Max Nichols

It's a shame that few or none of his (apparently 15+) books have English translations

www.goodreads.com/author/list/...

ほぼ日 - TOP 糸井重里が主宰するウェブサイト。1998年６月６日創刊以来、一日も休まず更新しています。糸井重里の日替わりエッセイ「今日のダーリン」／有名無名を問わずたくさんのゲストが登場するコンテンツ／「ほぼ日手帳」などのグッズも発売中。

Of course, the man has been posting interviews on his website almost every day for decades. He's literally a professional conversationalist. Very good at digging deep.

www.1101.com

Itoi: With Giygas in MOTHER… I feel like we could have refined him so much more, but… well, it's out there now. Miyamoto: I know. I really wanted to give it one more shot, right at the very end. Itoi: For that final form, I'd actually given instructions for it to be like Butoh, that "dance of darkness." Something incredibly frail... like if they were right there in front of you, you'd feel like they'd collapse if you barely touched them. Eerie and beautiful… but that's easier said than done, right? (laughs) Itou: That sounds… hard. (laughs) Itoi: I wanted to depict the terror of the weak. But man, it was tough.

Itoi: Ambiguous boundaries are the key. You can say that about anything, like virtual worlds, that draw upon the power of our imagination. Put an unusual way, I think that ambiguous world is like the Otherworld. We live in this world that we think is the real one, so if something from over there enters here, this world becomes unstable. That is at times frightening, at times thrilling. Iwata: Ahh, the boundaries break down. We can relax only when there are proper boundary lines. Itoi: Right, right. People long ago always existed in an unstable world. In other words, to people in the time of the Tale of Genji, there really were ghosts. Iwata :Uh-huh. Itoi: But maybe that's not something to talk about here. Iwata: No, it's interesting. (laughs) Itoi: Takaaki Yoshimoto says that, a long time ago, things were comprehended far less clearly, and that many things were not clearly delineated. With regard to questions like whether gods or ghosts existed, we can never relate to people in the past as long as we try to apply modern thinking. Rather, they must have existed in a more ambiguous frame of mind, he said. For example, if you're walking down the street at night and you feel like you hear someone following you, someone today would just think it was his or her imagination, but people in the Heian Period, couldn't be sure of that.

I always tag quotes in the @hyruleinterviews.bsky.social database with topics like "Characters", "Mechanics", etc.

Any interview with Itoi in it inevitably gets me wondering if I need to add topics like "Philosophy", "nature of creativity", or "ghosts" xD

iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3...

Itoi: I heard from Famicom Tsushin that no game has sold 200,000 copies this year. —It feels like everything's been released already, and there's really very little that I want to buy. Itoi: We're in a transitional period. In a way, it feels like the whole industry is just letting out a long sigh of frustration. We have these established genres—adventure, sports, shooting—and they form the core foundations, but there's this huge, collective desire right now for "one more" new genre to breathe life back into the room. —But the current trend seems to be combining shooters with RPGs, and doesn't that feel a bit... off?

If I asked you right now what year this quote was from, would you have EVER guessed 1989? xD

shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/

Color Grave does not miss

So by bizdev, you mean stuff like meeting with potential outsourcing partners, loc companies, marketing firms you want to hire to market your game, stuff like that?

The book is from 2009, but this was actually Iwata recounting some thinking from before they made the Wii and DS — which means it’s from 2002-2004 timeframe!

I think us squeezing our "leisure" into tinier and tinier chunks of time is a testament to humanity's ability to thrive in terrible circumstances, not because of any inherent quality of playing mobile games in 5-minute increments on the toilet at work, or on the bus commuting to work

PEOPLE: - Satoru Iwata, age 49. President of Nintendo. QUOTE: Iwata: We did a lot of thinking and investigating, but no matter how we looked at it, fewer people were playing games [in the early 2000s]. It wasn’t that children weren’t playing games any more—but they were graduating from them earlier. It used to be that they’d come home early and have plenty if time to play, but that time had disappeared from society as a whole. The result of all our hard work on making wonderful games was that people without the time and energy to devote to them were just saying ‘heck with it’ and walking away. The more we investigated this, the more severe we realized the problem was.

