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Miyamoto 'Banned' From Talking About Hobbies
walshy007 writes "After Shigeru Miyamoto developed a love of puzzles, the "brain-training" software that has proved to be an international "killer application" on the Nintendo DS console was born.
He became interested in taking more exercise, and Wii Fit was created. He took up music lessons, and Wii Music was the result.
Now, according to sources at Nintendo, the games designer has been banned by the company from speaking publicly about his hobbies."
..guess we'll just see how long Nintendo manages to keep him around with ridiculous policies like this in place..
I guess wii Bukakke didn't quite catch on as well as the other Japanese classics did.
he doesnt develop a fondness for fishing and hunting.
Good people go to bed earlier.
What most people don't know is that he has a strange fetish for women dressed up in furry animal costumes. I wonder what the next game would be like?
Are we to consider him a slave and is this legal in Japan?
I guess it'll be interesting, then, to see whether or not the "Wii Jack" makes it to retail...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
So the next game will be about somebody who has been banned from talking by his corporate overlords.
The first rule about hobbies is, you don't talk about hobbies.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I'm barred from talking about my hobbies by my employer as well.
Might have something to do with all the razor blades and dismembered animal parts.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
218 words. 6 paragraphs, 3 of which are in TFS. No source. No links. Few details.
I do agree, that is an interesting tidbit there, but it's an idle story at best. Fark material IMO.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
holy crap this is some old news.
Could it really be?
lolwut?
If knowing Miyamoto's hobbies is enough to scoop Nintendo, then why can't competitors even touch his track record?
I think Nintendo is confusing ideas with implementations. Having ideas is great. Anyone can have ideas. In fact, they're a dime in quantities of tens of thousands. The problem is getting those ideas implemented. And without Miyamoto-san's insight into the implementation, I sincerely doubt competitors are going to be able to get ahead of Nintendo.
This seems like a case where Miyamoto should ignore his employer and just do his own thing. Unfortunately, I think he's too nice to take a stand on this. He will probably go along with his employer's request. Thankfully, however, I imagine that this requirement will loosen and fall off with time.
Which can only be good for fans. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have found the stories behind the development of Miis and Wii Fit to be fascinating. (And hilarious. "You guys are useless!" :-P)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wiit coming soon to a dining room near you!
No smoking sigs indoors.
Fut besser, wenn gresser!
Actually, we already had Star Fox.
And Animal Crossing.
I don't think a game based on Hobbits would do that well.
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Clearly Nintendo is looking to base their future games on his personal interests:
"Super Eating Out Mario Bros"
"Wacky Workout"
"The Chronicles of Shopping"
"Watching Reruns on TV Fiesta"
"World of Internet Porn Surfing"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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Well, one thing that business has taught me is how little value ideas really have.
I know it's heretical to say this, but ideas just aren't that valuable. Discernment, discipline, patience, timing, creativity, craftsmanship, relationships with vendors and customers, and of course money have to be added before an idea generates a single penny of profit.
Take the idea of a car racing game with cute characters driving. Miyamoto's gone to that well multiple times, but nobody else has scored big with it, even though it isn't a copyrightable or patentable thing. He's got a team that gets the details right.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No one ever thought of doing puzzle games before.
And no ever thought of doing work-out games before (we actually own the XBox virtual personal trainer game that my wife used to work out with).
And no one ever did music games before.
And since when was Wii Music a big hit? I thought it hadn't even been released yet, and all the hype has been about Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I don't think Nintendo is worried so much about someone coming out with a better game. Their worries probably run more along the lines that a rival company will come out with a game first and either sue or just saturate the market with an inferior pre-knockoff.
There was a DS homebrew contest and I remember reading about a girl who won the contest by developing a game in which you stroked the fluffy parts of a bunny with your stylus just right to make the bunny happy, and then it exploded into a bunch of butterflies. The developer flat out said the game was a simulation of getting a girl off. I'm sure a similar homebrew game for the Wiimote will eventually come out.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
And here I thought that it is the next logical evolutionary step for the Wii.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=227
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
they don't want titles like "Wii fap to tentacle rape hentai" and "Wii subway groping" to come out.
I could have sworn I heard that Pikmin came from Miyamoto being a gardener.
Next time he's giving a presentation: "My best friend Shawn Michaels has gotten into (insert new hobby here) lately."
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
Wii Pr0n!?
I used to be a fan of Nintendo, but they seemed to totally screw everything up this generation. First they don't release enough games onto the Wii's Virtual Console, then they tell various third party publishers release dates then release non of the games they told them. Wiiware is much of the same, various publishers have said that they had no control on when the games they made would be released. And now this. Nintendo has become even more of a control freak then even in the NES era, and for no good reason.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Don't forget playing with his dogs (Nintendogs) and gardening (actually where his idea for Pikmin came from).
