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The Book Review
How Nintendo Became the World's Most Fun Video Game Company
00:42:45
Keza MacDonald, the video games editor at The Guardian and author of the new book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play,” speaks with host Gilbert Cruz about the iconic Japanese company.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:26]
Gilbert Cruz
Hi, I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. So here's the thing. I love books, and hopefully that's clear if you've listened to even a few episodes of this show. And I love movies, which, well, maybe has also become clear over the past few years to the annoyance of some people in the comments. And to those people, I will not apologize, but I am also really, really into video games. And this is something as an adult that I once would have whispered with slight embarrassment. But no more. No more. I'm a very proud video game player because it's true, and it has been true for quite a while now, that video games are one of the biggest forms of entertainment in the world. And the Japanese company Nintendo is one of the reasons why. Nintendo, the home of Mario and Luigi, Zelda and Link, Donkey Kong and Pokemon, is one of the most robust creative companies around. And my guest this week is here to talk about it. Kezza McDonald, the video games editor at the Guardian, is the author of Super Nintendo, the game changing company that unlocked the power of play. Keza. Welcome to the Book Review podcast.
- [01:45]
Kezza McDonald
Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:47]
Gilbert Cruz
You are a video game writer. You're a video game journalist. What does that look like? What does your average day look like?
- [01:54]
Kezza McDonald
Well, when I first became a games journalist, I got my first job on a games magazine when I was 16, which was about 20 years ago.
- [02:02]
Gilbert Cruz
Was that legal? Could you work at that age?
- [02:04]
Kezza McDonald
Just about. I was certainly underpaid, but I could work. I dropped out of school to become a games journalist, which I honestly think my parents might have preferred if I'd joined the circus because they would have understood what the circus was. And for a long time, this, which you mentioned, this slight snobbery around video games in the wider culture was something that I encountered day after day, thankfully less so as the years went by. But I write. So I write about video games, the people who make them and the people who play them. So my job is searching out the most interesting stories from virtual worlds, whether that's a really fascinating thing that players are doing that's unexpected, or a Creator with a really interesting story to tell or just a game that's really interesting and deserves some attention. So I feel like I'm an ambassador from video game world into wider culture.
- [02:50]
Gilbert Cruz
Working at a book publication at the New York Times Book Review. A lot of people assume that what I do all day is just read books. Like I come into the office and I sit down and I read books. And that's actually not what I usually do with my time. All of that is stuff that I do after hours. Essentially when I go home, it's nighttime. That's my actual reading time. I assume it's much the same for you as a video game journalist. People assume, oh well, KEZA must just sit in front of a video game console all day. What a job.
- [03:20]
Kezza McDonald
That's the difference between being a video games journalist and a Twitch streamer, I guess. Very little of my time, unfortunately, is spent playing games on the clock. Some, definitely some, but not as much as you might expect. I spend a lot of time talking to people like any journalist. But also, if you're going to be a good arts critic, then you have to know your subject inside out, right? So I do still play a lot of video games. I've never fallen out of love with them over my adulthood.
- [03:40]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, of all the game companies that you could have written about, you chose Nintendo. Nintendo is one of the longest standing, still existent video game companies. What distinguishes it from all of its competitors, from all of the Segas and the PlayStations and the Sonys and the Microsofts? Why has it had such a pull on our culture for 40, 45 years now?
- [04:07]
Kezza McDonald
There's a couple of reasons. I wanted to write a book about Nintendo, specifically, partly because I've been covering the company for a long time and it was the company that got me into video games. The first game I ever loved was the Legend of A Link to the Past. And so that was the first game that. It felt like a world as rich as the books that I read when I was little, as Narnia or any of the other fantasy that I was obsessed with as a kid. And so because Nintendo got me into games, I know that's the same story that millions of other people have had as well. And another thing that happened to me shortly before I started pitching this book is that I had children of my own and they are now discovering Nintendo. And I'm starting to see Nintendo through their eyes and see this as an intergenerational piece of culture, you know, in the same ways as Disney or indeed some of those classic Children's novels. So I thought that Nintendo would be the most interesting topic for me and that I wouldn't get bored of writing it halfway through. But that also Nintendo holds the key to understanding why we love video games as a whole. Because if you understand Nintendo, then you do understand why it is that people love games. It's been around for since the late 1800s, 1889. Nintendo started life as a playing card company that made Hanafuda cards in Kyoto in Japan. And before it got into video games, it made all sorts of other board and card games and toys. So it's got a very long history. And something that distinguishes Nintendo is that it has never really been interested in chasing the same technological cutting edge as other video game companies. It's always really focused on fun, creativity and innovation. And not all of its ideas have been successful, but the ones that have been really successful, the ones we all know about, like the Game Boy and the Switch, Mario, Zelda, those have been so successful that they've become a part not just of Japanese culture, but culture all over the world.