I think you're completely right. This was already a trend that was affecting games as far back as 2002-2004. Noticing this trend was in fact the initial impetus behind the Wii.

A screenshot from Super Mario Bros 2. It shows Toad, holding a key above his head, in a small room. There are four creepy Masks affixed to the walls, and a fifth creepy mask is mid-flight, about to hit Toad.

Not to be confused with the other terrifying flying face of more terrestrial origin

Too bad he was a genocidal monster

I backed off from that because while a subset of what marketing does could rightfully be called game design, it has a lot of other goals and priorities separate from that. So it feels incorrect to me now to say that the discipline is GD.

Of course, some decisions, like choice of IP or association with past works of a brand or company, can set expectations more powerfully than any marketing can overcome.

And not just in a "man I wish they marketed good" way. I mean in a "personally training your marketing teams on the design pillars" and "giving targeted, specific feedback on the details of marketing campaigns" kinda way.

I'm no longer quite on board with my old opinion that marketing IS game design, but I do think that marketing is _extremely important_ to the game experience, and thus designers should care about how their game is marketed a LOT.

Just thinking about this again these past two days

The exact same game can succeed or fail based on whether the people jumping in are getting the game they expected

A lot of the wrong players -- players that won't like it -- jumping in to play is really gonna color perception of that game.

There is a tiny little stool with four bronze legs. The stool is round with a green cloth cover. The top of the stool seat if off, revealing a hidden storage chamber. Instead sits a white cat, almost perfectly filling the space. He is cute.

I set it down nearby in the donate pile and was like “wait a sec…”

Whoa! I had no idea you had scanned these in the first place!

Well fucking done

Ah I didn’t realize you were already a Fromsoft history an expert! I’d have worded that initial post differently at least.

I haven’t actually played any of their pre-Dark Souls stuff, quotes like this make me want to

"By the time we got to KFII, the game was much larger, and we agonized over the world design. The biggest struggle with King's Field II was not being able to capture the atmosphere of the first game. "What exactly is ‘atmosphere’?", we asked ourselves. The first King's Field was very rough in terms of graphic quality, but I think it had more atmosphere as a game. By KFII we had more know-how and could create prettier graphics, but conversely, that made it look too polished--they looked like graphics created in a program rather than organic parts of a natural environment."

Maybe even intentional, hahah. By King's Field 2 the dev team was already talking about how the new visuals were too polished

shmuplations.com/kingsfield/

It looks like most Destiny 2 expansions still do not have credits btw, and they don't take correction unless someone has previously submitted the full set of credits. So nobody has credit for things like Beyond Light, Forsaken, etc.

(let alone the seasons)

This conversation made me realize that there is anothr game designer named "Max Nichols" and somebody at Mobygames gave me credit for a game they worked on. Whoops! Just sent in a correction for that one, lol

You can, I’ve submitted images and links and stuff to my mobygames page. And I’ve also submitted credits of games I worked on.

That makes a ton of sense, love it

There is sooo much to unpack there, lol. From the patriarchalism to the colonialism to the hubris of it all. I was just a 21-year-old excited to get paid to make minigames.

But one lesson I did learn: huh, people really, REALLY like and think about their soap operas, and they are a serious medium

When I was in college I worked on a UN-funded football game that was attempting to combat violence against women in South Africa using the “Sabido Methodology”. That method was developed by someone in mexico who used radio soap operas to try, essentially, to humanize women

Anyways, soap operas really have a hell of a lot to teach anyone who wants to do episodic storytelling, IMO, and are probably badly under-represented in lists of places that game devs draw inspiration or lessons from.

(and there were external forces kinda making me mow at all, I was inclined to leave it alone otherwise)

And then my neighbor did my a "favor" by leafblowing the leaves her tree had dropped on my yard, which I had every intention of leaving there, lol

Can't escape it.

I lacked the bandwidth to mow my lawn last summer (or the greater bandwidth to replace with real native growth), so I hired a service. The contract had them coming every 2wk... for like, 2months longer than needed.

Drove me mad to have mowers on a lawn that hadn't grown since the last time