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June 2002
INTERVIEW WITH THE GODDESS:
THE E3 PANEL WITH WILL WRIGHT AND YU SUZUKI
GIGnews recruited Melanie Cambron, known by most in
the industry as The Game Recruiting Goddess, to use her
skills for the good of gamekind and recruit some of the
big names in the industry to give us all valuable
insight into what they do and how they do it.
At the past E3Expo, Melanie moderated a panel with Will
Wright and Yu Suzuki, Design Secrets Part 1: Japan and
the USA. This special "Interview With the Goddess,"
features question and answer highlights from
that panel.
Note from Melanie: I just wanted to take this
opportunity to again profusely thank Kirsten Merit of
Sega of America for her invaluable help in coordinating
this session. Thanks to Young Ashworth for her swift and
eloquent interpretation. Also, sincerest appreciation to
Suzanne Levacque and Curt Feldman for putting together
an absolutely marvelous
E3
Conference with
thought-provoking and insightful sessions. E3 really
knocked it out of the park this year. And of course, to
Yu Suzuki and Will Wright for being two of the most
gracious living legends I know. Domo arigato. Thank you.
From Design Secrets Part 1: Japan and the USA
E3 2002 Panel
 MC:
Welcome and Youkoso to Design Secrets Part 1: Japan and
the USA.
Arguably, there are no two other countries more
intertwined in the history of video games than the
United States and Japan. Recently, I was reading the
History of Video Games on GameSpot. From 1889
when the forerunner of today’s Nintendo was born in
Japan until present day, the one continuous thread was
that Japan and America have historically looked to the
other for ideas and inspirations. Atari was an American
company with a Japanese name and Sega, a Japanese
company was started by an American. Both countries even
experienced coin shortages during the wild popularity of
Space Invaders in arcades. However symbiotic this
relationship may be and even as the world becomes a
seemingly smaller and more homogenous place, are there
significant differences or common influences in creating
great games? To help us answer that question we are
honored to have spoken with two of the greatest game
designers in history. Yu Suzuki and Will Wright.
 Yu
Suzuki is recognized worldwide as a forefather of
console gaming for his contributions in computer
animation and 3d graphics. He joined Sega in 1983 and in
his second year created the world’s first simulation
arcade game entitled Hang On. In 1993, he created
the international arcade hit, Virtua Fighter
which spawned the 3D fighting genre AND was added to the
Smithsonian Institution’s Permanent Research Collection
for its tremendous contribution to society in the field
of Art & Entertainment. He is best known for industry
firsts and genre breaking games. He is the visionary
behind the groundbreaking Shenmue. A student of
art and music since childhood, Suzuki remains an active
artist. He recently prepared his own art exhibit WHILE
completing work on Virtua Fighter 4 hailed as
"the best fighting game ever made."
 Will
Wright is a man The Wall Street Journal summed up as
follows: "In an industry best known for blood and gore,
computer-game designer Will Wright is an alternative
thinker. Intellectual may be more like it." Co-founder
of Maxis and the man behind SimCity and The
Sims, Wright was recently inducted into the Academy
of Arts and Science Hall of Fame, joining other industry
luminaries. A recognized visionary, Wright has been
included in Entertainment Weekly’s "It List" of the 100
most creative people in entertainment, as well as Time
Digital’s "Digital 50," a listing of the most important
people shaping technology today. Currently, Wright is
working on The Sims Online, an online version of
the cultural phenomenon and most popular computer game
of all time.
Japan is an ancient land steeped in history and
tradition. While America is more of a young whipper
snapper of a nation. However, the two have grown up
together in the arena of video games, learning valuable
lessons along the way. When Namco released Pac-Man
in 1980, the game was named Puck Man, however when
Midway licensed the game for US distribution, they saw
the potential for mischievous American youth to alter
the letter P on the game's marquee. Hence Pac Man.
Question to Mr. Wright: How have you personally been
influenced by Japanese games and culture?
 WW:
My all time favorite game is
Go
while not invented in Japan, it enjoys
its strongest popularity there. Go seems to reflect so
much of what I think of as the Japanese design aesthetic
which is complexity through simplicity. Go has two
simple rules, one of which is seldom used. Yet it has
strategy far more complex than chess. Just an amazing
example of what you can do in game design. I wish I
could design a game that had that much simplicity but
that much came out of it. Go is the gold standard by
which I try to judge all my game designs. I also
appreciate that visual sensibility of Japanese design as
shown in Japanese gardening. My daughter has sparked my
interest in anime and manga. And of course, going back
to my childhood, Godzilla. Japan has probably been the
most influential culture on my work.
