I went out of my way to play games I didn't like or find interesting. Those ended up being a lot more informative for me. At home, I have literally thousands of games, and I think of them as pearls of wisdom from my predecessors.

I think that the entertainment industry itself has a history of chasing success. Any time a hit product comes out, all the other companies start chasing after that success and trying to recreate it by putting out similar products.

I think what i've also learned, is that doing Kickstarter and Steam Early Access before you've got something which is defined and playable is a hugely risky undertaking that can be very destructive to the final quality of the game.

I sleep 12 hours and then work 24 hours. I've worked those irregular hours for the past three years. It's better to stay up day and night to come up with ideas. I usually get inspiration for game designing by working this schedule.

What's more important is that the monsters are controllable by the players.Pikachu is like the name of the species. But each player can name their own Pikachu. So kids can relate to it more. They get more attached to them that way.

Where 'Dragon Quest Monsters' originated from was 'Dragon Quest V,' where you had a monster befriending system as a main part: you could actually befriend monsters and have them fight on behalf of your party, as part of your party.

I don't think we should have sex in games. But I think we should have the right to have it. We should have the full range of human experience. It's an art form like any other art form. For me, that's the importance of preserving it.

We think we want enjoyment, and that enjoyment is incompatible with work, and somehow we have to import the pleasure into these miserable experiences. That takes for granted that there's not fun or play to be found in the work itself.

Using a mouse, keyboard or gamepad make my arm tired, so I can't use them in a continual manner. The only device I can use for an extended period of time is a joystick. It's posing problems when I'm test-playing something in progress.

Imagine if you're playing at home and your girlfriend is badgering you all the time not to play. Wouldn't it be great to have a game you could play with her? Because then you can carry on playing the game and not get beaten up for it.

The only thing I insist that everybody do is there has to be a basketball court in every game I do, and - with one exception, I let them get away with it once - you can actually shoot a ball through the basket in every game I've made.

People are satisfied with making minor upgrades and tweaking things here and there - as long as that's the landscape, it will keep on happening. I don't see a problem necessarily, but at the same time it is nice to see new things come.

I am tremendously excited to introduce a unique 'Metal Gear Solid' experience to a new audience of gamers as well as collaborate with my mentor in game design, Mr. Miyamoto, on 'Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes' for Nintendo GameCube.

When parents want you to do really well academically, they want to avoid you getting into anything that would distract you - you know, rock and roll music, or really serious, long novels that you get so absorbed in, you forget to study.

We all know the place you're in has a big impact on how you feel. How you feel has an impact on the quality of work. Why wouldn't we put a lot of effort into making the place we work as efficient and productive and pleasant as possible?

Dude, I turn into a six-year-old when I come to Disneyland. It's amazing. My eyes glass over and my blood pressure goes down. I'm just like everybody else. I turn into a big kid when I come here. It's the happiest place on earth, right?

What I like about Kickstarter is it helps games that people want to play still get made, even if you don't pump $20 million dollars into it to try and meet all the stupid bells and whistles that publishers feel must be in games nowadays.

It was an amazing thing to see how Bowerstone, the capital of 'Fable,' progressed. It went from, in 'Fable 1,' to just 20 houses and then in 'Fable 3' it felt like a city that had districts. You could see that sense of progression in it.

With 'Black and White 2,' I want to put it in a setting where you're actually using the creature. I want the little people within the land not to just be a resource but actually be in conflict and fighting and battling against each other.

For 'Journey' to create a sense of smallness and a sense of awe will encourage the players to be together and exchange emotions. When you put the two players together online and put them in a difficult environment, they will create a bond.

If you immerse yourself too single-mindedly in your chosen art form whether it's video games, movies, comics or whatever, your work can easily become just a reflection of what others are doing in that field rather than breaking new ground.

What I can say now about paid DLC is that we aren't working on anything at the moment. We've put all our efforts into making the actual game. Creating DLC would involve large additional costs and require the involvement of a lot of people.

