Wisdom that doesn't come with old age

 So Mr. Nintendo is now a "liability".

 Whoever this Malstrom guy is, he clearly just emerged from under some rock. This has been common knowledge now for quite a long time. Sure, the Wii took off and he wasn't considered to have lost all his marbles at the system's launch, but he was not exactly hiding the fact that he was on the downhill spiral.

 I'll give partial credit, only because this observation is partially correct, though extremely late, and the community needs to be reminded of this. It's not that we hate Nintendo. We don't. As gamers, we get excited when someone at least makes an attempt at innovation. Even if it goes the way of the Virtual Boy, an idea that could change games is always welcome. Microsoft and Sony have projects of their own based on Nintendo's exploration of new control schemes, so they didn't exactly create a one-time gimmick. Let's also not forget that even an idiotic concept like attaching a vibrator to your controller actually became pure industry standard awesome. Some ideas just need to get thrown out there, and Nintendo has proven it is willing to put some money on the line in making sure games evolve.

 If gaming had a Pantheon, Shigeru Miyamoto is certainly towards the top. This is a guy whose mere thoughts have profited Nintendo by billions. With the Wii's success, he had even more influence on what random ideas could be brought to the table, but the trouble is that his inspirations are getting a little strange.

 Go to your local GameStop and check out the clutter that is the Wii's game wall. While I understand that the "hardcore" crowd looks for a certain type of game you're usually not going to find there, there is still a lack of generally good games on display. For every game worth your time like MLB Power Pros, Twilight Princess, or Boom Blox, you're going to find hundreds more titles like Hell's Kitchen that have no place in anyone's home. The sad part is that, in essence, Miyamoto wanted this to happen.

 The simple things in life that inspired Miyamoto to make such classics as The Legend of Zelda are the exact things killing him now. Wii Music might not have been high up on anyone's "must have" list, but at least it was an inspired idea that just didn't pan out so well.  Yet, instead of learning that there needed to be a little more solid groundwork before everyone decided it was a good idea to make a game about everyday life, he continued to champion the concepts, giving rise to the clutter of bad cooking games you find on shelves today. In interviews, he still tries to get across that his plan is to make games about things no one else would make a game about, like walking a dog.

 Face it, your gaming God is starting to lose touch in some ways. Miyamoto is getting old, and is not the same type of gamer we are. When it comes to creating IPs, Mr. Nintendo is throwing some strange stuff out there, and it's not the kind of idea list supporters want to see conjoined with two horrendous E3's. Love him all you want, but Nintendo has a recent track record of being unimpressive and stale. Maybe this climate is shaping the way I personally view the guy, but he's starting to sound like some old guy spouting crackpot business scheme while hopped up on painkillers.

 Now, to his defense.

 Under no circumstances should this man retire for all of the same things I just spoke about. Miyamoto still gives one hell of an interview, proving every time that he knows the challenges in game design. He's not running on a 100% success rate, but neither did Michael Jordan. There are some people you can hear speak about their craft for hours, and Miyamoto is almost like the Bill Clinton of video games. When this man speaks, everything makes sense. Reading his latest interview at IGN, you can tell that he just "gets it", whether you're sold on his products or not. He's not a bullshitter, unlike Peter Molyneux, and expressed desires and imagination with great realism when it comes to design and the market.

 For every crazy idea the man has had, someone like Atlus will make a game such as Trauma Center to prove  that he wasn't off his rocker about how fun the concepts could be. Yes, user generated content (UGC) sounds like a completely lame idea at the moment, but he's not seeing it the way you and I are. What do we visualize when UGC is brought up? We think of the people designing levels for the Source engine and how many of them look like a second-grader whipped out those giant building blocks. We think of the glut of LittleBigPlanet levels and how most of them wind up being crap. Some Mario ROMhacks out there might even convince you that the only thing users could possibly create by themselves is a politically incorrect character swap for laughs.

 UGC goes way beyond what you're used to. Someone had to design those courses in Mario games, so this Malstrom guy clearly doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Just take a look at a homebrew Metroid project, AM2R. While everybody likes clinging to official releases as skill benchmark, getting original is what rocks about gaming. Sure, the man brings to mind IP rinse-and-repeats, but he's missing the big picture. UGC is exactly what will drive the future of gaming. Two counter-points to his argument:

 MMO's can benefit, and have benefited in the past, from UGC. The developers can only do so much with a gaming world. Barring a supercomputer driven, actual size, randomly generated planetary model of a planet (more on that in another post), these guys don't have the time to create every step you walk on in the MMO world. Some teams do, but if LOTRO taught us anything, it's that world-creation takes time. City of Heroes/City of Villains gave users the opportunity to modify their own super-hangout, and while it sounds gimmicky and unimportant, it's a step in the right direction. If Blizzard decided to give you a plot of land to build a World of Warcraft farm on, then that's a plot of land that you have the opportunity to make worthy of being included in their gaming world. It brings the users closer to the creators and expands the setting of the published game beyond what it was meant to. While it's true that if this happened, 90% of the plots would suck, but the idea alone is something that could potentially work while moving the genre forward at the same time.

 My second example is something I've already talked about: making gamers care. An extension of personality is not something to be taken lightly. You could be getting tea-bagged on a battlefield as a form of "expression", or you could be feeding the evolving machine. Computers operate on a set of rules that we, as a species, have moved way beyond. It's only natural that computer must break down these walls in some way, however small, to advance the relationship that users have with their software.

 For that matter, I also get a little steamed when people bash Nintendo's "guide" experiment. The idea is that the game will have a hint system built into the game so that entry level, or even advanced players, can get a bit of a clue that will help them complete a game. How is this a bad idea? I understand the fear fans have of being spoon fed, but get a clue; you're already babied. I had a hint book for King's Quest IV that used the red cellophane "revealer", strategy guides have been around for decades, and the second GameFAQs went online there wasn't even a need to buy those. Walkthroughs and guides have been around as long as gaming and they've evolved, too. Giving you the convenience to skip a step is common sense and just plain inevitable. Do what I did for Uncharted if you're so up in arms over the idea: turn the hints off. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit