Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a problem

Hidetaka Miyazaki created some of the hardest games of the century. In the latest release of the Elden Ring, he hopes that more players will feel the pain.

Author: Simon Parkin

February 25, 2022

Readers who are not serious enough may not be able to grasp the artistic achievements of the novel, and the theme or plot of a movie may be misunderstood by lazy audiences, but only video games can punish players who make mistakes. If the player's jump is not precise enough, loses to an enemy, or fails to reach the end of the level, the game can refuse to open the rest until it passes the challenge, or chooses to give up altogether.

Hidetaka Miyazaki, who is nearly fifty years old, is probably one of the most ruthless people to punish players. In Dark Souls, which made him famous in 2011, you'll play as a poor creature in a loincloth, running wild in the sewers or huddled in the forest. Enemies that attack you include a giant wolf, mushroom boxers, a swamp that emits a foul odor, and a spider wielding a sword. If you don't block an enemy slash in time, or stumble off a wall, you'll see a message that's just superfluous: "You're dead." "After the information fades, you'll be resurrected in a campfire with similar checkpoints all over this mysterious medieval world. Of course, all the enemy soldiers you defeated before will also be reborn.

Most players will be resurrected hundreds of times at this firelight. Most games will give players the power they had as a child, but Hidetaka Miyazaki's work is based on failure, patience, and hard-won precision, so you must not be delusional about being able to press keys recklessly. Each enemy is very clever and cannot be underestimated; you have to carefully observe their attack routines and plan your physical strength to fight back. Duels with knights, battles with wolves, and high-flying dragons on horseback all require different strategies. Even in the simplest encounters, the slightest distraction can lead to a state of doom. The player's struggles are both real and predictable, as is life.

Dark Souls and its sequels are already known for their difficulty in destroying players' self-confidence. This reputation has long since entered the context of video games, and we often use "'so-and-so's Dark Souls' to describe a daunting mission. (A bunch of crumbling dirty dishes?) "Dark Souls of the Dishwashing Session." "I've never been a highly skilled player," Hidetaka Miyazaki told me recently when he was connected, sitting in his office, a room full of books in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. So I wanted to answer the question in my own work: If death is not just a mark of failure, how can I give it meaning? How can death be made pleasurable? ”

Hidetaka Miyazaki is a very privacy-conscious person, he rarely gives interviews, and our conversation has undergone three reschedulings. But his work is still widely welcomed by players. Last year, in the Golden Joystick Award, the longest video game award to date, players voted Dark Souls the world's greatest game, pushing ahead with classics like Tetris, DOOM and Super Mario 64. Hidetaka Miyazaki's games have sold nearly 30 million copies, and his latest work, The Ring of Law in Eldon, is one of the most anticipated works of the year.

Still, behind every player who successfully destroys the monster, there is another player who angrily puts down the handle. "I deeply regret the players who feel that my game is too difficult." Hidetaka Miyazaki said to me, holding his head with his hand, and then smiled, "I just hope that as many players as possible can experience the joy of overcoming difficulties." ”

Born in Shizuoka, more than a hundred miles southwest of Tokyo, Miyazaki was born into a humble family. Unable to afford a book, he borrowed English versions of fantasy and science fiction from the library that he could not read, and then fantasized about the storyline based on illustrations. After being admitted to Keio University, he chose social sciences as his major at random, and after graduation, he joined an American IT company called Oracle. He told me that he chose the job only to sponsor his sister to go to college.

Although he also played games as a young man, his shining moments with the game occurred in 2001, when he tried Ueda's Kashin Lost (ICO), a subtle minimalist work about a boy and a girl escaping from a castle together. For Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game recreates his childhood fun piecing together a storyline through fragments of text and enigmatic illustrations. He decided to change his career direction. At the age of twenty-nine, with no experience in the video game industry, he took the initiative to take a pay cut to join From Software, an obscure studio based in Tokyo. He started out as a programmer and then took on a project in the midst of a development hell— a fantasy game in which shadow worlds are filled with towering castles and terrifying monsters. He restructured the entire game to determine a fundamental mechanic: if the player dies, they will return to the beginning of the level, with reduced health, lost resources, and enemies as strong as ever. "If my idea fails, no one will care," he told me, "and this project will have failed a long time ago." ”