A lot of people know he does this, so many journalists like ask him what he's doing in his free time and then try to parse his words to figure out what future new games he may be working on. If they really are quelling that, I'm not very surprised, given how secretive the company likes to be.
If he doesn't obey? Fire him? Not likely. You don't kill the goose who lays the golden eggs without a better reason than that. It being Japan, he'll probably not even consider disobeying, though.
Take the idea of a car racing game with cute characters driving. Miyamoto's gone to that well multiple times, but nobody else has scored big with it, even though it isn't a copyrightable or patentable thing. He's got a team that gets the details right.
I thought Diddy Kong Racing was pretty good. A lot of other people did too, from the article. Miyamoto is a good game designer, but he isn't the only one.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Because his latest hobby is directing Porn movies.
Wii Money Shot!©
Wii Stripper. Complete with brass pole.
Bearded Dragon
I'd venture that Nintendo just doesn't want others to try and do things first. I mean a lot of his previous hobbies and the way they translate into games aren't completely non-obvious; granted Miyamoto has great talent in that translation and what is really "fun" about them in a game, but if you follow that trend, someone's going to say "hey, how DO you make this into a game" and go from there. It's more of trying to prevent others from even getting the idea of "hey this _would_ make a cool game, wouldn't it."
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
if our hobbies can be classified as trade secrets...
I think all the people crying about "censorship" by Nintendo are overlooking one key point. If it were not for his employment with Nintendo, no one on the planet would CARE what his hobbies were. Half the people on this thread are running personal blogs where they talk about their hobby of collecting Star Wars figurines or studying Esperanto. However, no one's reading... and no one cares (sorry!).
It's only due to his employment situation, and penchant for turning new hobbies into games, that any of that information has interest in the first place. If you were a biochemical engineer for Pfizer back in the 90's, it would have been pretty reasonable for them to say, "Hey, can you please not blog about your obsession with impotence until we get this new Viagra thing through the FDA approval process?" Besides, if Miyamoto wants to write about his fascination with Firefly under the posting handle "SummerGlauRULEZZ"... no one will know (or care... or read).
Perhaps EA or some other game development company is following this story. To pick up this talent would be benefit, one would think.
Yes, the release is stupid. "any glimpse inside his head could be worth billions" - right. Making a game takes two grueling years and it's not the original idea that is valuable, it's the execution.
Ah, it's possible. But maybe you're just unable to look beyond your sweeping generalization ("driving game with cute characters") to see the actual original ideas that made his games big.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Wii Extreme Penetration. Playable with just the original nunchuks.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
I have a quick reminder for all you "freedom" trumpeters trying to explain how things should work - Miyamoto is perfectly capable of making up his own mind. Your half-baked uninformed opinions about the conditions of his employment are stupid. Plain freakin stupid.
until we see Wii Goatse!!?
I can definitely see Miyamoto getting into that.
I think we can infer from his resume what he enjoys in his off time:
Popping mushrooms.
Dressing up in short green skirts and cutting up bushes with a sword.
Getting drunk and tossing empty kegs at frat boys.
Pretending to ride shotgun with forest animals in space.
Inhaling food with cheeks puffed.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
And given the success and fame he's had since he's been at Nintendo, this "ban" could be just as much if not more so self-imposed than imposed by the company. I'm sure he probably sees that the success of the company is tied to his own success, and he probably doesn't want to sink the company.
there's an orwellian fascism game in the works.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
What's next, he isn't allowed to talk about Lord of the rings?
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Rumour has it that Nintendo have asked him to take up plumbing and Italian in his spare time.
Sounds like someone made an off-the-cuff joke suggesting that Miyamato's hobbies should be a trade secret, rather than actually stating company policy.
Of course, this has worked remarkably well, getting Nintendo a lot of press, so if it was a joke they're going to stick to their story.
...that he's moving to Massachusetts and taking up amateur chemistry.
The concept? The hobby of playing Wii...ON you Wii. Involves you moving your Mii around with the remote, while your Mii plays Wii! It'll rock, seriously!
I seem to remember Crash Team Racing and Diddy Kong Racing being incredibly successful at the time, and both feature the idea of "car racing with cute characters."
A case of art imitating life, or life imitating art?
Did Miyamoto mentioning his love of puzzles spur developers to make puzzle games, or did it take that discussion to prod the public into saying "Hey, where's the puzzle games?", which spurred developers to make said puzzle games...
Did Miyamoto take a sudden interest in fitness because he really cares about his health, or did he wake up one morning and say "Hey, I know, there's nobody trying to make people exercise to their consoles since the Track and Field pad on NES, why don't we do something about that?!"
