Excerpted from http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/03/gdc_miyamotos_k.html .
The speaker, Miyamoto, is a game developer at Nintendo, as in Wii gaming console.
personal way of determining if a product will be succeed with the
intended audience, I call it the wifeometer.
[laughter]
This wifeometer measures one variable: the interest level of my own
wife. Maybe some of you can remember when you played Pac-Man, or a game
like Mario. And maybe you think that these were important moments in
your lives. They were not important moments for my wife. But then
Tetris came out. The problem was that, when I thought my wife would be
interested in this game, she was not, but then when my daughter started
playing Ocarina of Time at home, there was a little change. My wife had
gone from complete disinterest to a background observer. She watched my
daughter play. I thought, oh maybe there is hope!
[laughter]
Then came Animal Crossing. Now when this game came out I assured my
wife there were no enemies to fight in this game, so she agreed to
actually touch the controller. She was soon happy cutting down trees
and exchanging letters with our children. The wifeometer went up a bit
more. I thought I’d going to get that thing higher!
As some of you may know we have a dog in our house, and my wife
loves cats but I’m a dog lover. We put a question out on the Everybody
Votes channel recently. Cos she’s a cat lover and because she likes
dogs too, but see… 63% of the world’s Wii owners agree with me, and
only 36% prefer cats. What’s interesting is if you go into Latin
America, in Guatemala, more than 90% prefer dogs. Do they have cats in
Guatemala?!
This is our dog. He’s 6. He sleeps on a better mattress than I do.
If you look at his face, he looks like a guitar pick. So we named him
Pick. Now since Pick joined us, we’ve been studying dog training, and
we made new friends through the other dogs our dog has met. He brought
us new joys and discoveries. Getting back to my point today… this
relates to growing the wifeometer.
I was watching our dog friends and my wife, I thought maybe if we
could get these people and turn them into game players, if we could
interest them, we could expand the user base, there were elements too
of dog training that I thought I could turn into a videogame. So when I
showed her Nintendogs, she finally saw a different perspective.
Then game Brain Age. This has turned her into a true gamer. She has
accepted games as part of her daily life. She understands the unique
interactive entertainment found in games. And today we have a Wii in
our house. So last month, on Valentine’s Day, in Japan on Valentine’s
Day women give chocolates to men, it’s very nice!
As usual I came home rather late from work, expecting her to be
asleep. I opened the door and heard the sounds of the Wii, so I thought
she waited up to give me chocolates, so sweet, but actually she was
just casting her votes on the Everybody Votes channel. So she herself
downloaded the channel and voted on her own, this is an incredible
occurrence in my household, it would be more normal to get home and
find Donkey Kong eating at my dinner table!
[laughter]
This is the second version of Brain Age. It has a mini Mario game in
it. Now my wife comes to me and says, I can beat you at this game,
anytime. She’s bragging! To me!
[laughter]
Looking at her scores, she’s right. She turned into a hardcore gamer
much faster than I expected. Wifeometer has shot up dramatically. So
there it is. Now she’s playing Wii sports. Not only that, she invites
our friends over to play Wii sports. I don’t know if she’ll stop making
Miis – she makes them for everyone in our neighbourhood. This is very
lucky for me, see because now she’s getting a taste for what it‘s like
to create something. I see this as a first step towards game design. I
think we’ll be competing going forward, eventually she’ll come up with
a unique idea, and when she does … I can retire!
[laughter]
