Why miyamoto is awesome

Why is this a problem? It gets the young budding developer away from focusing on customer reactions to the games. The only thing that matters is the consumer experience. You could even say the true designer of video games is the consumer reaction. Why did the team complain? You have no creativity whatsoever.

Games are very difficult to make and requires a diverse range of talents. Programmers do not often make good artists and vice versa. What happened if Shigeru Miyamoto stepped in front of a bus? Nintendo stock would crash. Everyone would declare Nintendo, as a company, is over. So Miyamoto-As-Game-God marketing persona was becoming a greater and greater liability.

Miyamoto has had wealth and fame that the rest of us will never have. It is no disservice to him to stop treating him as a walking demi-god. I also suspect Miyamoto is probably a little tired of it anyhow. Most celebrities get tired of the fame rather quickly. I prefer to think that there are multiple geniuses at Nintendo, a constellation rather than just one, solitary, and singular star. So what about Miyamoto-the-Man?

From my long distance observations, I think Miyamoto is special in three ways:. First, he is a life quester and puts that into his games. A life quester is someone who looks at life in an exploratory way and does not separate it from his work. The best entertainers are life questers.

An example of this would be Miyamoto trying to get fit and weighing himself. The idea of using weight scales for a game is so… insane at first glance. The biggest problem I am observing with game makers is they are not emotionally there.

Intellectually, they understand gaming. They can quote me various systems. But emotionally, they are very cold. But after dying, the game restarts from the exact same starting-point.

And it happens to everyone very quickly. This stage is very, very simple. When he passes it, he will advance to a more complex challenge. Step Three: What Next? Affordance is the name of the game here well, Mario, really. Is there a text to explain that?

No need. Later there are pipes, and the player understands that he can enter them. The coins also convey the message that they can be picked up and the plants that can be climbed. Today these things are clear to us as players, but Shigeru was the first to implement them.

Step four: A necessary discovery After raising a question mark, a mushroom comes out of it and walks toward the player. Is it good? But Shigeru has planned it so that we cannot jump over it, and against our will we run into it, learning that it makes Mario grow.

This is another alternative to a series of explanations in the instructions. Step five: What is difficult in training will become easy in a battle Later in the game there will be holes that will disqualify the player if Mario falls into them.

But just before the first hole, there is a fictitious hole. The user can practice the jump over it without risking falling and disqualification:. Shigeru was also a involved in composing the music for the games he designed. He felt that he could not design anything without being involved in the overall experience.

Okay, so Shigeru created original and fun things, but what can we take away from here? User-oriented design : Do we really know who will use our product? What state is our product in? How simple is it for the user? Is it possible to simplify it further? Creating pleasure : Will the user feel progress over the course of the game? Will he have a clear goal? Are there surprises waiting for him on the way?

Learning from parallel worlds : Have we sought to live only in worlds similar to our product? What other worlds are dealing with similar problems? When did we, as designers, last leave the screen and look at the world around us? Learning curve : When you first enter our product, do you easily understand what to do?

How do we hide as many interruptions as possible, so that the user will hardly feel that he is learning anything?

And how will we help him throughout the process? Holistic user experience : Does the user go through experiences we have not touched? Have we noticed, for example, sound and load speed?

All the design inspiration you need. It's like crack for designers. And good for you too! Sign in. Ariel Elboim Follow. Games are made with love or not at all. Nintendo has denied he's doing any sort of stepping down or retiring whatsoever.

Still, it's always nice to pay tribute to the greats, so this shall stay! Sure, you can argue, he hasn't had the hands-on role with the company he once had, and hasn't been at the helm of a hit title for a long time, but does that matter when you've got a track record as long and distinguished as Miyamoto's? So let's take a look at that track record.

Partly to let it soak in just how damn important this man has been to Nintendo and video games! Before we jump in, know that this isn't every game he's worked on. The nature of Nintendo's development structure means sorting the game's he has actually had a serious part in and those he's just made the odd creative decision on is tough.

So we're sticking to the big ones.