What I find the most interesting about games is the feeling of accomplishment. I think this is an emotion that cinema can't do and books can't do. You feel like you've personally accomplished something. You feel you get better at something.

I appreciate the sentiment that I am a popular woman in computer gaming circles; but I prefer being thought of as a computer game designer rather than a woman computer game designer. I don't put myself into gender mode when designing a game.

From a gameplay standpoint, I've said for years that hero, fiction, and tone have nothing to do with the idea that choices have consequences. And that's really what I'm interested in. I care about you showing how clever and creative you are.

It seems like it has kind of taken off where people are saying 'oh it's a female character' and it just kind of grew. But my intent in saying that was humour. You know, you have to show Link when you create a trailer for a Zelda announcement.

Up until now, the biggest question in society about video games has been what to do about violent games. But it's almost like society in general considers video games to be something of a nuisance, that they want to toss into the garbage can.

I've got a PowerPoint deck that I use for internal presentations, and there's a slide on it that asks, 'What percentage of your game is combat versus exploration versus puzzle solving versus platforming,' and I refuse to answer that question.

When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.

Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

Today, the era has changed. Everybody is indie now. Everybody making a random stupid mobile app is essentially indie, because they make it at home; they make it through Unity, and there are so many of them. We don't recognize everybody anymore.

I’m not so sure that the conventional wisdom makes any sense. Yes, it might be technically easy to track people and all that. But in the long-term I’m optimistic that we’ll see the pendulum swing back in the other direction towards more privacy.

When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket.

Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.

Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.

You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?

In any game, you have an enemy coming at yourself that you have to shoot. If you go back to 'Space Invaders,' they shoot at you when they come at you, so how are you going to protect yourself? You're going to shoot, and that is a typical videogame.

Of course, when it comes to Japanese role-playing games, in any role-playing game in Japan you're supposed to collect a huge number of items, and magic, and you've got to actually combine different items together to make something really different.

If we're going to reach a broader audience, we have to stop thinking about that audience strictly in terms of teenage boys or even teenage girls. We need to think about things that are relevant to normal humans and not just the geeks we used to be.

When I was a child, there really weren't very many video games, but I do have memories of 'Pong.' Maybe it was 'Pong.' It was a home system in Japan, so maybe it wasn't the real 'Pong.' It was just sort of a Japanese game that was similar to 'Pong.'

I've made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don't affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don't. It's demonstrably true that they don't, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking.

Once we can do Pixar-quality graphics rendered in real time with interactivity, I could see games costing $200 million to make, and all of a sudden you have to sell a lot of games just to break even, so I'm a little worried someone's going to do that.

The biggest was me running Lionhead at its peak. That was about 305 people. I'd say that was, for me as a creative, one of the most hellish times of my life. Normally running a team is like herding cats. This was like herding the entire African plains.

The linear design of FFXIII had a great advantage in providing players with enough time to become familiarized with the new battle system and the unique world. But on the other hand, it led to players feeling like the majority of the game was a tutorial.

I don't want to criticize any other designers, but I have to say that many of the people involved in this industry - directors and producers - are trying to make their games more like movies. They are longing to make movies rather than making videogames.

Throughout the Zelda series I've always tried to make players feel like they are in a kind of miniature garden. So, this time also, my challenge was how to make people feel comfortable and sometimes very scared at the same time. That is the big challenge.

Is it OK for Amazon to know every word of every book you've read? Are you comfortable with that? Maybe you are. Is it OK to let everybody know you eat Corn Flakes? OK, but then there are certain products you might not want people to know that you're using.

Providing accurate portrayals of characters is something I want to pay ample attention to. If I don’t stick to that thought, then we’d have to lower the quality or break the balance of the game. Something that goes way off spec could break the entire game.

I want my little corner of the world where I get to make games where you're not trying to win or lose; you're not trying to get a higher score - you are having unbelievable amounts of fun as you learn about yourself and the world. That's what games can do!

Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals.

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