- [05:57]
Gilbert Cruz
How would you describe its cultural impact? Because we're here, we're talking about Nintendo. It's a thing that you obviously inherently understand. You wrote a book about it. I feel like I'm in my mid-40s. My entire life has been shaped and parallel to the growth and expansion of Nintendo. Some of its characters are among the most known characters in any franchise or medium around the world. And it still feels in some way that when you're talking about something like this to certain audiences, you still have to really over explain why it's important. What has been the cultural impact. You're wearing a T shirt. Our listeners cannot see this now. You're wearing a Pokemon T shirt. Pokemon is one of the biggest franchises of the modern age.
- [06:42]
Kezza McDonald
I think it's the biggest franchise of the modern age. Pokemon. I think it's made. I think in terms of sheer revenue, I think it's made more money than anything, including Marvel or Star Wars. I think something that if you maybe grew up slightly before the rise, the real kind of rise of video games in the 90s, then it may have seemed like video games were a niche activity for a long time. But there is this thing has happened where the millennial generation that grew up with games, we've aged into power, as it were. And so video games. Yeah, well, the power that was left anyway. And so I do think there's a bit more of a sort of general understanding of the importance of games and Nintendo's cultural Impact. In some ways, it's the cultural impact of video games as a whole. Because the story of Nintendo from the late 1970s onwards is the story of games as a whole. And a great many of the breakthroughs that Nintendo has made creatively in video games are breakthroughs that then drove the whole industry forward. So when we talk about Nintendo's cultural impact, we're not just talking about Nintendo's own games. We're talking about the influence that those really crucial games, things like Super Mario and Zelda and lots of others that I could get really nerdy about. But I'll spare you a big list. We're talking about the impact that those had on the people who played them and then went on to create their own video games, films, other media. And I think that we see the growing impact of video games as, like, I would say, the really the defining cultural meaning of the 21st century.
- [08:09]
Gilbert Cruz
You referenced being a child, and like many creative children, perhaps being into fantasy books or the Chronicles of Narnia, stuff like that, I'm wondering if you could tell me, unpack a little more, the connection between the creative worlds that you were able to find in books like that and what it was about those early Nintendo games that allowed you to make the leap into caring about this other medium that now defines your life.
- [08:33]
Kezza McDonald
There is this time in childhood where the walls and the boundaries between what's real and what isn't feel very porous. I know this is true for me as a kid. It's true for a lot of creative, imaginative children, for most children, I think. But the books that I read when I was young, the books that were read to me, particularly fantasy things like the Chronicles of Narnia, Enid Blyton's novels, the Faraway Tree, I remember being really into and rereading over and over again. I could live those stories in my own head. And that was the way into literature for me. That's the magic of reading. But then the difference when I started getting into video games when I was about 7 or 8, the difference then was that not only could I live it inside my head, I could actually do things on the screen. Like I could think, wouldn't it be cool if I could do that? And then I could try it, and then it would often work. So something like Zelda was the first game that captured me because it had a world that really responded to your natural curiosity. So you'd be in a graveyard and you'd think, I wonder if I push some of these gravestones around. I wonder if there's anything under there. And then there would be. You'd push one grave, and one of them would move, and there'd be a staircase. And it was that sense of discovery and awe. And so I would play games, and then I would also keep playing them in my head, and they would live there in my imagination. And then I would take things that I thought about and ideas that I'd had back into the game and be able to then execute them and experiment and play with them that way. And that was just on a completely different level in terms of being able to exercise my imagination. Games were on a very different level to everything else I was doing as a child. And I read. I still do read voraciously, but I read a lot as a kid. But I never watched that much tv, and I never got that into film because I had games and books, and they felt like the things that aligned most closely with my way of thinking. And also, I was quite lucky to have grown up at a time when video games were very interesting, because they were changing every single year. Every six months, there'd be some new technological breakthrough, something that nobody had ever seen before. And because I had Nintendo consoles when I was a child, I would often see those happening. I would read about them in the magazine for months, and then I would walk out into a game like Super Mario 64 and be able to move a character around in a 3D space for the first time. And so it felt really energizing to be into games in the late 90s and 2000s.
