David T. Hyland

A story from so long ago

 

My first time ever playing a Nintendo console was when I was only about 8 years old. Way back then, my parents had given me and my brother a NES system as a gift, along with some of the oldest games that I can only remember. Whenever I was bored, I would always switch on the old Nintendo NES system and lock in the Super Mario 2 game cartridge. I still remember playing this game and completely sucking at it. It was then that I started to experiment with the other characters like Princess TOADSTOOL (or Peach as she was renamed later). She had that gliding gimmick that allowed her to float & hover for a brief period of time. It was then that I started to use this to bypass most of the hardest areas later in the game. Despite there being a few glitches within the game (like resolution or pixel rendering), I thought the game play was fantastic. It was then that my older brother, Caleb, had gotten used to playing the game so well that he completed it in a matter of a few hours. Determined to beating him, I started to practice on the same level as him, wanting to master the same techniques he developed himself and brag about it at the same time.

Fast-forward the best part of that decade, my mother had gotten us the Nintendo 64 for free, along with the Super Mario 64 game as a retail copy for working with Silicone Valley at the time it was blooming. My brother and I would always play games for competitive play and never get tired. It was then that Nintendo announced the Super Smash Bros game that we wanted to get the first game and compete against each other. Since then, my brother would always best me in a one-on-one fight with his Pikachu against my Fox character. I always started practice the game on my own, figured there would be a way to beat my brother at the game, but he would always win. Later, I found out that the game was mostly developed as a “cardboard” game, meaning that there was no balance in the game and Pikachu was considered the best character to use since its abilities in dealing fast combos and movement were all fixed to being greater than the other characters. I felt cheated at the time, but I still practiced with other characters to move on and still kept on trying to beat my brother.

I will go ahead and skip towards where I stand today with Nintendo. I am currently with their last console version, the Wii-U, and I own a few games like Super Smash Bros 4 and Mario Maker. It was then that I stopped playing games and started focusing on more pressing work. The only time I would take out the system was whenever my older brother comes for a visit. Him and me would always call it a brotherly tradition that whenever we see each other, one of us would bring the Nintendo console out, load up the Smash Bros game, and started playing for nearly 3-4 hours straight until we got tired. If there was anything that I experienced through my time as a gamer, it would be the bonding of family and friendship that I get when others are playing at the same level as I am and experiencing the joys of competitive gameplay.

 

Is there a point in discussing this part of my life? I will say yes, there is. Throughout most of my childhood experience, it was always the game system and I. I was never an outdoor-type and I would always lock myself in the room and started gaming for hours. I was always a gamer at heart. Whether it was adapting to the play style of the game and mastering it all the way or I was being a perfectionist by collecting all the items throughout games that have various things, I have expressed my own game feeling experiences through the memorable times I had lived through my life.

In regards to my research topic, I want to review Nintendo and go through some of their past game developments, their success and failures, and finally how they made a name-sake for themselves. I want to see this as not some research topic, but more like a deeper look into the feeling of game design with Nintendo and discuss the possible sense of where the business will take them down the road.

 

How has Nintendo changed their Ergonomics?

 

Going through what I remembered in my studies of Game Feel, the metrics of game Input is the means by which a player can control the game through interactions. It is with these physical input devices and how players are able to feel the controls will it have an effect on their comfortability and play style. Now you would expect this as a lesser issue with Nintendo, but they have earned themselves the recognition as being pretty famous and infamous when it boils down to the ergonomics of gameplay (Loughran, 2015).

 

When Nintendo released the Nintendo 64 version, the control device was designed almost similar to a Sai weapon (or shape like an M). This three-pronged device with at least 10-12 colorful buttons and a joystick that Nintendo released back in 1996 was a massive confusion to most of the young gamers that were used to playing with two-handed devices. Granted, the controller was designed for the purpose of the Mario 64 game, it still needed to be compatible with all the other Nintendo games still in development. I have to acknowledge that part of Nintendo's controller designs having that fresh and original feel, but it stands out as being one of the most unorthodox controllers Nintendo had to offer. There were at least two things that made the controller stand far from being comfortable. One would be the impracticality to use all the button functions like the D-Pad or the Analog stick for some games like Mortal Kombat or Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The second burden was the fact that if players were playing with the analog stick, it would be hard for them to reach either the L and R shoulder buttons.