Is this the thanks Miyamoto gets for making you the company that you are today?
You should be kissing his bare feet and wiping his ass with your hands, you tightwad corporate fuckheads.
The next step is that Nintendo allows Miyamoto's hobbies to "accidentally" get leaked in order to get Microsoft and Sony to waste all their time.
Word on the street is that he's taken up knitting, and he's started a rock garden. Run with that, Xbox dev team!
Which shows why banning somebody from talking about hobbies is silly.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
From Shigeru's blog:
Latest hobby: Sitting in my parents basement, masturbating to on-line p0rn.
Competitor: We're gonna beat them to market. We'll call it "Slashdot".
Have gnu, will travel.
I think this speaks to a much larger issue.
There are a few ways for a company to actively popularize its content.
1) Ads.
2) Feature the content prominently on their own popular website.
3) Have respected community members recommending your product. (e.g. blogs, delicious/Democracy-Player-style peer-trust-based popularization)
If you cut off your employees' relationships with the public, you lose an important vector. Individual employees can become community rock stars. Some of my favorite technical articles come not from faceless MSDN entries, but from individual Microsoft employees who speak candidly about their work and their environment.
Of course, if you let an employee become an unofficial face for the company, you stand to lose a lot if that employee leaves or if that employee decides to say anything negative. This isn't so much a dilemma as a reflection of two different models regarding the role of companies and their employees. The relatively new existence of community-models of popularization just makes the good-company-open-employee model a little more favorable than it used to be.
I seems it would really be up to him to accept the ban. What would Nintendo do if he said no to it? Fire him? Let some other company hire him and benefit from all his future ideas? If he wasn't willing to hide his interests from others, I don't think Nintendo could be able to force him. He's too valuable to lose.
..guess we'll just see how long Nintendo manages to keep him around with ridiculous policies like this in place..
See subject.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Oh great, now I can never look at a bunny in the same way ever again.
Does this mean Miyamoto likes eating funny mushrooms and kicking turtles?
Manager: "Please don't talk about your hobbies publicly."
Miyamoto: "OK"
Co-worker: "What was that about?"
Miyamoto: "They don't want me talking about my hobbies."
Co-worker: "They won't let Miyamoto talk about his hobbies."
[several layers of 'the telephone game' later]
"Miyamoto banned from talking about hobbies."
Well, one thing that business has taught me is how little value ideas really have.
I'm tired of hearing that.
A single idea very rarely is valuable. However, a connected string of ideas can have a value of many millions. With that I mean not just the original "let's do X" thought, but the string of how to do it at all, how to do it well, how to do it in a commercially viable way, etc. - it's ideas that count, for most of the actual implementation you can hire people.
The value of people like Miyamoto is that they don't just have isolated ideas, but can string them together to create something of value. But his value is still in the ideas he has. Don't confuse "initial flash of thought" with "idea", that's not the same thing.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Exactly. The ideas in Miyamoto's games sometimes aren't particularly inspired (collect carrots in a garden?) and often aren't really important to the core gameplay. What makes Miyamoto's games unique and universally great is the incredible polish and attention to detail, his ability to see what doesn't work and call out bad ideas, and the well thought out and extensively tested gameplay mechanics used in his games.
As always, it's not the idea, it's the execution.
I guess there could be some brand dilution if others come out before Nintendo, but then, it's Nintendo. People pay attention to them whether their ideas are new, or whether they have been done before (Kinetic Combat was before Wii Fit, Guitar Hero was before Wii Music, and so on).
Man, Grand Theft Auto for the wii would be my "wii fit"!
You still can't deny almost every single game [Miyamoto] comes up with stars Mario in some form or another.
Au contraire. The Nintendo fanboys are constantly complaining that Miyamoto has abandoned them because he has abandoned his old franchises such as Mario and Zelda. Miyamoto was only a producer on Galaxy, and he was barely involved in the development of New Super Mario Bros; I don't think he's made a Mario title in a decade or so.
I'm guessing one reason he's still at Nintendo is because he has total creative freedom and basically development control of the whole company. He's involved in most of Nintendo's project in some way, software or hardware. He can do whatever project he wants, no matter how outlandish, with all the resources he requires. Even if he were to go to Microsoft or Sony, he would never get that kind of control.
Can you point us to this home brew game?
This is it, looks like he isn't releasing a DS ROM, and I don't feel like installing that web browser plugin.
http://www.moboid.com/lapis/LapisDemo.htm
To be comparable with the jesus phone they would have to cripple the range and make it drop out regularly.
Gotta be the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years.
The iPhone is the best cell phone I've used in my entire life. I've hated using my cell phones since I first bought one. I've owned Nokias, a Treo, a few Symbian smart phones and others.