- [10:41]
Gilbert Cruz
So, Keza, one of the arguments that you make in your book is that Nintendo is a company that has succeeded and thrived and become such a cultural mainstay because it really has focused on this idea of fun and play. And I was curious about that because hypothetically, many video game companies are devoted to the idea of fun or play. What is it specifically about how Nintendo approaches these ideas that distinguishes them from anyone else making games right now?
- [11:14]
Kezza McDonald
I do think a lot of video game companies today specifically play and fun. It's a route to profit, right? Like the business of play. The business of fun is the thing that is being pursued with Nintendo. Although, don't get me wrong, Nintendo is a very profitable company, and Nintendo clearly has excellent business instincts. You do get the impression that perhaps the fun comes first. And one of the reasons I believe that is because I've spent an awful lot of time talking to people who work at Nintendo over the years and also reading pretty much everything that there is to read about Nintendo's history and the people that work there. And I do think there's a certain attitude of playfulness and an attitude of wishing to inspire joy that really comes first for Nintendo and its games. And obviously these ideas do result in immensely profitable games and franchises. But what you don't find in Nintendo games now is the same kind of engagement mining and profit mining techniques that you do see in other video games. Things like loot boxes.
- [12:23]
Gilbert Cruz
Say what those are for people who may not know what a loot box is, how companies are incentivizing spending money over and over again to play.
- [12:31]
Kezza McDonald
So a lot of other game companies, especially now, they're using engagement techniques, right? Like social media sites or gambling. They're using techniques like randomized rewards, like paying little bits of money every now and then to unlock new things. They incentivize you to return to the game with new daily, weekly, monthly rewards. All of this is stuff that's designed to keep players entrapped in a game's ecosystem. Nintendo games despite the fact that is very profitable, Nintendo isn't pursuing that same business idea. It's not pursuing the idea of farming for engagement. It's not trying to keep you locked into a game, spending infinite money on it over and over again. It's still selling games for an upfront price that you can then play as much as you like forever. And I think that for me it backs up this feeling that I get that Nintendo has a really long term approach in terms of its sort of respectability and lovability of its games and its characters. And instead of the pursuit of whatever will make the most short term profit, the pursuit of what will leave players with a good feeling and and what will make people feel good about playing the game and playing games in general. That does seem to really shine through in Nintendo's games, I think perhaps more so than most others, especially now.
- [13:49]
Gilbert Cruz
You talk about being a journalist and having to navigate writing this book while also dealing with the company Nintendo that is incredibly secretive. So amazing characters, very colorful, super fun, but also incredibly secretive when it comes to releasing information to journalists or fans. It's just hard to get any real understanding many times of how things operate within here. What do you think is the source of that? Will put walls around everything we do until we're ready and able to tell you.
- [14:22]
Kezza McDonald
I feel like Nintendo comes across a bit like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Like nobody's allowed inside. There's amazing things happening in there clearly, but nobody is allowed to know exactly what's going on. And there is this secretiveness to the company that has really always been a feature. There were a few brief years in the late 80s, early 90s where a couple of TV crews got into Nintendo's headquarters and had a look around. But since then, really very few people have been inside Nintendo's headquarters at all, unless they work there. And so it is. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that it's difficult to tell the story of why these games are so important without looking at how they were made and who made them. And that's information that Nintendo will never really give out itself. Nintendo opened a museum of its own history in southern Kyoto a couple of years ago. And in that museum you have all these displays of Nintendo's games and consoles and products, but nowhere will you find a name of somebody who made that, or even. Even in the credits of the games. You'll have a huge list of names, but you don't really get an insight into what they did, how they did it, where the ideas came from. That's the stuff that interests me, and I think that's the story that I wanted to tell in the book is where did these things come from? And is it this unimaginably wonderful dream factory, or is this a business like any other? And how do they come up with games that resonate and that last for decades and that sell for decades? How does this company do it?