 

Since then, Nintendo always looks back at their recent mistakes and started fixing their errors. Consider the sensitivity and efficiency of their recent input devices, they created a few controller devices like the GameCube version, where they went back on the two-handed device and changed some of the design layouts for better reach. The analog stick is no longer in the middle as it has been moved to the left side and the D-pad was shifted down to make room. The C- buttons have been changed into a small, yellow analog stick for more accessible inputs. Finally, the Z button has been moved towards the top-right shoulder of the controller next to the R-Button. This was all based on their decision about complexity through the means of sensitivity. What is important is realizing the implications through the choice of handling the input device, in which Nintendo tends to fluctuate often between other console releases.

 

Nintendo had started to changed their inputs again through the release of their first motion control device, the Wii console controller. Nintendo released this controller as a spring-out towards their wireless design and direct its aim at both casual gamers and non-gamers. However, there were few that were dissatisfied from the feel based on comfortability issues and constant looping problems with wireless feedback connectivity, as it would sometimes be inaccurate towards its response time. If that was not enough to convince Nintendo of their latest input problems, their latest console had been discredited for a much more poorer design. The Wii-U. The device was a slight step down on ergonomics in the eyes of the public view, but was a good way to show off their originality in controller development.

 

Though my history of controller use, I would always dismiss the concepts of ergonomics with the controllers since I keep thinking to myself “This is their newest controller. Everyone else is getting used to the feel, so, why shouldn’t I?” In all honesty, it never once bothered me since it gave me the different feelings of comfort while playing some of the newest games. I did grow up with both the NES and the SNES consoles, so you could imagine how it felt when I first gripped the N64 M-shaped controller. It was perplexing; I did not know how to handle it until either my Mom and Brother showed me the right way in handling it (Left hand goes on the middle; Right hand is gripping the right side of the controller). It was a new experience of playing games as I was fairly learning the control schemes for the Mario 64. Provided that most of the N64 game like Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time helped me with some of the tutorials, I quickly gotten over the anxiety feeling and started practicing. It was not long until I started to slowly mastering the Mario 64 games with some of my own response times to quickly pressing the buttons correctly in order to get from a high and vertical place to somewhere I could not go from before. Then the ergonomics kept on changing again when Nintendo released their Wii motion device. The Wii nun-chuck sticks did not feel too right as I was constantly calibrating the controller to the sensors bars attached to the television. It got worse when I first purchased the Wii-U console as I was handling what I considered was a large fragile tablet that came with the console. I felt disconnected from their game since I also. Luckily, Nintendo had designed some controller compatibilities with their newest hardware, allowing players to hook up their GameCube controller. With this new accessory, I decided to purchase a few of these controllers that will allow me to retain that better experience I once had for Nintendo games.

 

Overall, it is clear that with every Nintendo controller, there is a new innovation of technology, but a change in their ergonomic status. They would focus on this all the time, but somehow, they managed to worsen the quality of their comfort and functionality. Since the beginning of this topic, we can assume that a fair amount of research had been done since the N64 controller that gave rise the GameCube controller, only to drop its status with both the Wii and the Wii U controllers. I know through the feeling of playing on all the versions of the game. Since the time that I owned the N64, GameCube, Wii, and the Wii-U, I had always felt the difference in playing with the controllers since it sets an appropriate difficulty for players like myself to get the feel of the game and find that zone of comfort. I believe this is one of the key factors to Nintendo’s success. The N64 M-shape controllers were made to control a character in 3D space, just like how the Wii remote tries giving the natural feeling to swing a controller while operating the analog stick. Nintendo seamlessly polishes their ergonomic feel of both user comfortability and positive game experiences that make the controllers feel engaging with the audience in a very helpful way.

