the ontology of gamers

last week was the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which generated vast amounts of blog-worthy news. i'll get to the backlog over the coming week, starting with some interesting insights from Miyamoto Shigeru - creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and head of game design at Nintendo.

Miyamoto-san gave one of the keynote presentations at GDC, and although he didn't introduce any new games or product, he nevertheless stole the show. Most notably, from the perspective of this blog, were his comments on his measure of the likely success for a game, which he referred to as the wifeometer - a measure of the likely interest of his wife in any game he creates. He described her as having no interest in Mario or Pacman or Tetris, and only grudging interest in Zelda - and only then because her daughter was playing it. However, the breakthrough came with Nintendogs, Nintendo's dog training simulation game, and Brain Age, their 'brain training' game:

I was watching our dog friends and my wife, I thought maybe if we could get these people and turn them into game players, if we could interest them, we could expand the user base, there were elements too of dog training that I thought I could turn into a videogame. So when I showed her Nintendogs, she finally saw a different perspective.

Then game Brain Age. This has turned her into a true gamer. She has accepted games as part of her daily life. She understands the unique interactive entertainment found in games. And today we have a Wii in our house.

...

This is the second version of Brain Age. It has a mini Mario game in it. Now my wife comes to me and says, I can beat you at this game, anytime. She’s bragging! To me! Looking at her scores, she’s right. She turned into a hardcore gamer much faster than I expected. Wifeometer has shot up dramatically. So there it is. Now she’s playing Wii sports. Not only that, she invites our friends over to play Wii sports.

source

Far be for me to think that adding my own opinion to Myamoto-sans's in any way increases his credibility, but he is entirely correct: the compelling feature that sells more games is not 'bringing gaming to users in different ways'; it is 'converting non-gamers into gamers'. and non-gamers are not non-gamers simply because they can't get access to games in the form or delivery system they wish - they're non-gamers because games don't speak to their lives.

Making it possible for them to receive games in different manners, or binding the game delivery system to a home entertainment system, or delivering games in ever higher definition, in and of themselves are of no consequence - it is the gameplay, and the game itself that needs to change in order to transform non-gamers into gamers such that, like Miyamoto-san's oba-san, they become gamers.