- [15:53]
Gilbert Cruz
If this is Willy Wonka's Factory, who is Willy Wonka? Is there such a person at this company?
- [16:00]
Kezza McDonald
If Nintendo were like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then Willy Wonka himself would probably be Shigeru Miyamoto, who is Nintendo's most famous creative mind. And he is the person responsible for Mario and the person responsible for Zelda, two of Nintendo's longest running franchises. Both of them turned 40 recently. And Miyamoto was hired late in the 1970s as a product designer. And he wanted to be a comic book artist. So instead of a programmer or a tech guy, a computer guy, he was an art guy. And as a result, he had a very different way of thinking about games. And the result of that was Donkey Kong, a game that many people will remember very fondly from the arcade days of the early 80s. And that was one of the first games that had a bit of a story. It had a cartoonish look. It had a kind of story to how you progressed. There's a big ape, he's stolen your girlfriend. Go get her. Even that was more stories than most games had at that time. And Miyamoto has remained Nintendo's creative North star for many decades. Now he's now in his 70s, and he's no longer directly involved in game development, but he was until really quite recently. And he was the person that you had to get your idea past at Nintendo. If you wanted to see it become a finished game, you had to run the gauntlet of Shigeru Miyamoto's judgment. So although video games are made by hundreds of people these days, there are at Nintendo a few really senior creative figures who've had the source of influence that someone like Willy Wonka had in the novel.
- [17:37]
Gilbert Cruz
Can you describe a little bit how you understand the creation of, let's say, a Nintendo video game to occur? Right, because we're on a books podcast. You're an author, a single person who wrote a book. You think about television or movies, and obviously you have hundreds of people who are working on a production. There is a director, there is a writer. There are certain people who sort of like the creative lodestars. How does it work when it comes to a video game? Who are the creative lodestars? How do you get all these hundreds and sometimes thousands? If you look at the credits on some of these bigger games of people to come together, there's a great quote.
- [18:19]
Kezza McDonald
By Frank Lantz, who runs NYU's Game center, which, roughly paraphrased, is that a video game takes all of the creative arts necessary to perform an opera and all of the technical know how necessary to build a bridge. So video games are like bridges made of operas. And I love that quote because it really communicates the sheer miraculous difficulty of creating a game. You have writers like me whose job is to give texture to the worlds and the characters and the dialogue. You have coders who literally build the thing and determine how it works when you interact with it. You, you have musicians, you have artists, you have 3D artists. You have so many different disciplines and so many artistic disciplines and technical disciplines all coming together to make a video game. And when you spend a lot of time covering how games are made, you realize that every single one of them is kind of a miracle. It's amazing how much coordination has to go in to get all these people to work together effectively. And that's why modern games can take five years to make and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It's really hard to do. And Nintendo, one of the things that really defines their development process is that these teams are made up of people who have been there for a long time. So on the current Mario team, you will find Takashi Tezuka, who is a person who made the very first Mario game alongside Shigeru Miyamoto. He's working alongside all of these other people who've joined the company more recently in 10 years ago or five years ago or yesterday. And so you have this intergenerational knowledge about the spirits of the game, the ideas of the game, and then also importantly how the previous ones were made. And so they seem able to create games much more efficiently than some other game companies and with fewer people, which is really testament to how well they seem to work together. That's what makes it such an interesting art form for me.
- [20:17]
Gilbert Cruz
We'll be right back. Welcome back. This is the book review podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz and I'm here this week with Kezza McDonald, author of Super Nintendo, which is a history of the iconic video game company. There has been for a very long time, I think, unfortunately, the stereotype of the solo gamer in the basement. But I'm watching Stranger things with my 11 year old son now. It takes place in the 80s. There's a lot of scenes set in arcades. And something that you wrote resonated with me as I was watching that, which was essentially, you say many people's first experience with games was at an arcade or sitting with someone, a sibling, a friend, a child, a parent in front of a tv. That there always has inherently been something social about video games, which runs very counter to this idea of angry young men sitting in a dark room playing video games. I wonder as a video game journalist, how you think about those two, this reality versus the stereotype, how they sit next to each other.
