Keza MacDonald - How Nintendo Changed the World

0:00America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first, nearly three years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home, and not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us. Will we let them? Or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures. Let's tell Washington to keep us in the lead. Learn how at americacures.com. Pay for it by Farmer. Hello and welcome to the How To Academy podcast, the Boi Weekly show from London's home of Big Thinking. I'm Vashkristadulu. Guardian journalist Kessum McDonald is the author of Super Nintendo, a new history of the company that reveals how a Kyoto playing card manufacturer became one of the most loved organizations in the history of popular entertainment. The book should be read by anyone who wants to know how a giant corporation can consistently

1:04break all the rules to delight and innovate generation after generation. Kessu joined me earlier this week to reveal more. Kessu, in a very real sense, you've been conducting the research for this book for your entire life. That is very true since I was approximately six, I think, since I could read. Why is it Nintendo, then? Rather than the many other video game companies that were competing for your time as a six-year-old, that won your affection. So when I was little, I had a slightly older technophobic parents or certainly tech skeptical parents. And as a result, I wasn't allowed to touch a video game. I was never ever going to be allowed to touch a video game. So I would sit while my mom was doing the weekly shop in Science Breeze. I would sit and I would read the magazines that were there about video games. And I would just like vividly hallucinate about what these games might be like. And so the reason that I gravitated towards Nintendo was

2:05because honestly, the Nintendo magazines were the most interesting looking to a six-year-old. And so I would develop this fantasy console in my head, these fantasy games. And when I eventually got a console, it was an Nintendo one because that's the one that I've been reading about by that point for a couple of years. What did you have to do to get that? Bag. I had to beg. I had to recruit my brother in order to double the begging. I also a little bit later on when I was about 10, I made a PowerPoint presentation about why I should definitely be allowed a Game Boy. It was intense. It was intensive. My parents were not particularly keen on games. And then it was also very restricted. Me and my brother were only allowed to play games on a Friday in a Saturday. Obviously that did not work. It did not dampen my enthusiasm for them whatsoever. But I'm not the only person for whom Nintendo was the route into games. In the 90s, if you were a child interested in video games, it was really going to be either Nintendo or Sega or maybe PlayStation, although that was more teenagers and older. So my experience is one,

3:08maybe not the magazine's part, but everything else about discovering video games through Nintendo. I think that's an experience that many millions of people share. Why do you think your affection for Nintendo has extended into your adult life, when I'm sure so many of the other things you enjoyed as a six, seven-year-old have fallen by the wayside? There's a difference between childish and childlike, right? And Nintendo's games, they are childlike without being childish. I think also having a nostalgic association with something isn't enough to sustain an affection for it into adulthood. There's an awful lot. I'm at peak nostalgia age right now. I'm in my late 30s. Every company is trying to sell me stuff based on the childhood associations that I have with it. This already happened for Gen X with Star Wars, and now it's happening to us with Pokemon and all sorts of other things. But what has really kept Nintendo interesting for me, for all these years, for 30 years now,

4:09is that it keeps changing. Nintendo games keep innovating, and they keep giving me something new, alongside bringing out the familiar old toys of Mario and Zelda and everything I used to play when I was a child. Another thing that has certainly more recently cemented Nintendo in my household is that I have my own children, and I have been looking for a way to introduce them to video games that kind of echoes my own experience, right? The positive experience that I had growing up with games that made me feel creative and intellectually stimulated and not just, you know, entertained. And so I'm now sharing Nintendo with my own children, and so it's become like an intergenerational thing. And I think if it hadn't, then I certainly wouldn't be playing Pokemon anymore if my six-year-old wasn't in Pokemon. You know, Pokemon is a series that really is aimed at children. It's a children's fiction, and without a child in my life, I might have definitely grown out of that by now. But then Mario and Zelda, they only come along really every maybe three, four years, maybe even

5:12every five years, and every time one turns up, it's been long enough since the last one, that the game recaptures something that I want to experience again. Did you make your children sit through a PowerPoint presentation? My kids have no idea how lucky they are. Honestly, the sheer gulf in experience between my kids with their games journalist mother and my own childhood with my text skeptical parents, it really couldn't be larger. The company is very secretive, and any official statements about their working practices or missions tend to be sort of bland corporate speak. So how were you able to discover so much about their history and internal culture? Nintendo does not like speaking about itself, and it's very difficult to get them to wheel out one of their star creatives and just have a chat. You know, it all tends to be, as with most games companies, they like to tie things into marketing beats. So you'll have the very sanitized situation where there'll be a new game coming out.

