Shigeru Miyamoto describes Nintendo's wife-a-meter

SHIGERU MIYAMOTO gave one of the more interesting keynotes I have heard, not because he said anything astoundingly new, but because he said it in a personal an rarely seen way. Shigeru tied the game development and overall Nintendo strategy into his personal life.

He touched on three separate goals of Nintendo, expand the audience, balance and risk. The main tool to view these things, his wife, or more importantly, the Wife-O-Meter. It doesn't take a genius at game design to figure out where this is going.

The first thing is expanding the audience, and it has some interesting things already done. In 1998, the world was very different from that of 2004, the top video games of 1998 were Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Gran Turismo, Banjo Kazooie and Super Mario 64. Can you see any patterns here? They are games for gamers.

Forward to 2004 and the same list is GTA: San Andreas, Madden 2005, Halo 2, Halo 2 Limited Edition and ESPN NFL 2K5. See a difference? A lot less hardcore gamer games and a lot more mass appeal games. The 2004 list is also a lot more on the violent side than 1998, but the audience is wider.

Shigeru lamented that people were suddenly seeing games as bad and violent when the majority of them were not. Industry sales were skyrocketing while its reputation was dropping just as fast. Clearly something had to be done.

That brings us to the first of the three Nintendo philosophical goals - expanding the audience. It does you no good to expand the audience while people are hating you. Shigeru's wife initially would not play games whether or not he designed them. His goal of appealing to people from five to 95 clearly was not met here, the Wife-O-Meter read low.

With games like Tetris, his wife would not play any games at all. Once he started bringing home titles like Animal Crossing, his wife watched their daughter play, and was slowly sucked in. Once Brain Age came out, she ended up playing it and becoming a gamer. Recently, he came home late from work and heard the Wii being played. When he looked into it, it was not his wife busying herself waiting for him to get home, she was sucked in.

With the Wife-O-Meter topped off, it was time for the next goal, something that Sony seems to have badly missed, Nintendo is devoted to gaming. It calls this devotion balance, and as you know, an unbalanced game is rarely fun.

Nintendo does not worry about promoting the latest disk standard, wiring in the latest gizmo, or supporting a new tool, it just makes games. It also doesn't make games in a vacuum, all of the company participates. Everyone is in the same building, and there is a lot of cross-pollination.

This collaborative effort was shown in the design of the Wiimote, it went from a diamondish Gamecube++ controller through a host of changes. It wasn't until the end that the remote control ideas and the form factors gelled together, and even that took a lot of people.

In the end, you didn't have 300 people figuring out how to add in the latest DRM infection or blue laser, just people making good games. To balance them out, you had people making hardware to support those good games.

The last item is risk. Nintendo sees the challenge of any upcoming console as a risk, if you don't take risks, you will never meet the challenge. If you haven't noticed, the Wii is full of ideas that even up until it was launched were considered high risk.

Anyone who says they knew the Wiimote was a slam dunk before launch day is probably lying, it was a bet the company made. Just the idea of moving gaming from a 'two hands on a controller' model to a one handed model is a massive risk, remote or not.

Once the console debuted at E3 last year, it was obvious that the risks had paid off. People loved it, his wife and daughter played the Wii, and in general they had hit the mark. They had taken risks, achieved a balance, and expanded the demographic. It looks like Nintendo hit the mark that Shigeru Miyamoto was aiming for. µ