- [21:39]
Kezza McDonald
This is something that's always been quite frustrating as a games writer for so long, is this idea that video games take you away from the real world, that they isolate you. When my lived experience as a player, but also the experience that I see over and over again, reporting on the people who play games and meeting them and speaking to them, is that games are a vector for connection. Not all games, but a lot of games are a vector for connection. And that started in the arcade where you'd be playing alongside others, you'd be competing to try and win at high scores, but you'd also be helping each other out like people. Older teenagers would teach younger kids the tricks of the cabinets and then that tradition really carried on, I think when gaming came into the home and most people's experience of games as children was playing with a parent or playing with a sibling, playing with roommates. How many of us played GoldenEye? 007 in college that these.
- [22:32]
Gilbert Cruz
Oh God, so many hours, many, many hours.
- [22:35]
Kezza McDonald
And these are the defining experiences of games. These are the things we remember. And when you talk to people about who love games, when you talk to them about the games that they remember the most, it's usually the ones that have some. They've got an association with a person, it's a game that they played with their best friend, or it's a game that they looked forward to for a long time and spent a lot of time talking about on a forum even, or it's a game that they played online with friends that they don't see very often. And even today, when a lot of social gaming has moved online and it might look to you like the 14 year old who's sitting in his bedroom with his headset on, is cut off, is isolated. But even then it's extremely likely that 14 year old is with his friends, he's talking, they're having a shared adventure in a space that is virtual rather than being down the park together. And I think that social aspect of games has always been really crucial to them. And there's always been this sense of connection among gamers. I think especially when it was a slightly more niche pursuit and when it was slightly more ridiculed in the wider culture, there was a kind of banding together of gamers and if you found someone else who was really into games, it was you, you'd have an instant friend there. And as much as some games are these huge worlds designed for you to lose yourself in vectors of escapism, I still think like most video games are played in pursuit of connection in some way. I talk about this a lot in respect to Pokemon, because that's a game that doesn't exist without other people. You can't play Pokemon without collecting, trading and fighting with other people. Right? Otherwise it's inert if you're playing it with yourself. And a lot of games are like that. They're really brought alive by you, the player, but then also by other people's experiences. And of course your experience with any game is going to be different from some other person's experience. That's what makes them interesting to talk about.
- [24:20]
Gilbert Cruz
So Kez, I grew up playing video games. I graduated from college, I got a job, and at some point I got rid of my video game consoles because I said to myself, if I have these in my house, I really am not going to be able to focus on making a life for myself. And many years passed before I ever played video games again. And then 2020 came and I went out and I bought a Switch, a Nintendo Switch, an Xbox and a PlayStation. And it was because of the Pandemic, this terrible thing, that I rediscovered my love of video games as an adult. I think that's true of many others. As you write in your book, you believe that the Pandemic sort of helped to persuade the wider world of the social and artistic value of video games, partially because we're all stuck inside, partially because of this one game that you write about, Animal Crossing. But I was wondering if you could talk about that time and what you saw as a journalist, as someone who's experiencing a lot of people having to be home for extended periods of time and maybe reconnecting with this medium, finding it as a way to spend time with their children, as I did with mine. The number of hours my child played Just Dance, for example, I truly believe led to him being into Dance right now as we speak. What was that time like for you?
- [25:46]
Kezza McDonald
I think the Pandemic was a real turning point for people's general understanding of games. Because a lot of people, like you, they play games as kids or in college, as young adults, and then they leave them behind, right? Because life gets in the way. And this is a story I hear a lot. And I'm sure it might well have happened to me if it hadn't been literally my job to keep up with games. And also I think I probably would have kept playing them, but certainly not to the extent that I did, because it was part of my work. And I think that when the Pandemic happened, we were all incredibly bored, firstly. And video games are just such a quick route into fun and like a really good kind of fun, a rewarding kind of fun. It wasn't just distraction. I think we all fell out of love with our phones as well, a lot during the Pandemic. Nobody wanted space scrolling, the news scrolling social media. That all started to feel bad and there was a desire for something else, something that felt more rewarding. And games are very rewarding. They're designed to be rewarding. And I think that perhaps if you are living your normal life and you've got lots to keep you occupied and lots of social fun going on, you don't necessarily need the fun and the social outlet that games have to offer. But when you have all of that taken away, suddenly games are your only route into fun and into socializing. Animal New Horizons came out in March 2020, and it could not have arrived at a better time. This was the point at which Most of the world was in lockdown. We were not allowed to safely socialize. It didn't feel safe to even hang out with your friends. And this game offered a way to hang out with your friends on a little deserted island that you can decorate with cute furniture. Some of my friends had their birthday parties on Animal Crossing during lockdown. It was also a creative outlet. People were holding comedy festivals, people were holding talk shows, people were holding art exhibitions inside Animal Crossing because it was the only safe way for us to do these things. And yeah, perhaps if all of that had existed in real life, many people wouldn't have spent quite so many hours building their Animal Crossing islands. But I think it really showed how games can save you from loneliness as well. If you're in a period of your life where, for whatever reason you are kind of lonely, then games are a really amazing social outlet. There are a lot of people who, for one reason or another, perhaps they're in a period of illness or disability. Games can be a really vital lifeline to the outside world and to other people. And I think the pandemic showed everybody, even people who usually have been too busy to play video games. The pandemic really showed them that aspect of gaming, that nourishing aspect of gaming that perhaps got slightly lost.