6:15They'll send a bunch of people to a big white room to play the game for a bit, and then you'll maybe get 20 minutes to talk to someone who worked on it. And you can't get anything interesting out of that. It's really, really hard to get as a journalist anything interesting out of that kind of setup. So I did have to dig a bit deeper. One of the things that helped is that I've been a games journalist for 20 years, so I've got my first job on a games magazine when I was 16, which you can imagine my parents were delighted about. So over the years, I've managed to speak to certain creatives at Nintendo several times, and I think just developing just that little bit of recognition and relationship has really helped me to talk a little bit more deeply about the games. And then the other thing that really helped was that Nintendo had a president called Satura Uwata, who the whole time he was in charge of Nintendo, he would interview people at the company about the games they were making. And Uwata obviously managed to get quite a lot more interesting stuff out of Nintendo's creative teams over hours and hours worth of interviews over 10 to 15 years

7:19than anyone could get in a 20 minute interview. So the combination of that wonderful archive of Uwata's interviews with Nintendo creatives and my own sort of 20 years of just very slowly getting, getting under the skin of Nintendo's people and Nintendo's games and understanding it better. The combination of those two things I think is what unlocked the kind of anecdotes and the kind of insight that comes across in the interviews in the book, I think. Uwata is kind of an amazing guy, right? I mean, you're a journalist for the Guardian, and here is a corporate CEO, and he's kind of the hero of the book. The way that he transforms Nintendo's corporate culture, not just this sort of brief glimpse of openness that we had while he was the president, but in other ways is extraordinary. I mean, can you speak a little bit more about that? Uwata is one of the most extraordinary business people in all of entertainment history, I think.

8:19So he was a gifted programmer, nerdy kid, and an incredibly gifted programmer who straight out of school started developing games and as part of Tokyo's at the time, quite nascent game development scene. And he then ended up through a series of circumstances. He ended up being put in charge of a game developer in Tokyo that worked with Nintendo and he saved it from bankruptcy and then worked very closely with Nintendo for years, and was eventually sort of taken on by Nintendo's then president Hiroshi Amuchi, who was like a guy in his 70s at that point, 60s 70s. And he took Uwata on who kind of selected him, hand selected him as the next president of Nintendo. And the thing about Satura Uwata is that he very sadly passed away about 10 years ago, but he had this incredible ability to see the humanity in games. He saw what they brought to people, he saw the joy that they inspired. And he had himself like the heart of a gamer, like he was such a gamer, most corporate presidents of anything. They're not that interested in the thing that the company does, right?

9:20They just aren't. And as a guardian journalist and also a human being living in our times, I'm extremely skeptical of most of the CEO class, the corporate class. And so to have the president of a game company who instead of firing people when Nintendo wasn't doing so well, cut his own salary, who instead of demanding that Nintendo follow whenever the shareholders wanted, decided to take a very brave approach and go with things like the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS, which were designed to broaden the gaming audience, and to bring in people who didn't already play games, rather than just chasing whatever the kind of thing of the moment was, like online gaming or micro transactions. All of the stuff that other game companies were doing, Iwata had the kind of courage and inspiration to say, no, let's go in a completely different direction. And the result of that was Nintendo having one of the most successful periods of its entire history when the Nintendo Wii and the DS were, you know, you had your granny playing Wii tennis. That was very much inspired by Iwata.

10:20And I think his ability to understand the purpose of games and the effect that they had on people. I think that still lives on in Nintendo's corporate culture now. I hope it does for for significantly longer. It might not last forever, but I do think there is this real genuine, genuine love for games and genuine understanding of people that Iwata had that's really so unusual, not just in the games industry, but in any industry to have a CEO who really understands that stuff. Spring is here and the shopping list is long. Time to make a lows run. Buy three bags get three free of stay green one cubic foot garden soil. Plus, right now members can earn four times the points on an eligible purchase. Start spring off strong with these deals and more. Our best lineup is here at Loads. Valent the 325, while supplies last. Soil offer excludes a last gun Hawaii, loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. See Loads.com slash terms for details. Subject to change. Point booster subject to exclusions and more terms apply. One time only offer. So don't be at two as come home to Disney plus.

