l-dopa

not pictured: dignity
There’s a great interview with Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto here where he answers the question on every gamer’s mind: do I have to jump around like a silly giraffe when I play a Nintendo Wii game?:

I think what’s really important is to think of how the player feels while they’re playing. For instance, with the Tennis games, you don’t necessarily have to do big swinging motions to play it, you can actually make just very simple motions; you could even just tap the controller back and forth on your hand and still execute the actions on the screen. But in fact for most players getting a good swing in and actually playing the game with those sweeping motions is a lot more fun. Simultaneously, something else that we’ve tried to think of is, as we’re creating the games is does the game look like it’s fun to play when you see someone else playing it? I think that’s very important, this idea of when other people are looking at the player are they being encouraged to actually try and play the game as well. And so really it’s a balance between these two, and I think that’s something we’ll be working on going forward.

UPDATE: Monkey Ball.

~jeff