Every cell phone I've ever used sucked.
The iPhone is not perfect. It should be more open. Bluetooth should not be crippled. I want a fucking blinking LED so I can see when I got an SMS.
But it's still the best phone I've ever used, because it
In short, every other cell phone I've owned sucked due to the death of a thousand cuts. Every time I had to use it, it managed to annoy me in some little or big way. Every time I use the iPhone, I'm happy at how elegant most stuff on that phone is.
If you think it's "the most overhyped POS of the last 10 years" because it "drops out regularly" (do you actually own one? Mine has never dropped a call, but perhaps that's because Europe's cell phone networks don't suck donkey balls), you're probably missing the point.
I know, one of his hobbies is collecting stamps.
Oops, I unleashed the secret of the next hot game.
oh wait , isnt that a one player game?
There must be some part of your reasoning that I'm missing. If the guy (who's something of a genius) bleats publicly for half an hour on what *exactly* he likes about poker, a team of people just as competent and dedicated as his own team might be able to get all the inspiration they need from that to create one of the best chance-based games of all time. Ideas are very valuable but eminently stealable.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
I know that people think this is a huge danger, but I can't really think of any examples of anything like that happening.
After the fact, when a successful product has been launched, sure imitation is a problem. But after the fact you benefit from all the thought and problem solving that went into original product development, as well as from real world response to those decisions. A well funded competitor is very dangerous in that respect. However a company that relies on having lots of money to invest doesn't stay that way if it chases every will-o-the-wisp. Better to let the little guys prove the market exists for a product then crush them like a bug before they get too big. Second mover advantage is a very real for second movers with deep pockets.
But preempting a product by stealing its idea? It very seldom happens.
Creating products is hard, and expensive. It's more like piloting a ship than aiming an arrow at a target. Chances are if you are well positioned to exploit an idea, you've got plenty of your own.
Companies, like Apple, that are ostentatiously secretive about upcoming products primarily benefit from controlling the product buzz. Even after all these years, competitors have yet to build an iPod killer, because the iPod's strengths don't boil down to any single idea or small set of ideas. There's a kind of product gestalt that, if it qualifies as an idea, is not something you can glean from some offhand remarks. It's more of a system property.
This applies to Nintendo's games. Suppose Miyamoto lets it slip that they're working on Wii Philately. So, you whip up your own stamp collecting game to steal his thunder. How likely is that to work? How close would your game be to his?
I'm not saying that ideas don't sometimes need to be kept secret -- although that's different than saying they are valuable in themselves. But you have to have a number of exceptional circumstances, few of which are likely to apply to games. In most cases the value of keeping an idea secret is marginal. Where you have somebody with lots of ideas, letting him blab about them might actually leave competitors less informed.
I'd be much more concerned about Miyamoto talking about the philosophy of game design, or the things that work or don't work about his development team, than the fact he really likes to collect stamps. Creativity is about coming up with the right idea at the right time, then doing the right things that generate additional right times. It's 90% about mastering the process.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But preempting a product by stealing its idea? It very seldom happens.
You are conflating my argument with a previous poster's. I never suggested that some competitor could (or would want to) preempt anything. A better scenario would be a second-mover scenario where you have stolen the idea and developed it, yet wait for the originator to develop, launch and take the inevitable early popularity hit from minor game mechanics glitches and launch-time bugs. You hit the shelves two weeks later, with a bigger and better thing - one that also has your own secret sauce added.
Suppose Miyamoto lets it slip that they're working on Wii Philately.
That's another strawman you're fighting. It matters not one whit what he's working on. The angle, the spin, the original twist is everything. If the company knows that his musings about newfound hobbies usually turn into original ideas about games and gaming, well...
Other than that, you're still missing the point with all that talk about creativity being process. It's not. Everybody who's somebody has process down pat.
You talk about an iPod killer. That's Microsoft talk, big bureaucracy crapolanguage. "Og smash!" is not a recipe for creativity.
Apple killed the iPod themselves - they let the iPhone gobble it up, while everyone was scrambling to produce a better iPod than the iPod.
Well guess what, you can't be a better Catholic than the Pope is. All you can do is start your own religion, be Luther - a revolutionary, not a process guy whose thinking is limited to "everything you can do, we can do better".
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Who said I hated Slashdot? I'm just agreeing that it's sensationalised, and that it's often guilty of that style of reporting. Who *originated* the sensationalism is irrelevant; what makes a paper or news site is which angle of a particular story they choose to publish. I don't really know Kotaku or Gizmodo, maybe they're similar.
However I'm more than capable of accepting news from the internet or tabloids with a pinch of salt and still enjoying reading them.
what are you doing here if you hate it that much?
Cor! A Geekriot!