Minmaxing Life

I went to see Keita’s talk and had two surprises. First, his hair has grown a lot since we last met in Paris – he now has them very long – which was a painful reminder of how fast time passes.

But what surprised me most was the deep melancholy in his speech. It was by far the most soulful presentation I have seen at GDC this year but under the surface of jokes and quirky toys, there was a core of sadness – almost like if he had been hurt by the development of Noby Noby Boy.

I wasn’t expecting that at all…

The team over at Gamasutra did a much better summary of the lecture than I did but here are my notes anyway (Italics mine):

“Noby Noby Boy is different from Katamari : I didn’t come up with a wild guess. This time I had an idea and talked to my teammates.

They think I’m crazy but I’m very normal. I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink at all. Please don’t worry about me!

In Katamary I wanted to make a statement about the consumption society. When the objects are rolled in the Katamari they disappear, they are gone. And then I felt empty. This is how consumption society makes me feel.

So I wanted to make another game with fewer objects. The answer was to make Noby Noby Boy.

The other thing is that I wanted to make a game where I was not constrained by the boundaries of Time and Money. And I also wanted to make my game in that way but sadly that is not possible.

In games there are usually goals and rules. Katamari has rules but I wasn’t happy with the fact that that existed. I wanted to throw this off and start from “what games should be”. I wanted to make something that didn’t have a visible goal and set formulas. Of course at the time I wasn’t thinking about debugging and when the programmers would ask me “what is a bug in that game?”.

Miyazaki said “Children today are not playing they are consuming.” I think he’s right. In Japan people who play games are called users but I think it is wrong and it disturbs me. What’s created has to be consumable because we’re in the gaming industry but I still think that what matters is that they must have fun.

From the end of 2005 we began prototyping Noby Noby Boy (on XBOX 360!). It took us 3 years to complete and we had to change engine in the middle because we needed a real physics engine which at first we didn’t have. If you use Havock you have to show their logo in the game and I did not want to show any logo so we didn’t use it. Instead we used Physics effect by SCE. But in the end we still had to show the Bandaï Namco Logo, so…

When we were done, the people high up in the company were very angry at me… I could see them glaring at me!

Currently 55.768 people are playing Noby Noby Boy.

I said NB didn’t have any goal but it’s not completely true.  There is “Girl” that must connect the entire solar system. But it’s such a huge goal I think it doesn’t really count as one. At the current rate, this would take 820 years which is a problem because I will be dead by then.

Next I’d like to talk about what I couldn’t do.

I wanted to give pillow and scarves to the players as a token of my gratitude for buying my game. I wanted to give them actual gifts. I wanted them to receive physical gifts so as to make the game more real. So my sister made a pillow and my mom made a scarf – it’s a domestic industry – but only one person could get this. Then I wanted to make wooden doll every day  and give it to the players but the company said I couldn’t do all this because of privacy and delivery issues.

Noby Noby Boy is made by 10 people. It’s a very small team.

There is one more thing I couldn’t do: a loose ranking. I wanted to make Girl’s ranking fuzzy. But because of time and programming restrictions, I couldn’t do it. I also wanted to make a search interface, like for google,  where if you did a search characters would bring the results and if you ate them you’d go to the site. But popular sites could run very fast so it would be hard to eat them. I also wanted to do pencil caps that looked like Boy.

What I wanted to achieve by making Noby Noby Boy: Something New – Another choice in video games – Something possible only in games – Something surprising.

I felt cramped. In the last 4 or 5 years the real world has felt cramped, constraining – nothing to do with the recession and maybe that is only my personal feeling – but something seems to be tying me up – maybe Bandai? Noby-Noby Boy is a way for me to feel I’m pushing against this constraint. Games don’t need big ideals like that, they just need to be fun… but I needed them.

I also need to tell you about the update. (He then demoes an iPhone Noby Noby boy and the upcoming multiplayer version on the PS3)

A lot of people ask me if Noby Noby Boy is really a video game – they seem to think it’s not. But I just want to do something enjoyable. I would like to ask those people how they define a video game. I don’t think games can be defined just by goals.

So I have been complaining a lot until now – people don’t call me Keita Takahashi they call me Hate Takahashi – but it’s because I think there is a great potential to games – so that is frustrating. If we love video games we have to observe more, and feel more when we make them. There is no completion when we make them: it is always in development. Perhaps we are hiding behinds these rules and we rely on past experiences. Perhaps we have to ignore the players and the company. Maybe we should rely on our inner feeling?

I want us to not fear failure. By doing that, I’m sure something that has never been done before would be born. And I think we have to make those games.

This is our mission.”