- [28:19]
Gilbert Cruz
I think at one point in your book you write, when you think about it, all games are quite surreal when we play them, we inhabit two worlds at once. And I think I know what you mean, but what do you mean?
- [28:33]
Kezza McDonald
When we're immersed in anything, right? It's the same with a book, but when we're really immersed in it, it really feels like we're at once sitting in the real physical world, but we are creating another one in our heads. And the magic of games for me is that you are a co creator of a game with the people who made it for you. Developers make a game, send it out into the world, and then what turns that into art is you interacting with it. I think that's just magic. If you are creating something alongside the person who programmed the game, wrote the game, drew the game, then you're participating in the creation of a sort of alternate reality. And I just think that's so cool. It really is. I remember feeling just stunned by the. The sheer imagination of games when I was a child. And that feeling, that childlike feeling of wonder, that's something that I can still access through games. Not as often, but now and then a game will really hit me like that and I'll feel like something slightly magic is occurring and that's the feeling that games give me that no other art form does.
- [29:35]
Gilbert Cruz
Speaking of childhood wonder, as I said, one of the reasons I got reinvested in video games was because of the pandemic. It was somewhat imposed on me, but one of the other reasons was because I had a child, and it was something that we were able to do together. It was also something during that time that was able to fill his time while his mother and I were working during the day. But as he has grown and as we have grown together, it has become this sort of shared form of joy. And we play games together as much as we can. What has your experience been as a parent now who is trying to figure out the best ways to share games with your children, the healthiest ways to do so, giving them this medium that you grew up with.
- [30:23]
Kezza McDonald
Sharing games with my kids has been so rewarding. Overall, it's been so fun because you start to see things through their eyes. And in the same way as that, I think a lot of people look forward to the first time they can watch their favorite film as a child. When with their kid, you're waiting for that year when they're finally old enough to watch Star Wars Goonies or whatever it was. And for me, that was Pokemon. I was waiting for my little kids to be old enough to play Pokemon. Not just watch it, but play it, really engage with it. And that has finally happened in the last few years. And we all three of us now play Pokemon together. And it's just lovely because I would not play a Pokemon game now as an adult, probably. They're games that are very much aimed at kids, and I've played loads of them. I don't necessarily need to spend any more time with a Pokemon game, but because my children are seeing it differently, I'm seeing the game differently as well. And keeping games for us as a mostly family activity rather than an individual one. It feels really nourishing. It's really great to have something that we can all enjoy. I think everybody knows how hard it is to find stuff that you can enjoy and your kids can enjoy at the same time. I also think that ironically, because I know games inside out, I'm actually the one who's always kind of advising other parents not to let their kids play certain things.
- [31:40]
Gilbert Cruz
You hear people in the tech industry, I've heard this said. They're like, I know how this works. I will not give my child a phone until they're 18 years old just because I know how addictive it can be. As someone who has grown up with video games and who writes about them for a living. How do you navigate that when you are trying to also be a good parent?