MC
Question to Suzuki-san: How have you personally been
influenced by American games and culture?
 YS:
I didn’t play
games that much when I was a student. But I bought the
Apple computer which at the time only displayed text. So
in Wizardry, when I saw the picture on the screen
I was overwhelmed. Pong is the first game. It
greatly influenced me and consequently inspired me to
make games. The movement of the ball in Pong is very
beautiful. (Pause) That’s a joke! (Laughs) I do get a
lot of input and information from Western people. I tend
to like old American movies like Roman Holiday
and Casablanca which is my absolute favorite.
MC:
How do you approach game design? Do you think your
approach / method is uniquely influenced by your
culture/heritage?
WW:
You don’t want
to know. (Laughs) I tend to get very captivated with a
subject. I will research it for a number of years and
then start building a lot of prototypes of it. Usually
the game design for me comes in toward the end, after I
have a really good sense of the subject and what aspects
of the subject that I want to illustrate. Then I’ll
experiment with game design.
YS:
I appreciate originality in everything so I don’t
only want to be involved in games. I like to do many
things and only after the inspiration has accumulated do
I begin making the game. I get a lot of inspiration
outside of the game industry. I also get inspiration
from dreams. Like Dali, the famous painter, I get a lot
of my inspiration from dreams.
MC:
At the Tokyo Game Show earlier this year, Bill Gates
said that the Xbox would be tailored for the Japanese
market with a smaller hand-held controller and US
designed games adapted by a team of Japanese developers.
What differences do you see between the U.S. and
Japanese consumer market?
WW:
Japanese market
tends to be much more console based while the US tends
to be somewhat more PC based. I think the Japanese
market is an interesting one. You go over the and see
stuff that is way crazy out there and then you’ll see
the seventeenth version of an RPG. You get both the
creative exploration and the refinement. In Japanese
design, the extremes feel more populated but in the US
it seems that everything is middle of the road
homogenous mush.
YS:
I feel it’s the
opposite. Japan is an island country with only one race.
So I feel that everyone has the same tendencies in
design. It is true that there is a small portion of the
population who are in the extreme but we are a nation of
farmers, not hunters, so we tend to cultivate something
to near perfection before moving onto something new, as
in game genre.
MC:
What could be considered decent in Japan can be
considered "mature" in the United States, and vice
versa. For example, Square has held back games like
Xenogears due to mature themes that could offend
American customers. When designing are you creating a
game for a specific type of audience?
WW:
I know what I like. I can’t come up with an original
game by trying to put myself in someone else’s mind. The
game is built to please me. Once I start building that
game and see that nobody else likes it, then I look for
excuses in usability to fix it. Usually, there’s a lot
of playtesting involved. For the most part, my design
starts with some obscure thing that interests me. My
task then is to figure out how to make other people get
it.
YS:
I always contact
market research, including my target audience. Based on
research, I customize the game for this audience. For
example, I use certain cars for a European audience and
in America I would use cars from Nascar. For Nintendo’s
games, I always think of small children ages 10-14.
MC:
Should games be designed with a global market in mind?
That is, when you sit down to make a game, should you
design in terms of what will sell globally or does that
bring the risk of diluted game design? Like ordering,
say, veal parmigiana at Denny's? Maybe not everything
should be for every market. Is there marketing pressure
to design games for world-wide audiences?
WW:
Not more pressure than I already feel myself. I like
the idea of my games going out to a more global culture.
When creating The Sims, we decided we were going
to do it in 14 languages. So we had to study a great
deal of non-verbal gestures that might be inappropriate
in other countries. Facial expression tends to be
cross-cultural. I think that’s useful for any game
designer.
YS:
There’s not so much pressure to worry about the
global market. But the budget is a bigger issue. I have
to always worry about the budget for the
development…like with Shenmue.
MC:
What are your references and influences and how do those
references influence your game design? Do you draw
inspiration from other art forms? film? science? other
innovative designers? etc.
WW:
My biggest single influence is biology. I think we
are just beginning to fully appreciate what an
incredible information processing system it is. Other
design fields like product design, architecture and toy
design have also been strong influences. Robotics are
also a very big interest of mine, especially Japanese
robotics.
