Attention to detail, like most facets of truly good design, can’t be (and never is) added later. It’s an entire development philosophy, methodology, and culture.

–Marco.org - We don’t question the power of the OS, but the…

The New Yorker has an in-depth profile with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto which is worth a read (all-in-one page here).

Overall, I’d call it a positive piece, although the tone veers between patronising and sincere. A few other things I want to comment on, in no particular order:

Fishermen have a saying, in reference to the addictive sensation of a fish hitting your line: “The tug is the drug.”

So when can we expect the Panorama episode on fishing?

this is called “gamification,” or, more gratingly, “funware”

Seriously? “Funware” is more grating than that other word? Good grief. I’ll save my rant on this for another time.

games are typically considered to be commercial products, rather than creative works; consider the fact that game titles, unlike the names of, say, movies or songs, appear in most newspapers and magazines, including this one, un-italicized

This bugs me, almost as much as it bugs me that the Guardian Gamesblog is in the ‘Technology’ section. However, this line clues us into why the industry is approached this way:

There aren’t very many video-game auteurs, but Miyamoto is one.

and this quote from Miyamoto towards the end of the article nails it:

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell, from the looks and the play of the games, who has created the software.”

Most games companies take the Walt Disney approach, and create everything from behind one brand. There’s nothing wrong with that. And it’s not the oft- lamented lack of ‘auteurs’ or ‘personalities’ that’s causing the problem here either.

It’s a lack of distinctiveness, and not just in terms of the central character. Note that Miyamoto mentions both ‘looks’ and ‘play’.

The problem is that you (or, at least, I) can very rarely tell which company is responsible for a game. Off the top of my head, if I was to do a play test on a range of games from various creators, I think I’d probably only be able to identify a Valve game, a Denki game and, yes, a Nintendo game. Maybe a PopCap game.

Writers, filmmakers and musicians often talk about ‘finding their voice’, the distinctive tone or mood or themes that marks their creations out from the hundreds of others. I think many game creators still have a way to go to find their voice. And until games show greater diversity of theme and mood and tone, it’s difficult to provide a compelling argument they deserve ‘creative work’ status.

Anyway, asides aside, there are loads of great design tips in the article, too many to quote here, so just go and read it. I’ll just end with this comment from Will Wright on Miyamoto:

“He approaches the games playfully, which seems kind of obvious, but most people don’t. And he approaches things from the players’ point of view, which is part of his magic.”

So lets say I’ll attack three or four scenes, and what I’ll do is I’ll write a draft and hand it in to Lee the director and he’ll go, ‘eh, X, Y and Z.’ So then I go back and I’ll go through that very small two-person feedback loop for five or six passes, basically, until Lee finally goes, ‘OK, I think that’s it.’

–Michael Arndt Digs Into Toy Story 3 and the Genius of the Pixar System - Thompson on Hollywood

ScottishGames.net has a nice little post about another iPhone app I made that came out earlier this week. This time, a tie-in with Gary: Tank Commander.

Featuring a range of soundboards, almost guaranteed to confuse non-Scots, with classic clips from Gary (Gary McLintoch) himself, alongside ‘Gary’s Mystic Ball’ in which the hero of the show provides helpful advice and answers to questions, in the same manner as a Magic 8-Ball, but with an eerie Scottish twist.

So far, so good on the ratings front: 4 out of 5. And if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you should totally download it. It’s free, so it’s not like you have anything to lose.

Remember when I said this?

To anyone who thinks that Android is somehow “better” for developers, you’ve clearly blanked out/weren’t around for the first ten years of mobile games development.

Rovio explain why:

We are aware that a number of our fans have had trouble running the game on their devices. For example, some older and lower performance Android devices are experiencing severe performance issues.

Our real world has tremendous biodiversity. We have everything from cute little prosimians like tarsiers to crazy cuttlefish … I hope that our gaming industry can one day show the same type of diversity … the only way that we’re going to get there is if some of us are bold; if we try out new ideas and commit ourselves not to taking the easy path, but to taking the strange path or the hard path or the path we’re passionate about.

–Nathan Martz (Double Fine)

There have been widespread claims that deficit-cutting actually reduces unemployment because it reassures consumers and businesses; but multiple studies of historical record, including one by the International Monetary Fund, have shown that this claim has no basis in reality.

–Paul Krugman (British Fashion Victims - NYTimes.com)

This is an ‘all about me’ PSA:

• I’m (or at least, my words are) on page 60 of the Oct 4 issue of Holyrood magazine. You’ve already read them, however, as it’s an edited version of my In Transition post from a few weeks back.

• I’m now officially the games adviser for the Cultural Enterprise Office. What’s that?

Cultural Enterprise Office is Scotland’s specialist business support and development service for creative businesses and practitioners.

• I gave a talk at ScotSoft2010 on what I’m calling Selfish Creativity, which seemed to be well received. More to come on that “soon”.

• I created an iPhone app for theatre company Cryptic (iTunes). You can see a video of it in action here.

If you dropped Silicon Valley into Scotland. People were surprised when I told them this yesterday.

Another week, another PopCap interview, this time with Matt Johnston, senior producer on Plants vs Zombies for XBLA over at Gamasutra. This one generally focuses on the value of being able to iterate repeatedly until you get it right:

We spent a lot of time just trying to get [the control system] to feel right but I think eventually we got there

(Although weirdly, the next paragraph states: “Spending a lot of time on small elements like this is something PopCap prides itself on” - although I’m not sure I’d classify the control system a ‘small element’ of a game.)

They bear in mind that you have to think like a player:

we sat there and spent a lot of time looking at how that double sun was going to look and animate, trying to second guess over and over and over again how somebody who had never played PvZ or somebody who may be confused by it, what they would think and what they would do.

They obsess on details:

I feel incredibly lucky to be working for a company that values those things and shares my need to sort of exercise my OCD and go through every little detail.

Aside from iteration, they also value knowing when to stop:

To be honest, getting that working and tested would have taken another six months … I didn’t feel like it was worth [it]. … At some point every good game developer has to decide, ‘OK, I’m actually gonna ship this game this year.’

That last paragraph reminds of me of this quote from Harrison Ford:

You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

And if you read this interview with the Dave Roberts, the CEO of PopCap, you can see why they work like that:

[W]e are pretty happy. We have never had to compromise anything about what we believe in for great products … I think we are going to continue to build some awesome value here, and people love the games. And we are going to keep making great games.

Lovely.