- [32:00]
Kezza McDonald
I am very pro video games. But video games encompasses a huge variety of things. On the one end you have Roblox, which is essentially made up of unmoderated stuff that other people have made, you know, and it's an online collection of who knows what. And then you have games like Nintendo's which are very authored, very enclosed, very safe. So the spectrum between those two extremes is huge. And there are a lot of games that are for adults, that have adult content that you absolutely would not show to a kid that a kid should not be playing. And there are also games that I personally don't trust with my children's welfare. I wouldn't let my kids play anything online, for instance. Anything where there's a possibility for them to be talking to strangers is a hard no for me at this stage. But I also think that we have a lot of panic about screen time as a concept. But not all screen time is created equal. Like an hour of a child watching YouTube unsupervised, completely different from a kid spending an hour with Mario or watching a Pixar film together with your children is completely different from an hour half of whatever's on Netflix that day. It's really about finding a version of screen time that is nourishing in some way. So for me, games are. I put limits on it, but I don't put strict limits on it because it really depends on how we're feeling on that day. But other things like YouTube and social media are like very strictly controlled in my household. But I do understand it's hard to understand the differences between different types of. If you're not into them yourself. It can be really hard to see the difference between a game like Fortnite and a game like Call of Duty. They're both shooting games, but one is very adult oriented and quite violent. The other one is more cartoonish and would be suitable for a 12 or 13 year old. It's hard to know this stuff and that's also part of the job these days. I think of the people who cover video games is helping people to understand the broad things that are out there and helping them to understand what their kids are doing and why they love it so much.
- [33:53]
Gilbert Cruz
I think about the history of modern media a lot. So film history and music history and ranking of things. But you can only have history if you're able to access the things. And so when I'm thinking about video game history. You wrote about this Zelda game, Ocarina of Time. It's a game from 1998, and you say it was considered then and maybe is considered even now to be one of the, if not the best video games ever made. And I thought two things, because we're talking about technology that degrades over time or whatever, the ability to access old things in order to sort of experience and judge them. And then the way in which the advanced technology that we have now when it comes to video games, can radically alter the way in which we see something like a blocky 3D game from 1998. So when a video game writer, video game critic, says, this game is one of the best video games ever made, the modern player picks it up, plays it, and says, this is so boring. Or I don't know how to do this. And you would never necessarily have that experience. If you're thinking about Citizen Kane or Rolling Stone's album or James Joyce's Ulysses, you can still experience it in the same way, hypothetically that people who experienced it the first time did. How do you think about video game history and the way in which we judge or don't judge greatness?
- [35:16]
Kezza McDonald
Games are more susceptible than anything else to becoming obsolete, partly because a lot of game studios don't really take much care in preserving the things that they put out 10 years ago. It's old news, right? Or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. Nintendo does take great care with this back catalogue, but it's one of the only companies that does. And now you have entire organizations like the Video Game History foundation who are dedicated to collecting old discs full of code and old video game magazines and everything that's been made or said about a game, collecting that all together to document it. Because game studios are so bad at doing this. And there is also, the technology does make older games feel really obsolete. If you are trying to appreciate a Nintendo 64 game now from the late 90s, it's hard to show someone that now, maybe a teenager now, with its one analog stick and its weird buttons and its blocky looks and be like, look, this was really important. It was really important. You have to trust me. I was there, man, it's hard. But, you know, these days you can play a game from 15 years ago, from 2010, and it's not that different. The pace of technological change flattened out since then. Obviously, some things have improved. Graphics are prettier, but generally the kind of you can play a game from up to about 15 years ago and not necessarily notice that it's old, but before that you do have this huge barrier to entry. And I do wonder whether this is going to be something that when we're all old, we will just be the people. We will be the people who understood why those games were great. And perhaps it's just the case that they won't last a long time, but I'm not sure. I think that people are still playing the original Mario today. People are still playing games from 20 or 25 years ago today. Happily, they're still loving them now. And I think that you will see a younger generation who develop an appreciation for these older games in the way that you develop appreciation for older music. There's an awful lot of people who love the Beatles, even though they were not alive in the 1960s. And I think the same will be true for games, for the ones that really stand the test of time.
- [37:21]
Gilbert Cruz
You wrote a recent piece for the Guardian where you're the video game's editor about playing through the quite difficult game Silksong, which was the long awaited sequel to another game called Hollow Knight. And you wrote about being diagnosed with a nerve condition that resulted in pretty significant pain in your arm and your hand. And these are things that you need in order to play video games. I'm wondering if that's still something that you're having to deal with and if so, or even at the time, how it's changed your relationship to this thing that you love and this thing that you do for a living.
