In an interesting and heartfelt keynote, videogame icon Shigeru Miyamoto talked about Nintendo's vision and more specifically his vision for the game design process. And you'd be surprised how much his wife is involved in that process...

Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto shared his vision today in a keynote at the Game Developers Conference. Executive GDC Director Jamil Moledina mentioned that Will Wright has called Miyamoto the "Spielberg of videogames," and in introducing Miyamoto, Moledina said that he believes that some day in the future geniuses in other fields will be called the Shigeru Miyamoto of their discipline.

For his presentation, Miyamoto and translator Bill Trinen used the photo channel of the Wii to display the slides. Miyamoto said he's amazed it's been eight years since the last time he had a chance to talk at GDC. His talk started by taking a look back at the last nine or ten years of gaming. He said that he observed an important shift. In 1998, the top five selling games were Goldeneye 007, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Gran Turismo, Banjo Kazooie and Super Mario 64. In 2004, however, the top games were GTA: San Andreas, Madden 2005, Halo 2, Halo 2 Limited Ed., and ESPN NFL 2K5. All of a sudden, people were worried about the effect of games on people, turning them into zombies, he said. The reputation of the games industry was at stake.

He also noticed that players seemed to want the same types of games over and over again and that designers felt obligated to provide that. Miyamoto said that he even wondered if his style of games would still be accepted by gamers, so he started thinking about Nintendo's vision and the "Nintendo difference." There are essentially three main elements that comprise this vision: Expanded Audience, Devotion to Entertainment, and Risk.

Miyamoto injected a dose of humor into his explanation about expanded audience by using a very personal example: his wife. He said his own personal measure of success is the "wife-o-meter." Mario and Donkey Kong were hugely important to the industry but not to his wife. Tetris came out and that bumped the meter up a little, then Ocarina came out and his wife watched as his daughter played and that bumped up the meter a bit more. A bigger breakthrough came when Animal Crossing was released; there were no enemies and Miyamoto was able to convince his wife to actually touch the controller. The "wife-o-meter" was finally really on the rise. Finally, with the release of Nintendogs Miyamoto's wife (and many other non-gamers) started to look at games from a different perspective. Brain Age then came out and that changed everything – she finally accepted games as part of her daily life.

In fact, Miyamoto came home on Valentine's Day one night and found her casting votes on the Everybody Votes Channel on Wii. This was an incredible breakthrough Miyamoto said, because it meant that she had downloaded the channel and started using it all on her own. He was so stunned that he remarked that it would be less of a surprise to come home and see Donkey Kong eating at his dinner table. As time went on, his wife started playing the second Brain Age and even bragged to Miyamoto that she could beat him anytime; she had turned into a hardcore gamer, Miyamoto said. Now she regularly plays Wii Sports and makes tons of Miis. The wife-o-meter was up dramatically. Miyamoto joked that with the Mii creation tool, she's getting her first taste of game design and that as soon as she comes up with a unique game design he can retire.

The second core element of Nintendo's vision, devotion to entertainment, means that every employee is able to focus on providing entertainment. Miyamoto said that Nintendo has a very good balance of engineers and developers, and there's a chance for collaboration all day long, "even in the bathroom." And it's all about collaboration. Even though Miyamoto has worked on every controller Nintendo has made, he stressed that it's all been a group effort. Looking at the Wii controller specifically, he said that they looked a many prototypes to see what would create the most possibilities for the most users. Nintendo's software teams were excited but also concerned about losing the heritage of traditional controllers and games they've created all these years. Nintendo had to balance the needs of hardware and software. Settling on the TV remote style, they felt they had achieved that balance.

The third element, risk, is at the core of Nintendo's philosophy for the Wii. Miyamoto said that the bigger the challenge is, the bigger the risk. Nintendo took on the challenge of asking what a video game is. He said that Nintendo has taken a number of risks over the years but that none was bigger than the Wii. He acted as an evangelist within Nintendo, telling others not to think about what they might lose by abandoning the traditional controller in favor of the remote, but to think of what they will gain. The more he talked about it, the more confidence he became in his own idea for the Wii. He said that to be honest, though, he didn't really feel great about it until Nintendo showed the Wii at last year's E3 and received a tremendously positive reaction.