 

Contextual Game Experience

 

Many of us have experienced situations where it has been necessary to play a game that in itself we do or do not enjoy. Sometimes, we would facilitate a social situation that is valuable for us to experience in the game and take it further up. Most of the Nintendo games I have recently played were very keen on the contexts of their game world. In this particular article about the context of Nintendo’s Switch game “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”, the story covers the topic the entirety of the game as a huge, reminiscent world filled with a sense of meaning and imagination (Thursten, 2017). The article goes on about the most of their environmental structure is similar to the Assassins Creed series, where the player is climbing a tall tower structure and lighting it up will reveal both the entire map and a few secrets of the game. It is through the experience of finding them, climbing them, and deriving your next direction from them is analogue and, like everything else in the game, puts the player's imagination. Now compare the latest Zelda game “Breath of the Wild” to all the previous Zelda games before. On the NES version with the first Zelda game, the main character can only move in 4 directions of the world using the D-Pad. In the next Zelda game, they still kept the concepts of moving around in 4 directions, but they introduced the side-scrolling feature for the main character to have a grip of his own surrounding. Soon after the Nintendo 64 was released, they incorporated the 3D movability to the Zelda series in the famous Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. You see the pattern here I am getting at here? Within every release of the newest console, Nintendo developers have always tried to change the spacial awareness of their predecessor games while retaining their older concepts. This is covered later in the section when Nintendo works on developing those contests through intuitiveness of how to play the game.

Like the recent Zelda games, how is it that Nintendo still keeps the context of their games still fresh? Nintendo might have produced the same game repeatedly, but rather than doing it once a year they normally, they are doing it only once per console generation (or twice depending on how well they redefine the previous game and release it in their newest console). They can do more development with the better and faster new hardware so that the new one looks better and plays better. Some of the obvious examples of games would be Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart, and the Legend of Zelda. Nintendo have done a ton of sequels that feel similar towards its predecessors, right? That is because they have been at it since 1985. They would produce at least 2-3 games of the Mario series for the NES. Although this is excluding the facts that their mobile console versions like the Gameboy or 3DS games have a fair amount of the Mario series into various game for both 2d and 3d versions. Likewise, we could count that same situation with Zelda series, but provided that Nintendo changes their perspective gameplay that matches the control feel for players to interact. Let us take the game “Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” as a game designed for the Wii rather than the GameCube version. The uniqueness with that game on the Wii console was how it incorporates the aim function for weapons like the Bow or the HookShot device. Granted, the developers of Nintendo would never leave out the player’s involvement with the game world as they still need the experience to take form of immersive interaction from the operation of players. It basically works out for the best and has been executed with a degree of satisfaction polish that reassures players their avatars meaning in collecting items or taking diverging paths based on their sense of freedom within the game world. This might sound a little insincere, but it is one of the key points of that gives Nintendo their standing in game development.

 

One other concepts of context that I interesting was the concepts of how very few Nintendo titles was how the developers manage to guide their audience in the alluring environment by steadily moving them in both linear progress and the freedom to explore. In this talk about the Game Design of Super Metroid (ToolKit G.M, 2018), the person talks about how the game safely navigates the users and avatars towards the right direction. Along the way, players will often see doors that remain locked or paths that are inaccessible without the right upgrades. This is a method to teasing players into the belief of accessing the doors when they get the right upgrades. The video goes on about the simple linear progress the game shows us until we reach near the mid-point of the game. He describes the feeling of Nintendo developers being that helpful mentor holding our hands, keeping either a firm and loose grip on the player to help them progress while feeling the same comfort before they can fully run. One the player reaches a certain point near the end of the game, that grip finally comes undone and players are given the feel of freedom, whether it is up to their desires to finish the game or collect all the optional power-ups in each of the hidden room. Going back on a few of Nintendo games, I start seeing a pattern of comfort Nintendo provides for players. Players start off in a safe environment and out of proximate danger zones until they start mastering the basic controls. Soon afterwards, they are steadily guided through their sense of exploration through boundless areas until they become skilled enough to roam freely within the game world. I find this concept unique in its designing phase as the developers of Nintendo know just what the player wants and gives them the needed help while hiding their tutoring methods.