11:21Let's go get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time. New friends. Do it this night. And your last name? This night. Dream team. New habitats. Utopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon. At home. Zotopia 2. Now available on Disney plus rated PG. Right now you can get Disney plus in Hulu for just 499 a month for three months with a special limit to time offer ends March 24th. After three months plan auto renews at 1299 a month terms apply. Can you take us back to the origins of the company way back in the midst of time? Nintendo started as a playing card company in 1889 in Kyoto. So this was a very as an interesting period of Japanese history actually because the trade routes and communication routes with with other countries would have just been opening back up again over the previous previous decades. They'd also just lifted a kind of total ban on anything that was gambling or gambling adjacent. So Hanafuda cards which were the Japanese playing cards that Nintendo made

12:25those were able to be produced again and able to be sold again. And then it kind of situates Nintendo on this like continuum of play from board games and in-person games through to chess through to cards. These are things that have been around since humans have had civilizations we've played. And so Nintendo arrives at a time when card games were the sort of easiest route to play. And in the next decades it started selling western style playing cards in Japan right? So and then it would sell different games based around like family games. It's sort of strange selection of toys and other products things like board games. They had a baby stroller. They had all kinds of other odd experimental toys really. And so that history of Nintendo was like a slightly mad toy maker that comes through when it starts making video games and getting into consoles. And it still kind of comes through now that that toy making history. But I think Nintendo's history making things to play with that really informs how Nintendo

13:28functions as a game company. It feels more like a toy maker than a tech company even now. One of the unique things about Nintendo separates them from other hardware manufacturers and certainly in the console market is that they don't try to make the most powerful machines. And that attitude has been embedded in the company since they were an electronic toy maker. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? This concept of doing interesting things with older technology comes from a guy called Gunpei Yokoi. He was one of Nintendo's early employees in the 1960s and 70s. And his job was to fix the machines that made the cards on the production line. But he got really bored doing that because it was a boring job. So instead he invented strange little contraptions just to amuse himself. So he invented this extendable grabber hand. And at one point the chief of the company was doing the rounds and saw Gunpei Yokoi playing with this extendable grabber and went, hey, that looks good.

14:29Let's make some more of those. And so that was Nintendo's first hit toy. It was called the Ultrahand. And it saw tons and tons in Japan, the Ultrahand. It was a very popular toy. And it was followed by the Ultra Machine, which was a little machine that would spit little ping pong balls, like baseballs at you and you would hit it with a bat. So these were the strange toys that Nintendo first came out with. But that person, Gunpei Yokoi, he ended up in charge of Nintendo's R&D department. And his entire philosophy was lateral thinking with weather technology. So what that means is not necessarily chasing the technological cutting edge, but instead looking at what you've got that's affordable and doing something new with it. So you can see that philosophy in things like the Wii, you know, there's, it's not the most powerful console, but it has motion control, and so unless you play games in a new way, you can see it really clearly in an Nintendo game called Labo, which was essentially a big box of cardboard for 70 pounds. But you would make models out of

15:30this cardboard. You'd make like a model house or a model fishing rods or a little model piano. And then when you would insert the Nintendo Switch controllers into those cardboard models, they would transform into electronic toys. But that's, that's kind of magic. And Nintendo has this ability to find interesting things to do with technology that is not going to bankrupt, either as customers or the company, right? So Nintendo consoles are known for being somewhat underpowered as it were compared to Xbox and PlayStation. It's main rivals, but that is one of its strengths, because it means that it actually makes money on everything it sells as well, rather than selling the hardware or loss, and then making up for it by selling lots of games, they've made money on everything they've ever sold. But it also enables the developers in Nintendo and the console designers to be, there's restraint there, right? And restraint often leads to creativity. And I think that that comes across a lot in Nintendo's consoles. There's technological constraints, and that leads people to find interesting new things to do with a tech that already exists. Yeah, there's a common refrain in the in the wider gaming community in the tech industry

