"That is simply narrowing down the potential of what video games can do"

Did i miss something, or...?

Looked like he was to me. I dunno, maybe i misread it.

Still... I disagree with what he says here anyway.

Someones going to quote you with "Wii music".

I might as well be the one. (:

You're missing the point rather spectacularly here. Rockstar make GTA/Manunt. These are violent games. They also made Midnight Club, two Austin Powers games, and a version of Earthworm Jim amongst many other non-violent games.

Shigsy was talking about the companies that only make the violent ones.

You missed the sentence right before that, which wasn't even about violent games. Talk about misquoting.

"Sometimes, games designers tend to focus their attention on a limited particular area of their expression. That is simply narrowing down the potential of what video games can do"

You're missing his point, i think. He's discussing the potential of video games to reach people, and how the companies that are focusing exclusively on violent games, and especially on violent games as the kind of games that really push the industry forward, as being potentially harmful. Because when all of your highest-quality products are focusing on a small audience, what does that say about the potential for growht?

Like who?

He was asked what he thought about "violent titles such as Modern Warfare 2". If anyone misquoted, it wasn't me... It was whoever wrote the article putting that in a section about his thoughts on violent videogames.

I want you to get ready, because at the end of this post I'm goign to tell you that you're wrong. I'm not goign to do it now. I want you to read the post.

What Miyamoto is referring to here is the ability of games to appeal to people outside of the current game-playing population, and he's right. Games right nonw are played primarily by a very specific band of people, and Nintendo is working very hard on attempting to expand the possibilities in thi way. They've done enormous studies concerning why people don't play video games throughout different age groups and the two genders, and one of the biggest returns is the fact that may people falsely characterize video games as being full of mindless violence.

Nintendo has sort of started a shift in the way that people see video games, has taken long strides toward makingn games into something that anyone - anyone - should be able to play an not b put off by, but they can't do all of that work by themselves. Miyamoto isn't sayingn people shouldn't make violent games, he's no even saying violent games are bad, he's saying that the public perception of videa games as a violent medium is one of the things keeping people like my grandmothers from buying their own systems. The problem, he outlines, is not even one of content so much as it is of image.

Nintendo is trying very hard to change that image. Miyamoto unquestionably would prefer it if other people tried to help them in changing that image, but that doesn't mean that violent games aren't worth making or that the level of violence in games or even the number of violent games isnt' acceptable. All he's saying is that the image of gaming has to become something more varied than the image currently associated with it.

When he says that, he's right. The image of video games is thrown back at us all the time by th mianstream media when they're talking about anything except for Nintendo consoles: video games are seen as the equivalent of drug rings and also lethal weapons all at the same time. Video games are treated as one of the ills of society, and in order for the industry to truly expand it needs to shed the image of being homogenously violent.

Do you disagree with that assertion?

What's with this "at risk" business? It has already happened.

No, seriously. If I had to put a year on it, I'd say it happened in 1992: the year that Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, Splatterhouse 2, and Wolfenstein 3D were all released. These four games came up again and again in the arguments surrounding the censorship of video games and (eventually) the creation of the ESRB. This one year saw an explosion of this particular sort of game onto the market, and the dire warnings of the industry's detractors frankly came only a few years too soon: not only did these games provide a fix for people too young to handle their content, the controversy made them Edgy And Rebellious, which only drove more immature gamers to the style. That same group has more or less dominated gaming ever since.

The industry is really only now starting to recover from that dark time, and then mostly due to Nintendo's efforts. This isn't to say that Nintendo is the only one making anything but testosterone-soaked killfests, but Nintendo is the one that made it acceptable in the mainstream again. One could draw analogies to Wind Waker: certainly Nintendo wasn't the first or only developer to make games in an art style othe than generic photorealism, but they're the ones who made it acceptable.

"He was asked what he thought about "violent titles such as Modern Warfare 2". If anyone misquoted, it wasn't me... It was whoever wrote the article putting that in a section about his thoughts on violent videogames."

That doesn't mean that comment was about violent games in general. Context is what matters. Just because a question is about X, Y, and Z doesn't mean every part of the answer will be about all three things.