will enable you to think more in terms of how to create original and markettable gaming techniques.
Most games these days are built on pre-built engines. All the development is high-level software... nothing that you're going to pick up in learning C++. Now, don't get me wrong, in learning C++ you'll also learn some valuable thinking skills in order to get you working quickly under various circumstances, but your best skills are going to come from walking away from your computer/game system, and just learning how to think in terms of elegant design and functionality. People play games to have fun, after all... if it feels like a game is made by people who do nothing but sit behind screens and type in numbers, it's not going to be a fun experience.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
1) I build experience in creative thinking by studying many different fields, arts, ways of thinking, etc.
2) I get all you coders to make the games for me.
3) I hire some middle men who can tell you to make the games for me, without sounding like an asshole (like me).
I think I'm set for life.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
How do you say "developers ! developers ! developers !" in Japan ??
-- Rastignac was here.
Q: Is that image disgusting?
A: Yes. Yes it is.
...is here.
nt
no single game designer has had anywhere near as much impact on video games as miyamoto throughout his career. i dont know what miyamoto had to do with starfox assault but one mediocre game means nothing. even 10 mean nothing when you've been invovled in as many games as miyamoto has. also "TWP" as you call it is an excellent game thats judged 10x harder than any no-name game simply because it's zelda and it has a legacy of one of the greatest video game series of all time (if not the greatest). i'll gladly acknowledge wind waker didn't meet expectations but at the same time it succeeded in turning a video game into a cartoon more than any game ever has before or since, it basically puts to shame any and all other attempts at "cel shading" thanks not only to its excellent execution of that but also its equally amazing and consistent animation and other visual elements.
if miyamoto's overrated i'd like an example of one person you think is more important to video gaming than him, and i don't mean one-shot wonder accidents like whoever invented space invaders but people who have been consistently creating excellent games through something like 5+ generations of gaming platforms.