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.

Comments

Re:Wait, what?

[techpawn]

I heard the frame rate and bump mapping on the "outdoors" is amazing!

Re:Just what I think

[flyingsquid]

Charles Darwin is a good example of why you need a broad education. He didn't come up with the idea of natural selection by reading a lot of biology papers, he came up with the idea by reading Malthus' book on human population growth.

If you focus exclusively on your field, then the best you can do is learn everything that is already known in that field. That may be fine if you just want to be a craftsman, using time-honored techniques. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if you want to really push boundaries, you need to go outside your field and bring in pieces of knowledge which are foreign, even revolutionary.

Re:miyamoto-san?

[patio11]

Lots of Japanese people I meet at my job (technology incubator in Japan) will go out of their way to stick a Mister on my name (or a close approximation thereof), because they think its polite. Even when they're talking in Japanese, which obviously lacks "Mister". Even when they're addressing me on a first name basis, for some folks. Many foreign businessmen who don't speak word one of Japanese will put a -san on everything in sight, because they think its polite. My policy is to accept both in the spirit they were offered.

Ditto the tiny minority of folks who request their name to be reordered, for whatever reason. Most Japanese people abroad adopt a Western name order, most Western foreigners in Japan keep their Western name odrer. A teeny sliver of people ask for the reverse. I think that, hey, its their name and thats a fairly reasonable request to be able to make, for whatever reason. (There are Japanese politicans who have asked foreign newspapers reporting on them to respect their culture and put the family name first, and there are foreigners resident in Japan who on principal do not want to stick out any more than they have to and so want a Japanese name order. Plus it results in less confusion when your bank thinks you are Mr. Bob instead of Mr. Smith because the data entry clerk put things in the way she always does, family name first.)

For a related example, how exactly is English supposed to treat the name N'Gai? I used to be an English teacher, and I don't recall a capitalization rule for that case. My untutored supposition would be that the g is lower case, but if he writes it with a capital G, then I'll take the hint, rather than saying "Hey punk, this is English, not Klingon. Drop the apostrophe and the screwy casing convention". Thats needlessly rude.