Destroying the Genres of Gaming

Shigeru Miyamoto makes me go all fanboy, even if my Wii and DS tend to collect dust while I play WoW instead. But I'm coming to admire him more and more as an artist (as opposed to a designer) as I get older, and this New Yorker piece pushes me further in that direction. (To be fair, Paumgarten, who wrote the piece, is guilty of giving in to acertain stereotyping and fetishism of Japan, but I'll forgive him this.)

My favorite part:

 What impressed [Miyamoto] most about the early manga artists of his youth, aside from the fact that they created a genre “from nothing at all,” was how they later subverted it. “When they became much older, they started to destroy the style they themselves had created,” he said. For example, they began to ignore the cartoon-panel framework or combine multiple narratives or else use the manga form to explore macroeconomics or their own private thoughts. “When I started working for [Nintendo], I thought that someday I would like to do the same. I wanted to destroy the styles that we ourselves created. I don’t think we can do so completely, but I think that in the way that we are making video games today we might be getting closer to my idea of destroying the original style.” He went on, “Because we ourselves have created the original format or style of video games, we understand why we had to do it at the time. Because we understand that, we can also understand why some of them must be kept intact and why some of them we can destroy.”