Quote Originally Posted by zmweasel
Miyamoto had no shortage of resources during the production of Mario 3, and yet he spent "exhausting months" on its creation. Game development, ironically, is anything BUT leisure.
OK, I'll get to this in a second, but first I want to tackle one of your responses to someone else (and I am not in the habit of creating five different posts just so that I can quote all your stuff, so...)

So, you who think you can quote Chris Crawford and defend Miyamoto - let's tackle this Chris Crawford quote:

"If I go into the forest and eat an orange mushroom,and it makes me so woozy that I actually enjoy Super Mario Brothers, I can come back and tell you, 'Don't eat those orange mushrooms, they'll make you do crazy things!'"

This is from his (in)famous "Dragon Speech" where he lambasts the gaming community for creating twitch games that do almost nothing to engage either the human mind or the human heart. I hardly think that Chris Crawford, when asked his thoughts on Miyamoto, would answer in favor of your position. He's been a regular critic of Nintendo and their "twitch-gameplay-without-any-deeper-meaning" philosophy of game design.

He doesn't like Super Mario, or Zelda, or any of those games - he wants to see games that are about "a boy and his dog, the prostitute with the heart of gold," etc. - games that make you think and feel in deep and meaningful ways. Let's face it - while Miyamoto's games are entertaining run-arounds, his ability to move the heart and mind are limited at best. It's not that he doesn't have any story, but that his story has never really progressed beyond the trite "save the princess!" paradigm and the "oh no but our princess is in another castle! er, I mean, you have to collect eight pieces of triforce! no, wait - you have to collect the medallions of the sages!" model of story-telling.

I never said that the principles of game design were "simple" or that it didn't take talent - but I admire talent like Sid Meier's and Warren Spector's and Peter Molyneux's over Miyamoto's any day of the week. Why? Because, in general, when you play one of their games, you have some sort of exploration of a philosophical issue and / or you have a choice about how you accomplish your goals. Black & White - will you be a good god or an evil, god? Why? Deus Ex: kill people or go in guns blazing? Alpha Centauri: which "civilization" (or "political / philosophical ideology" in this case) will I choose, and how will I live with the practical side-effects of this philosophy?

Granted, games like Deus Ex didn't offer you a complete choice and eventually you had to kill people. I'm guessing that if Spector had had a budget as big as Miyamoto's and all the time in the world like Miyamoto has he could have made Deus Ex a lot better game in that regard (as he's said in interviews that he wanted to). But at least, for most of the game, you had a choice about how you take down the opponent - as opposed to Miyamoto, whose only method of creating a challenging enemy is to make it vulnerable to exactly one weapon and then to have you have to figure out which one it is (and that's not usually too hard because it's almost always the weapon you just obtained).

Furthermore, I never said that game design was "leisure," but that Miyamoto "had the leisure" of an almost inexhaustible budget and schedule. You're good at twisting words, aren't you? I suppose if you do it to Chris Crawford, though, I should feel honored that you'd feel the need to do it to me, too

In short: Miyamoto might be able to make good "jump-through-these-hoops" games, and I'm not arguing that when it comes to hiding heart-pieces and making some little block puzzles that he isn't very talented. What I am saying is that this ability doesn't make him Shakespeare - in fact far from it.

Shakespeare's genius was not just putting together a bunch of words to make it sound pretty, but making it sound pretty AND injecting some hefty and meaningful statements about the human condition into the work as well. Miyamoto's work is entertaining, but any deeper meaning drawn out of his games would be really scraped together - it's not like the games are rife with it. As such, no matter how talented he may be with what he does, there are other game designers out there who are better than he is, because they can hide their heart pieces (or Augmentation canisters) and make their block puzzles (or their creature islands) just as compelling while also managing to insert meaningful choices and / or dialogue on the human condition into the bargain.