Fun and games with Katamari Damacy’s creator.

Keita Takahashi, creator of cult sensation Katamari Damacy, has announced that he is to make a playground for the people of Nottingham. The designer revealed his plans during his keynote presentation at Nottingham’s GameCity festival, where he also discussed his favourite sandals, his philosophy of truck design, his obsession with Miffy, gardening as a form of revenge – and finally showed his next game, Noby Noby Boy, running for the first time.

The playground project began when GameCity director Iain Simons read in an interview that Takahashi dreamed of designing one. Having secured the leftfield artist/designer as a speaker (and having checked that he actually meant it), Simons wrote a proposal and began to drum up support with the city’s council and two universities.

Discussions are still at an early stage, but the currently favored site is an old playground in need of replacement in University Park, near the Lakeside Arts Centre. We visited it with Takahashi early on an overcast morning, the day before his talk. Despite the gloomy conditions, he seemed taken with the site, frequently wandering off in the middle of conversation to test the equipment and photograph the views. He imagines installing a wind turbine on the climbing net, and decorating it with hundreds of LEDs.

moscallout“I’m beginning to get a bit bored making just games. I wanted something in a different area, but quite similar.”/moscallout“I want to make it happen,” he announces later, after staring out of the window for some time. “But I don’t really understand why everyone is trusting me so much!” he adds, with his trademark shy giggle.

There are numerous stumbling blocks for such a project, from local politics to geographical distance, but the park service seems extremely willing to accommodate his vision. And for his part, Takahashi is keen to find another way to express himself.

“Being totally honest with you, I’m beginning to get a bit bored making just games,” he says. “I wanted something in a different area, but quite similar. Being able to move physically, to exercise, I thought that would be a good idea to start with.”

Asked what his feelings are about creating something physical and permanent rather than virtual, he answers ruefully, aware of the extreme freedom videogames offer him: “I’m looking forward to it. But I’m worried about the boundaries of what’s possible.” The site, he says, is “a lot better than I expected. The surroundings were really nice. I hope this will take shape, and something will actually materialize.”

Although his charmingly surreal visual designs certainly appeal to the curators of the Lakeside centre, it’s his restless appetite for action and play that make the concept of a Takahashi-designed playground a truly enticing one. “At the moment, I just want to make a park where a child will feel like taking off his shoes and start to run,” he says simply.

Fittingly for a man who doodles incessantly while he talks, Takahashi’s presentation is conducted live on his MacBook’s desktop: he draws, manipulates tiny windows showing short slapstick videos, and toys with Google Earth. His unorthodox methodologies and unusual topics of discussion all make an acutely relevant point: everything is a game to this man. In a rather lengthy analogy, he compares his obsessive quest to obtain Miffy-branded paraphernalia via a sticker-collecting promotion to leveling up your character in an RPG.

“I feel that anything one does is enjoyable, has an aspect of play. But the way we live at the moment, play is actually a separate category in our lives which we need to materialize. My personal opinion is that every normal daily routine should be fun, but at the moment that doesn’t seem to be the case. The idea I have is to break that dividing line, integrate both areas.”

In the meantime, though, Takahashi’s paymasters at Bandai Namco would like another slice of materialized play from him. Putting Noby Noby Boy into words eludes him. “I’ve been trying to explain it to my colleagues and managers in the office, but I haven’t really succeeded,” he confesses. So, at the end of his talk, he fires up a PS3 and plays it for and with the audience on the cinema screen, distributing controllers among the crowd.

It’s a game that has barely taken shape yet, however. Takahashi admits that it should be finished already, and notes that as well as meaning ‘stretch’ and ‘free’, the word ‘noby’ can mean ‘postpone’. What he shows is a simple but compelling control demo, leading us to wonder if he’s creating a game or a pure virtual toy.

“My feeling is, there doesn’t need to be any goal – it should be flexible, there should be freedom for every player to enjoy it for themselves,” he says. “But I do understand the importance of setting objectives, since it will make it easier for the player to understand what to do. It’s a difficult question. If you want to talk about Noby Noby, there is an overall objective, although I don’t really understand the necessity.”

Wondering why not everyone has such a playful spirit as he does, Takahashi is suddenly philosophical: “In life, people don’t necessarily have objectives. Maybe it’s easier for everyone to have a game which has one.”