 

How is Nintendo still so good with their Simplicity?

 

There are a few ways to describe Nintendo games as to why most of their games are rather addictive towards its audience. They know how to set the bars of what fun is in a video game. We can simply base these desires on how their games follow a certain rhythm or flow within a game. Zelda games, like Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker, have that flow of slow exploration and still remain very engaging in between puzzle-solving environments and battle-tactics. Through this style of rhythm, Nintendo games have always set their game’s rules at minimal levels and assert both player engagements and intuitiveness in their games.

 

First, let us go through the topic of what keeps players engaged to their games. I had just played Nintendo’s latest game “Super Smash Bros Ultimate” and I was marveled at how the game always has something new to keep my interest piqued as describe in an Engadget article online (Devindra, 2018). Unlike the previous versions, the game had a sense of nostalgic feel towards all the previous Smash titles and old NES games. There is the imaginative feeling that the developers had so many fresh ideas that they had no trouble throwing all of them into the game. Most people would call this Nintendo's polish (Scott, 2018). Unlike some of the other game titles, there is always a constant stream of innovation flowing through the game as you progress.

 

The second topic I would like to cover with simplicity is the intuitiveness players develop in their games. These are described as how players can tell how a game feels natural and intuitive to interact with some of the environment based on past experiences. For some of us that play the old NES or SNES games like Mario World or the Kirby games, some of the controls felt tight or had a nice flow of freely running in simple directions. Since the development of 3d games for the first time, players would have felt the sensation of merging themselves with the mascot characters and graceful perform jumping trick as if they can do it themselves naturally. This is one reason that leads to how Nintendo addicts their audience into gameplay. You do not have to learn the instructions or how to operate the control of the avatar. Gamers would just have to leave out the conscious part about themselves and focus their attention on the contents of the environment instead.

Thinking back on how we use to play the SNES game “Super Mario World”. You know about platform games and how they operate when you have Mario jumping from pit to pit with just the B button. It becomes a very tiresome experience when you start expecting the same thing will occur in the later levels. But take that part of the conscious away, it becomes the matter of how you start focusing on the gameplay experience while forgetting about how physically your operating the controller from your personal living room. It is through these experience that Nintendo seeks to broaden their horizon with game development by giving players the sense of belonging in the game. Although the ergonomics tend to make the gameplay awkward as the player still needs to operate the constraint of the controllers, proven to be tedious with a few designs (as covered earlier in the first topic). Nintendo games almost always seem to have such natural controls with the game that players do not know themselves they have become immersed into their games.

 

Rather than making gamers experience just how to enjoy their games, they start to model after documenting their comprehensive experience with their newest models and suggest a different approach towards development. I would look at this as intentional step towards understanding more about their audience and how to evolve a player’s experience through these methodologies. The gameplay experience is personally linked with the players’ perception though contexts of game play. I feel it is necessary for Nintendo to learn more about how players play better at games, what gives them the motivation to keep playing, and how they could develop certain games that would reach that form for player’s expectations. Nintendo often changes these expectations to see how well the audience reacts. If you recall any of the older Nintendo games, voice acting was never included in their games (you only hear from NPC characters a few lines or the avatars saying one word to express their feelings). They do not see it as a way that enriches their game experience since some of their games would find themselves lacking a bit in the storyline compartments of their games. Most of the better experience is done through dialogue reading to get the grasp of the game world (with the exception of the Star Fox series as the avatars within the game are given proper dialogue trees that express just what kind of characters they are). However, some of their policies had changed over time when they started letting in a little bit of voice acting in their recent Switch game, Breath of the Wild. Way back when the games were lacking in the polish, players would experience the game feel of their avatars as if they are the characters themselves. Who would have known that the voices of characters in the Breath of the Wild game would give players the idea of how these iconic characters would sound? (Zelda, being the stoic and pure maiden princess she is portrayed as, is actually a die-hard explorer from the heart).

 

Where do I see Nintendo in the Future?

