Wii Music encourages players to be creative, like many other games being made right now. Why is that?
I’m often asked the reason why my games are fun to so many people, so I often thought about that and came to think about it in this fashion: when gameplayers find some creative aspect to a game it can become fun.

Videogames are a unique form of entertainment called interactive entertainment. Players are given the opportunity to make their own decisions and plans, and that’s how this interactive nature can generate circumstances in which players can become creative. I think that’s one of the most appealing points of videogames.

When it comes to the creativity of drawing pictures, playing with music instruments – these aren’t easy for the great majority of us, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t like to draw pictures or make music. Simply because it is not easy means that people are hesitant to try to understand the joy in making pictures or music. I think our job is to support them by getting rid of the difficulty of them and getting to the pure fun nature of these activities.

But I have been trying to include this kind of nature for players to be creative all the time – when I look back over the Legend Of Zelda series, it often included it. When it comes to the general trend in the videogame industry, though, I’m sorry, I don’t have the answer!


You mentioned people’s fear of mistakes – in many aspects of Wii Fit and Wii in general it looks like you’ve been looking more towards people’s behaviour than ever before. Do you ever feel that you’re acting more as a behavioural psychologist than a game designer?
I really don’t think I’ve changed in my attitude to making videogames at all. It’s just that the possibility of videogames has been expanding due to emerging technologies. What I have been doing is rather simple. I try to use anything around me that’s available to give a pleasant surprise to people. And doing that is my joy. I think entertainment is nothing more than that.

We want to entertain people by surprising them, so I really don’t think we are psychologists – we are nothing but entertainers. Having said that, however, we have to understand how we are going to surprise people. My way of surprising people is often to give them some clue or trigger so that they are going to discover inside of themselves some hidden ability or interest, or something that they already have but did not realise. In order to do so I am actually making a point of thinking what people are thinking, and how they are thinking, what kind of experiences they are having. If you call that psychological, then… [Shrugs]