[-empyre-] Punk and Games, messages by Julian and Gabriel

[Daniel Cook]

>
> This is quite a western angle on games - don't forget Nintendo. They
> consistently show that the way forward is to make games for the rest of
> us. Despite taking this to the bank in recent years (3 times more DS's
> out there than iphones for example) their methods seem heretical in the
> bro-world (not heard that term before - I like it).
>

Nintendo fits quite nicely into this particular simplification of history.
 If you look at the culture and management team running Nintendo, they tend
to hearken back to the 80's and 90's...Miyamoto and Iwata are developers who
learned their aesthetic sense of what games should be during the frontier
days of the industry.   According to the tale above, we should see the
following:

   - Such creators are denigrated when attempting to join the emerging bro
   culture: See Gamecube.  You could make a very solid argument that Xbox was
   an attempt to identity and crystallize the emerging hardcore demographic as
   a ploy to create a wedge between Nintendo and their loyal fans. The roots go
   back further, but I tend to place the shift from a partially open frontier
   to a closed frontier right about the time of the PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox.  I
   should dig up Microsoft's public strategy discussions of this very point.
   - When the creators stay true to their frontiersman roots, they find
   success in new markets, not old.  The DS and Wii are wonderful examples of
   this business strategy having great synergy with the company's culture
   values as game creators.

The current plight of the general Japanese developer who lacks the war chest
of Nintendo is also of note.  They failed to make the transition to the
western-centric bro culture that dominates much of modern console gaming.
 As a result, they've been marginalized. They have the genetics, but the
past decade has inflicted so many ills that on the talent base, they may not
make it.

take care
Danc.


I'm a subscriber to the theory that "casual games" as the bro-centric
> world call them, are what computer games have really always been about.
>
> cheers,
>
> dave
>
>
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