 

Nintendo has a lot of popular series, most of which are pretty good. Unlike many of Nintendo's other series, it is quite shallow in terms of what is there to get into based on their recent list of games. Back when the Nintendo 64 was popular, there was a big range of games with different ratings on the ESBR system. You would see games like Doom or a few South Park games that became a 64-only release. Soon afterwards, Nintendo started to go through some changes in marketing development as more variety of family games started to appear on the store shelves. When the Wii-U came out, some of the games would not be considered so bad, but they could not hold a candle with a majority of Nintendo's novelty releases like Mario or the Zelda series. So why should I take this fact into consideration with the way Nintendo has done business while also searching for their situational meaning? Over the constant years of trial and error with game development, Nintendo would always study the language of gamer’s comfort and include just what they need to improve their next release.

We can interweave these conjectures based on the studies of player’s contexts and their ideal of a better game play. We can take this thought and apply it to the way society would think about the values of game play. Just as VR games are created for the sake of spacial immersion, Nintendo sticks with modifying their way of thinking about how to improve nostalgic games through better means of better experience. I would assume Nintendo thinks big on how affecting society would also affect everything taking from the perspective view of individuals and smaller groups. For this, we seek out the context of earlier forms of Nintendo games and see just how they greatly influenced players by recreating those childhood moments through their classics and molding them to newer forms. We see so much from the 90’s of just how play practices and game forms have taken shape and still gives the old and new audience the feel of their own satisfaction. In the most basic sense, Nintendo is seeking to evolve their game play experience and use both context and richness through nostalgic and common likeness.

 

In my own perspective opinion, I still believe Nintendo is doing the best of its abilities to find that certain comfort for players to keep enjoying their games. Throughout the recent reviews, I have seen in articles regarding the struggles with the Nintendo and their marketing troubles, but it sticks out to me as something of a phase more than a trouble.

 

I felt that over the course of the recent 4-years, the Wii U never made the same impact as the Wii did before. I think with Nintendo’s newest and current console, the Switch, it has that ability to recapture some of the Wii magic in different ways. It is due to the functions of the console that it is a 2-in-1 system. It tries to act as both portable and a home console all in one package, giving game players the freedom and light loading experience that they are not limited to the constraints of one place and they can play about anywhere.

With their recent reviews Nintendo Switch, it seems like Nintendo is starting to be more popular again with the reviews of better feels of games like Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, and their newest release title Super Smash Bros Ultimate though seer contents of game play and breath-taking graphics with particle physics being top-notched. I would predict within the next 3-4 years, their next console version would be a next upgrade to both ergonomic feels and game playing experience, taking their next generation of game development through newer leaps and bounds of what we now feel would make better games. This is already proven as a fact from how far along they managed to change their production designs to balance out both the fun and innovation of game experience.

I feel that there is a lot of appeal in being able to enjoy a console through the immersive gaming experience whenever and wherever you wanted. I would like to see them further expand on the diversity of the console hardware. My idea is to make a smaller, more shock-resistant version for all gamers, and full compatibility performances with all the newest and previous versions of games through the challenge of retaining their original play values and retain a fair amount of resolution.

 

Conclusion

 

There is certainly a lot to take in with the history I share with Nintendo games. Growing up in an environment where I hardly made friends or barely holding a conversation with my family that interrupts me in every sentence, I felt that need to escape from my situation if I just played video games all day and get lost in the moments. Eventually, I started to get used to playing the same games almost every day until my brother invited me to play a few games with him. Some of these games hold nostalgic feelings I have held against my family. As soon as I grew old enough to make decision of my own, I decided I wanted to dive deep into game development and start making some fun games like Nintendo has been doing all these years. As a designer, I want to make a game that brings joy and comfort for the youngest players and help them grasp the same feelings I once held when I was also young. Though the means of Game Feel and Deep Analysis of video games, I felt I have gotten a better grasp of what gamers seek through their own cozy zone of game play.

Nintendo has been running its course over the 30 years since the tech marketing started to flourish. From their struggle of developing the right ergonomics of controllers, towards their challenging game developers with new ideas for old concepts. That's kind of the essence of game design I would find in Nintendo after playing their game product for years.