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Nintendo is well known for making some games like this too. It's a bunch of cool tech and physical controllers generating new interaction models, and game desig

by inerte 7y ago

Nintendo is well known for making some games like this too. It's a bunch of cool tech and physical controllers generating new interaction models, and game designers stretching that as far as they can, sometimes cohesively as a full game sometimes a collage of mini-games.

derefr 7y ago
Some Nintendo games are definitely explorations of their own novel input methods; and also, earlier on, explorations of the possibilities of the console’s fancy custom hardware features. (Whether you got one or the other often depended on whether the software/product department, or the hardware/R&D department, was responsible for the game’s design—the product folks [Nintendo EAD] tended to push for the inclusions of novel input methods on new hardware designs, so they built games around those; while the R&D folks were more intimately familiar with the more “gimmicky” hardware features they had included into new console designs, and so only they really understood what could be done with them, until they demonstrated it to the world and to the other departments with a tech-demo game.) But I would say that, most of the time, Nintendo (and similar allied shops like HAL and Intelligent Systems) just invent novel game mechanics out of thin air, then ask how the player should interact with those mechanics; they make the interaction with the mechanic as a prototype, and playtest it on its own; and then, if that turns out to be fun, they wrap a game around that. This is why, for example, the Paper Mario series looks the way it does. Nintendo + Intelligent Systems both agree that you can’t just take the same mechanics and make a new game, even if the mechanics you came up with the first time were really good. They already explored the possibility-space of those mechanics as well as they could manage in the first game!

by inerte 7y ago

derefr 7y ago

Some Nintendo games are definitely explorations of their own novel input methods; and also, earlier on, explorations of the possibilities of the console’s fancy custom hardware features. (Whether you got one or the other often depended on whether the software/product department, or the hardware/R&D department, was responsible for the game’s design—the product folks [Nintendo EAD] tended to push for the inclusions of novel input methods on new hardware designs, so they built games around those; while the R&D folks were more intimately familiar with the more “gimmicky” hardware features they had included into new console designs, and so only they really understood what could be done with them, until they demonstrated it to the world and to the other departments with a tech-demo game.) But I would say that, most of the time, Nintendo (and similar allied shops like HAL and Intelligent Systems) just invent novel game mechanics out of thin air, then ask how the player should interact with those mechanics; they make the interaction with the mechanic as a prototype, and playtest it on its own; and then, if that turns out to be fun, they wrap a game around that. This is why, for example, the Paper Mario series looks the way it does. Nintendo + Intelligent Systems both agree that you can’t just take the same mechanics and make a new game, even if the mechanics you came up with the first time were really good. They already explored the possibility-space of those mechanics as well as they could manage in the first game!