16:35that Nintendo should just give up on hardware and make their games for other people's more powerful hardware. But it's always struck me that people who have that view don't have the faintest idea what they're talking about. Do you think Nintendo games could function on other people's hardware as they're something intrinsic in the relationship between the innovative hardware and the innovative gameplay that means they could never be separated? I agree with you that people who say, are just put Mario on a phone or just put Mario on the PlayStation. There has been a constant constant refrain for especially since the GameCube, which was not one of Nintendo's most successful consoles. So since the early 2000s, there has been this rather unimportant opinion that Nintendo would do better if it just gave up on consoles. But I do believe that the interrelationship between the software and the hardware, that's that's kind of the key. That's the key to Nintendo's success is that they make quite eccentric consoles and toys, and then they make equally eccentric and

17:38interesting things to play on those specific consoles. And the relationship between the controllers, things like the Nintendo 64 controller with its strange three-prong design and its analog stick, even the Wii U controller, which had like a screen inside it, the game's all function based on this interesting creative interrelationship between making the hardware and then making something to play. And the teams at Nintendo work very closely together. So the person who's made that controller sits in the same building as the person who's making the flagship game to play on it. And I think that that's a really key thing that's allowed Nintendo to keep being innovative because they're not having to look at whatever it is that Sony is doing with the PlayStation 5 and being that, okay, well, we've got to make something that conforms to that. They can be like, no, we want to be able to have an infrared sensing thing on our controller so we can use it as a mouse randomly. We want to be able to, you know, wave around the left joy-con to wave your hand in a game. They can have these ideas and then build that into the hardware that they're making. And in addition to

18:42that, it's very profitable because if you sell games on other people's platforms, right, you have to give a 30% cut of that to whoever owns it. So if you're selling a game on Steam on PC, Steam gets 30% of that PlayStation or Xbox will get 30% of whatever you sell through their platform. Nintendo keeps all of the profits not just from its own games and its own hardware, its own consoles, but then also from everybody else who sells the game on an Nintendo platform. So business-wise, it also just would not make sense for an Nintendo to give up on the hardware to give up on consoles. The hardware companies that make the cutting-edge stuff are often copying Nintendo's innovations after the fact as well, thinking about Sony copying the analog stick on the PlayStation controller. I mean, when they introduced that for the N64, it reinvented video games. You could say the same thing about the Switch and the various Steam Deck and Steam Deck-like consoles out there today. Yeah, and Nintendo has this habit of often it will come up with an idea and the idea won't be

19:45quite ready for the world or the world won't be ready for the idea. A good example of this is animal crossing, which obviously sold 30 something million copies in 2020 during lockdown when we were all desperate for a connection. And it's a lovely creative chill vibes game that allows people to come together on an island and you know, decorate their houses, make beautiful, close to each other. It's a very lovely community-focused game, but that game first came out in 1999, which was really before online gaming had taken off, before social media even existed. And so at that time, it was a weird idea that wasn't quite like ready for the world. And then every time animal crossing came out again, every time there was a new entry in that series, it was more suited to the world around it. So online gaming came in and you could visit each other's villages and towns and more easily. You could share the creative things that you'd made more easily once social media turned up. So I think Nintendo has a talent sometimes for sticking with an idea that's not quite ready yet,

20:46and then just taking it forward maybe for even five or ten years until it's an idea that works properly. And I think if there's a skill in that company for understanding the ideas that are worth sticking with and the ones that weren't, the Nintendo Switch, which is Nintendo's most successful console ever, the idea of having a console that you could dock and play on your TV and then pick up and play in your hands. We're used to that now, but that was a really revolutionary concept. And it united the kind of once separate streams of home consoles and handheld consoles. And now that that feels very, it feels natural, it feels completely normal. But at the time, I remember people being like, can they even work? How would that? And is it even a good idea to try and unite those two at the time, quite different flavors of gaming? So yeah, some of its ideas are adopted immediately and become standard. Some of its ideas take a bit longer, but generally Nintendo knows when to stick with an idea and when not to. What did you learn about the spirit of collaboration and iteration that Nintendo uses to keep their work so fresh and exciting?