- [37:58]
Kezza McDonald
Yeah, so I injured the nerves in my arm, basically. So my entire right arm was in really very bad nerve pain for a good kind of six to eight months. It was pretty intolerably bad. And it affected my work, it affected my life massively. And for a while it was so bad that using my right hand would hurt. So I couldn't really play games, certainly not in the way that I was used to. And as I've healed and gotten better, I've regained use of my right hand. I can play games again, but certainly for a good few months I could not play them with the intensity that I used to. I really like difficult games. I like games that present me with an intellectual challenge. I like games that present me with a reflex challenge as well. That's what gives me the satisfaction. And the games that I tend to get really into are the ones that have a lot of depth, either intellectual thematic depth or depth in terms of how you can master them. And so I had to start approaching games very differently. I had to start being much more chill about them. I had to start playing for shorter periods at a time. I had to be slower, more gentle. I actually hear a lot in my job. I hear from a lot of people who are retired, who have really picked up a gaming hobby in their 70s or 80s, and who find that a lot of games feel very demanding, like too demanding to play. So I've really started to appreciate the need for games with different temperaments and four different temperaments, and games with different pacing and also the options that games will give you to make things a little bit easier on you. They might make it easier for you to play through without dying all the time, or they might make it easier to control. They might simplify the controls. This is stuff that's really important for. For enabling as many people as possible to appreciate games. And this kind of macho, gatekeepy idea that, no, you just gotta get good, you gotta be good enough. There's a famous Dar o' Brien joke where it's like a book doesn't close itself in your hands if you don't understand a word. Whereas a game does have this habit sometimes of locking you off from the rest of the game if you can't do a certain thing. And so it really gave me. Having that period of disability and illness gave me a renewed appreciation for a more sedate pace of gaming and also for the accessibility options that games offer. Games teach you that you just have to really keep trying. You just throw yourself a challenge over and over. You get better and eventually you'll prevail. And with illness, that's often not the case. It's very rarely is illness and recovery from illness a matter of willpower. Instead, it's a matter of connecting to yourself, giving yourself rest, learning to take life a little easier than you normally would. That's what recovery is about. And I learned that games can fit into my life in a different way. It was a difficult period to get through, but games certainly helped me a lot in the end.
- [40:37]
Gilbert Cruz
This is a books podcast, and so I must ask if there are listeners who are looking for a game experience that is sort of book like. If you have any recommendations, I'm going.
- [40:52]
Kezza McDonald
To recommend a game that a lot of people talk about when you talk about literary video games. And that is Disco Elysium, which is a very political game about a drunkard cop trying to figure out what he did last night. And from that premise tumbles out a very interesting game that is very concerned with human motivations and psychology. And that has a lot of really pretty smart writing and dialogue in it. That's a game that a lot of people appreciate on that level.
- [41:23]
Gilbert Cruz
I also find I have, amongst the many different kinds of games I play, I've rediscovered the love of, of really narrative driven games. There's the excavation of Hobbs Barrow. Did you ever play this?
- [41:36]
Kezza McDonald
Oh yeah, yeah. That's an adventure game, right?
- [41:38]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah. Story driven adventure games that feel they're not particularly onerous, you don't have to be overly dexterous in order to play, but you're following a story, creating the story along the way. I love those games.
- [41:52]
Kezza McDonald
The great thing about narrative games is that the point of the game is to experience the story, you know, is not to beat a boss, get the high score, whatever. It's just to experience the story. And there are a lot of those around these days and a lot of really interesting stories being told. I recently played one called Dispatch, which is. It's like. It stars Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame. And it's about a kind of reluctant former superhero who's put in charge of a call center, dispatch center for superheroes. And it was a very funny take on the genre. It was much cleverer than I thought it was going to be. I really enjoyed it. But that's a game where all you do is watch, listen, laugh, make the occasional choice about what a character does and just experience the story.
- [42:32]
Gilbert Cruz
Watch, listen, laugh. I'm gonna get it crocheted on a pillow. Kezza McDonald, thank you so much for joining the Book Review podcast to talk about your book Super Nintendo.
- [42:41]
Kezza McDonald
Thank you, Gilbert.
- [42:43]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Keza MacDonald about her new book Super Nintendo, the game changing company that unlocked the power of play Play. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.
- [43:04]
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Kezza McDonald
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