YS:
Mr. Wright and I share a lot of common influences.
For the past five years, I have been constantly
researching movies. I have accumulated over 500 DVDs.
The new game platforms effectively allow cinematic
expression in games. I think many things will be merged
between games and movies. Well produced movies from
Hollywood with all of their technological enhancements
are hard to analyze. They seem too perfect to study.
Some second class movies from Hong Kong are useful in
that they show what not to do. My travels, as well as
movies, also inspire me. For example, when visiting a
European country, I saw beautiful 7th century
palaces and fortresses. I want to use these landscapes
and structures in my games.
MC:
Where do you see yourself headed in terms of game
design?
WW:
I’ve been very impressed with how The Sims
fans have customized the game. I’m really interested in
how to make this player-created content appear on your
computer without having to download off the web. A
Napster meets Amazon thing where the game is continually
evolving to match your personal preferences.
YS:
I would like to create a new genre of game. Up until
now, the game has evolved from 2 dimensional to 3
dimensional. From this point, I want to discover, to
develop some new category.
MC:
I noticed a striking similarity in researching both or
you. You are both excellent students of human nature.
Mr. Wright, in your GIGnews.com interview, you said
you are willing to sit back and observe with an empty
mind, trying to imagine what’s motivating others as well
as yourself. When I’m sitting there playing a game, I
always wonder why am I really doing this? What real life
experiences or observations have been incorporated into
your games?
WW:
I lost my home in the Oakland Hills fire in 1991. So
in SimCity 2000 I made a scenario about the
Oakland Hills fire. My house was actually labeled in the
scenario so I could put all the fire trucks around my
house and save my house. Now that we are working on
The Sims Online, the boundary is getting blurred.
Things are happening to me with real people in the game
that are sparking other ideas for the game. We’re seeing
the in-game and out of game behavior start to blur. The
game is breaking out of the box.
MC:
Suzuki-san, you said in an interview with GamerWeb
that your game creation has benefited the most from life
experiences like "working odd-jobs or getting dumped!
Meeting lots of people so that you learn to figure out
what other people are thinking." Hence, you are able to
work out what the player is thinking. What real life
experiences or observations have you observed and then
incorporated into your game design?
YS:
I don’t have any
concrete rules about incorporating my experience into
games. It is very important for me to impressed,
overwhelmed by experiences. These types of things, I
like to incorporate into my games. When I feel that my
energy has accumulated by my experiences then I begin
making games. For example, the wine gives me energy.
(Laughs).
MC:
It seems to me that these are not things learned in a
game design book or course or workshop. These seem to be
innate abilities to learn from life’s observations
things. Do you recognize the experience while it’s
happening as fodder for future endeavors and make note
of it OR only later, do you come to realize that a
previous observation or experience was actually a
subconscious source for your inspiration?
WW:
Either conscious
or subconscious, it happens both to me almost in equal
amounts. I kept a journal when I was working on The
Sims, recording what I did every day down to the minute.
It was painstaking research. It totally changes the way
you live when you have to write down "answered the
phone, went to the bathroom, had a bite to eat." So I’ll
probably never do that again. Other times, something
will appear in a game and I’ll have déjà vu then realize
that this happened to me and now it’s in my game.
YS:
I have been
carrying around sketchbooks and notebooks, carrying them
everywhere. This particular one contains a new game
idea. Ideas pop up very quickly. Sometimes many ideas
will pop up simultaneously so while I am making notes on
one idea, I’ll forget other ones. I also carry a tape
recorder because sometimes I’ll get a very nice melody
in my mind and want to tape it.
MC:
Well, let me just add that I am fully aware that I am
interviewing Yu Suzuki and Will Wright and how truly
surreal this moment is. I will not have to jot this
moment down in a journal.
 Past
Interviews:
Interview With Elonka Dunin
(May 2002)
Interview With Will Wright
(April 2002)
Interview With Stevie
Case and John Romero
(March 2002)
Interview With Richard
Garriott
(February 2002)
Interview With George
Sanger
(January 2002)
Interview With Josh Resnick
(December 2001)
Interview With Paul
Steed (November 2001)
Interview With Marc
Saltzman (October 2001)
Interview With Rick Hall,
Senior Producer, Ultima Online (September 2001) |