21:51Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you, and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling. Ross, work your magic. New Maybelline Serum lipstick. Maybe it's not just lipstick. It's lush color with endless possibilities. It's serum infused with the hyaluronic acid and oil blend for eight hour pumping moisture in tone enhancing shades. It's more than the shade. It's who's wearing it. You knew Maybelline Serum lipstick. Maybe it's Maybelline. So the way the games industry normally works is that you get a lot of people together for projects and then they work very hard on the game and then the game comes out and half those people get fired because we're back to concepting now they don't need so many people, right? So game teams generally

22:53they start small in concepting and prototyping and then they expand outwards when it comes to finishing off the game and then once something's released they'll contract again. This leads to a lot of turnover in the games industry. Like a lot of people go through five, six, seven jobs all with different studios and different companies. Nintendo doesn't do that. It scales its teams up and down but it doesn't do the hiring, firing thing. So people who work at Nintendo they stay there for their whole careers sometimes. So an awful lot of the people who really built Nintendo as we know it today they've been working there since the 70s or the 80s and they're still there now and a lot of these guys are going to retire in the next few years which is why this is kind of an interesting point in Nintendo's history because they've had to pass that down. They've had to pass down the institutional knowledge and let the idea of the spirit of these games that we love they've had to pass that down to a new generation and the way they've done that is by creating these intergenerational teams. So you have on the Zelda team you have

23:53the senior guy whose name is AGO Numa. He's been working on Zelda since the 90s and then you have the current director Hidamaru Fujibayashi who's younger and then you have this like collaboration really between the different generations of developer at Nintendo and no matter whether you're the guy who's been there for 40 years or the guy who started last Wednesday everybody gets to present their ideas everybody gets to contribute to to every game concept they have a quite an almost quite egalitarian way of prototyping and getting ideas going everybody gets to contribute it's not hierarchical as there's not this kind of autosituation where there's someone at the top telling everybody else what to do it's a very collaborative game development environment this is quite unusual from from what I understand of how games work usually it does not work like this and you know if you're if people ask all the time that why Nintendo games are the way they are why they why they have such a high kind of consistent bar for quality and it is because of that it's because there's an intergenerational team structure and also people aren't getting hard and far

24:57at all the time so they have the institutional knowledge stays in the company and also people have security I have heard that it's quite hard to make it in Nintendo right I've heard that you have to be like a particular type of person and the standards are very high but I think if you if you do make it in Nintendo then you have the opportunity to contribute for you know not just however long that one project lasts for but however long you want to you you can you can stay and and make new things in spite of that culture there is one man who is a figurehead for the company he is perhaps the only game designer in the world who is close to being a household name we haven't mentioned him yet but it is of course my moto you've met my moto more than once how was that was it a case of never met your heroes well he's me moto started at Nintendo in the late 70s right and then he made Nintendo's first video game hit Donkey Kong that was his idea and then obviously he went on to make Mario and Zelda with with small teams and he has remained like Nintendo's creative north star

26:02ever since and as you say if there's one game designer that someone knows the name of it's probably Shigeru Miyamoto he's had such a gigantic impact on culture like massive so as a result of this you might expect him to have an ego on him but he he really doesn't like at all it's really it's surprising to talk to Miyamoto because he he's a very he's kind of he's in his 70s now the first time I spoke to him he was probably in his mid 60s so I spoke into him to I think three times over the course of of my career and opportunities to do so are quite rare right they keep him they keep him under lock and key as it were but he he doesn't have a massive ego on him he doesn't have like he's not he's he's also not possessive about Nintendo's properties that he that he played such a huge role in creating when I spoke to him for the book a few years ago he talked about Mario was like what other people have him there other people are raising him and he's like you know I can't really imagine feeling too possessive over Mario now I feel like he's he's he's become everybody's

27:03he's he's not just mine and I think that's a really unusual unusual view for for someone like him to have like almost no like possessiveness and almost no ego really about about these amazing things he's created but yeah Miyamoto as a as a figurehead for Nintendo he's like he comes across as quite cuddly you know he's he's always come up come out on on stage at Nintendo events waving a little sword around for a New Zelda game or something he's got a great big smile like a really big joyful smile and the games that he makes are so playful but you know you'd imagine he'd be a very a lovely person really but he does have a reputation Nintendo for being a bit of a hard ass like he will he will during the time that he was in charge of development Nintendo he would really shut ideas down he'd have very high standards for for what people brought forward as ideas and he'd he'd have absolutely no qualms whatsoever shutting people down I spoke to one of Nintendo's longtime employees his ashi no gami who said he'd never once been praised by

