Moving game design beyond safe and familiar | Shouichi Tominaga | TEDxKyoto
Translator: Masami Mutsukado and Kacie Wright Reviewer: Claire Ghyselen Here in Kyoto, my team has been developing software for a new game console. Today I would like to introduce some unique ideas and advanced technologies we've used. These were our objectives when we started this project is this. These are Japanese sweets. Japanese sweets have a peculiar look. Is it transparency? A peculiar shade. A quiet, steady kind of feeling to them. We wondered if we could challenge ourselves to create this texture with this new game console. We had a hunch. To that end we focused on lighting technologies. Especially translucency? Transparency? Can you see it? The left one's the best that previous game consoles could do. The right one is the effect that we can create with our latest technology. You can see that it calculates how light will hit points inside objects. What's more, as a console it does so in real time. Now, look at how the light reflects. Now, the newest consoles have obtained a more naturally lit space, a more naturally lit space than the one on the left with the completely dark spots. Moreover, we can now reproduce subtle detailed shadowy areas, like dips and boundaries. For example, we can apply it to a ride. It's too detailed, and the picture's too small. It's difficult to see it. I'm sorry. The effect looks like this on a character. At a glance, this might seem totally unremarkable. The truth is, even something so simple has been impossible to depict on consoles until now. It's only through individually layering these effects that we have approached the calm serenity of the Japanese sweets from before. By the way, the character designs come from traditional wooden Czech dolls. So they look hand-carved. Through this, we brought out that warmth. We could only have done this on our latest gaming consoles. Next, let's consider the game's theme. We gave it a kind of Sixties look. For us, living in the present, it might be only me though, the Sixties were a totally crazy time. Our imaginations ran riot A generation we loved for its overflowing imagination. We were always thinking of how we could bring out more and more of its essence into our games. Incidentally, this picture is of an island in the shape of a surreal face. Which leads me to an introduction of how to play the game. You play with multiple people over a network. You develop a town. The objective is to build your own society. To build up your town, you need resources. You play the game by mining for resources. Mostly you mine through shovels, pick-axes. It's manual labor. You carry the resources home and share them with everyone. Also manual labor, huh! Carrying. So, to make progress, it's very important to cooperate and delegate. Of course, this is manual labor too. Once it just popped into my head: "Wait, is this Marxism?" Recently some books and videos have re-evaluated Marxist themes. But no one's done it in a game, right? So why don't we just throw ourselves into fully developing that world? We tried several things that have never been done in a game. For example, queuing. In an online world, it's absolutely unnecessary. But we dared to do it anyway. People commute by bus periodically. Everyone gets on them together to commute. That's also unnecessary in a digital world. In the town there's a Labor Office. Whenever you contribute work, they evaluate it. Of course you must defeat enemies. But every little action, such as carrying a small object, is counted as work. Also, there are elections in the town sometimes. Your manifesto tells you to expand your defenses, or to expand your power plants. By voting on the candidates you support, to build the town they've decided to build. Unlike other media, the advantage of playing a game, is that you really live in that world, you really experience it. So through this game, some people may start to doubt: "Am I truly a member of this society?" "Am I truly contributing here?" There's surely more we could do in this world which we could only do inside a game. Now we are thinking that we would like to continue to challenge ourselves to explore the unknown. Thank you so much. (Applause)