Shigeru Miyamoto Wants to Create a Kinder World

The legendary designer on rejecting violence in games, trying to be a good boss, and building Nintendo’s Disneyland.


https://www.newyorker.com/culture/th...a-kinder-world


There’s a story about you that’s been widely shared recently. It’s about the Nintendo 64 game Goldeneye, which was based on the James Bond film. The game’s director, Martin Hollis, told me that, when you first tested the game, you expressed sadness at the number of people Bond shoots down, and suggested to him that, during the end credits, he make the player visit each victim in their hospital bed. It’s a sweet story that says something about who you are, and what you believe games should be. How do you feel about the fact that the medium has come to be dominated by guns and shooting?

I think humans are wired to experience joy when we throw a ball and hit a target, for example. That’s human nature. But, when it comes to video games, I have some resistance to focussing on this single source of pleasure. As human beings, we have many ways to experience fun. Ideally, game designers would explore those other ways. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that there are studios that really home in on that simple mechanic, but it’s not ideal to have everybody doing it just because that kind of game sells well. It would be great if developers found new ways to elicit joy in their players.

Beyond that, I also resist the idea that it’s O.K. to simply kill all monsters. Even monsters have a motive, and a reason for why they are the way they are. This is something I have thought about a lot. Say you have a scene in which a battleship sinks. When you look at it from the outside, it might be a symbol of victory in battle. But a filmmaker or writer might shift perspective to the people on the ship, to enable the viewer to see, close up, the human impact of the action. It would be great if video-game makers took more steps to shift the perspective, instead of always viewing a scene from the most obvious angle.