28:04Miyamoto like to his face never once in all those years and the his colleague patted him on the back and said well behind your back he's very pleased with you so I feel like he's got this he's got a reputation outside Nintendo as being very cuddly kind of guy but I actually think he was he had very very high standards and he he had such enormous creative impacts at Nintendo because he had such high standards he's not technical guy so what qualities does he bring to the business of game design that have made him so successful so Miyamoto's he's an artist he's he wants it to be a cartoonist he wanted to draw comics and he studied product design right so he ended up at Nintendo because I think his dad got him the interview if I remember correctly like he knew someone there who had an in so he was he had an artist's eye and at this time video games were barely excellent you know we're talking space invaders era at this point so video games were so new and Miyamoto the thing that he brought with Donkey Kong the thing that he brought to games was this

29:07cartoonist's eye so he had an idea for character and story and if you look at things like space invaders Pac-Man the big hits at the time like Pac-Man's that she just is circle space invaders has no plot whereas Donkey Kong had the semblance of a plot it was here's this big monkey he's taken he's taken your girlfriend go get her back and then it had a sequence of levels that gave you the sense of like progressing like moving through a story and then it had an ending but these were all new things these were completely new things for games at the time and when Mario and Zelda came out in the mid 80s they were also they had this idea of a journey you know that they had an idea of like an adventure for Zelda and for Mario he had this idea of like this the sea and the sky and the ground and like moving through the elements and these were they just felt like worlds in a way that a lot of games didn't a lot of games felt like stages you know they felt like or arenas but Miyamoto's games felt a bit like worlds and it's very interesting actually how the relationship between Miyamoto and Iwata was those two had a fantastic friendly rivalry

30:11and friendship and Iwata was obviously running Nintendo he was the president of Nintendo Miyamoto was the creative leader of Nintendo you'd imagine there might have been a big clash there but there wasn't because Iwata had the mind of a programmer he was he was an exceptionally talented technical game maker and then Miyamoto had this this multi-disciplinary game design mind and this artist's sensibility and so these two people had completely different flavors of creative intelligence both of which were absolutely vital to how Nintendo made games that's one of the things that's so interesting about games right because they're made by musicians artists programmers there's such a lot of technical expertise and such a lot of creative expertise and really the marriage of those two things is what video games are that's what I still find them so interesting after all these years is because games are at once like a really complicated jet engine and like a really beautiful painting like all of those skills are in there and the ways in which you would appreciate those two very different things are existing games there they're a unique marriage of technology and art and yet Nintendo's ability to like recognize people who have

31:15different types of creative intelligence and bring them together and put them in teams together that's another reason why Nintendo's stuff tends to be unusual and tends to be so interesting so this is not a gaming podcast what can people who are creatively minded learn from Nintendo and draw into their own art forms the biggest lesson to be learned from Nintendo I think is that failure is a necessary and important part of making something interesting and lasting. Nintendo has had all these very long running games and all these very successful consoles that's what you think of when you think about Nintendo but they've had a lot of quite high profile failures along the way and the things that you can't do anything creatively and just interesting without making room for failure if you're going to put forward experimental ideas in whatever medium you're working in you have to make room for that not working for Nintendo in a business sense they've created a huge kind of stockpile of cash so that if they have a console or a game that

32:17doesn't hit it doesn't mean that the company goes down in the tech industry this happens all the time you have such high stakes that one failed products can mean the end of the company the CEO falls on their sword everyone gets fired then Nintendo doesn't operate like that it allows people to to stay the course and it allows for failure and any creative company or person I think needs to have that in there in their thinking the idea that if you're going to do something interesting and innovative you have to be prepared to not get it right at least once or twice and you have to allow for that in the structure of whatever you're doing you have to allow not just for the process of making something but for the process of that thing not working and then leading to the next thing this episode is brought to you by peloton break through the busiest time of year with the brand new peloton cross-training tread plus powered by peloton IQ with real-time guidance and endless ways to move you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence helping you reach your goals in less time let yourself run lift sculpt push and go explore the new peloton

33:17cross-training tread plus at one peloton dot com this episode is brought to you by indeed stop waiting around for the perfect candidate instead use indeed sponsor jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast it's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate see according to indeed data sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs so go build your dream team today with indeed get a seventy five dollar sponsor job credit at indeed dot com slash podcast terms and conditions apply how is Nintendo able to defy the sort of toxic addictive brain rot narrative that surrounds almost every other video game and tech company on earth I think there was so there's been an enormous moral panic about video games in basically since they've existed there's been some flavor of moral panic around video games as a whole and what's interesting is that Nintendo didn't avoid that in the in the nineties particularly

34:21Pokemon Pokemon was treated as I think time magazine called a pestilential Ponzi scheme and there was a very strange flavor of almost yellow parallel panic about these like creepy foreign monsters coming over capturing your children there was a very strange reaction to to Pokemon and video games in general did have certainly in the nineties a reputation for being at best pointless and silly and at worst just dangerous in some way you know like they're gonna turn children violent or they're gonna desensitize you or whatever and all of the research that we now actually have about how games work and the influence that they have on people suggest that they are extremely positive influences especially for you know people who struggle with depression and anxiety find that games are an enormously helpful mental health and regulatory tool right so generally all of this moral panic hasn't played out but now we have new problems caused by the internet and by social media by connectivity and also the way that video games work

35:21now instead of trying to you know sell you a game for 50 or 60 quid and then you play that game as long as you like and you have a lovely time now a lot of games that exist on phones and on PCs and on consoles as well they're designed to monetize your attention right so they're trying to get you to come back every day and play it spent time with the game every single day every single week and so it's become like a like more like a social media relationship that you have where like the the motivation for the person who's making that game is to get you to spend as much time and money as possible and that obviously comes with huge dance sides and so Nintendo's ended up in this strange position now where what used to be a major disadvantage which is its reluctance to accept new technology to embrace the internet to be on the cutting edge that's now a huge advantage for people who are looking for a nice safe of you know a lovely gaming experience for themselves or for their children. Nintendo's very reluctance to to go with the rest of the industry has now become something that's very very sellable if you are looking to sell things to families. I know that if I

36:24give my kid an Nintendo switch they're not going to end up talking to some stranger and they're not going to end up accidentally spending 300 pounds on my credit card like that that cannot happen on a Nintendo console whereas it can happen on an iPad and it can happen you know on roadblocks or any of these other very popular with children games. So yeah Nintendo has a voice I think it's partly avoided being overly partly because it's not violent Nintendo's games have never been violent they've always had this idea of like family friendly childlike if not childish gaming and so that has kept it out of that flavor of moral panic and then nowadays its business practices are quite old fashioned and that has now become an advantage because it's kept it out of this like modern social media panic and it also means that all the headlines that you see about video game addiction and about terrible things happening in online gaming platforms such as you know roadblocks and that doesn't it just doesn't apply it doesn't apply to Nintendo it's become a huge strength for them. Where should the Nintendo curious non-gamer start? I think if you have an old Nintendo console

37:28somewhere in your house like if you once had a SNES or an N64 or a Wii dig it out dig it out and have a play. The thing about Nintendo is that it is it's expensive right it's a buy-in and Nintendo switch two costs like 400 quid but the older Nintendo consoles don't cost that much at all so it's very very easy now to pick up an Nintendo DS or a Wii all these are you know 10 plus years old these consoles but they're still really really good the games are still excellent so you can you can find one that appeals and not have to spend many many hundreds of parents to sort of try that I think another if you know someone in your life with an Nintendo switch that is it's just the best Nintendo console it's got such a approachable feel and such a massively wide variety of games and it's so easy to play because you can take it with you wherever you go the switch is I think is a lot of people's route not just into gaming but also back to gaming I know so many people who you know were into games when they were a kid or a teenager and then fell off it when they grew up and had responsibilities and then the Nintendo switch is the thing that's

38:32given them games back because it can fit into your life it's not you know these aren't games that need you to spend five hours of your week or your day on them you know these are games that are there for you whenever you want some a little route to joy in your day this is something I feel increasingly passionate about the older I get is that you've got to make room for fun and for joy in your life especially in the the kind of circumstances we're all living in is really important to find whatever that is for you for me it's video games and several other things for other people it's sport reading art whatever it is you've got to find like a route to playfulness and and keep space for that and I think video games in general but Nintendo games especially they're my route to to fun and joy. Kazan McDonald thank you so much for joining us on the podcast thank you for having me. This episode starts Kazan McDonald and was produced and presented by me Vash Krista-Dulu and make the show with Nicole Wong, Georgie Derry and our editor John Dorty till next time thanks for listening

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