Demon's Souls, released in 2009, didn't win over fans. The game's clunky combat, which requires extreme precision of operation, is not suitable for players to try. Hidetaka Miyazaki clearly remembers that players will shrug their shoulders and walk away. On the cover of the game, an Arthurian knight is slumped against a wall — a scene that heralds conquest and defeat rather than heroism. The narrative of the game is also built around a variety of small clues: the description of the object, the monologue after the death of the enemy. However, time passed, and the game's vague language, gothic design, and high-risk mechanics allowed it to gain word of mouth and gradually gain a group of fans. In 2011, his spiritual sequel Dark Souls was a huge success, selling more than 2.5 million copies in 18 months. From Software has also been named one of Japan's top developers. Three years later, Hidetaka Miyazaki became president of the company.

It all seems to have come from the ground up: Hidetaka Miyazaki's difficult childhood, a series of hard-earned achievements, just in line with the emotional curves that many players experience in his games. Hidetaka Miyazaki's face, tucked behind glasses and goatee, is still full of energy and a sense of humor, but he rejects the theory. "I don't think my life story influenced the way I made games," he says, "and if you look at it in a more precise way, it's a problem solving." We all face countless problems in our own lives. Finding the answer will always be satisfying. In real life, however, there isn't much to give us that satisfaction. ”

How difficult the game should be is, closely related to the target audience. Some argue that games should be more approachable: provide a crafted experience that caters to players of varying levels, abilities, and interests. Others argue that developers should design games to their own devices. In the latter mode, the difficulty setting is also the privilege of the creators, and not every game has to meet the needs of all players.

Most of Miyazaki's work falls into the latter camp, after all, in the latter's view, the core characteristics of the medium of games are not escapism or inspiration, but provide challenges. "It's an interesting question," Hidetaka Miyazaki told me, "we've been trying to improve that, but for our work, the difficulty gives meaning to the experience." So at the moment we are not going to give up on that. The difficulty is exactly who we are. ”

However, Hidetaka Miyazaki's new work, Elden's Ring of Law, makes some compromises, or as he puts it, a way to make "the player feel like victory is close at hand." The hallmarks of this series are still alive – encounters with giant enemies, difficult battles that require players to improve their abilities rather than just make the avatars on screen stronger – but there are also a number of compromises that make the game more acceptable. In this game, you can summon the souls of animals to fight for you through the ashes, or escape a battle that must be lost on horseback. In Miyazaki's previous works, the player could only choose a fixed set of routes, each guarded by a powerful leader. There's an open world in Eldon's Circle of Law, and if the challenge of one path is too daunting, you can switch to another.

Still, you'll die many times: by the breath of a dragon, by a giant's sledgehammer, by the tentacles of a stranded octopus. For Hidetaka Miyazaki, death in video games is an opportunity to create memories, or jokes. "When I play these games, I think, this is the way I want to die — it's funny and funny, and I can share this story," he says, "Death and rebirth, trial and error and ultimately victory — and we want this cycle to be enjoyable." In real life, death is very scary. In video games, there can be a difference. ”

During the development of Eldon's Ring of Law, Hidetaka Miyazaki was able to work with one of his idols, George R. R. Martin. According to him, he was a fan of Martin's books long before fantasy novels like A Song of Fire and Ice, who was also known as a science fiction writer. At the suggestion of a board member of From Software, Hidetaka Miyazaki contacted Martin and was surprised to find that Martin was also a player in his own work. At first, Miyazaki worried that language barriers and the age gap — Martin was seventy-three years old — would make communication difficult. But as the two continued to engage in the hotel suite and Martin's hometown, the two formed a deep friendship.

For the degree of Martin's participation, Miyazaki Hidetaka set a strong limit, that is, Martin can only write the background story of the work, but can not participate in the writing of the actual script. The Eldon Ring of Law takes place in a world known as the "Junction.". Martin wrote the setting, character stories, and texts of myths and legends, including the destruction of the Ring of Law and the scattering of fragments (known as the Great Lune). Hidetaka Miyazaki will then explore the subsequent impact of this history in a story that players experience directly. "In our game, the story has to serve the player experience," he says, "and if (Martin) wrote the story of this game, I'm afraid we'll have to deviate from the script." I hope he'll be able to keep his pen to paper and not get caught up in the quirky game mechanics that may change during development. ”

Martin is known for his extremely sophisticated plot, but Hidetaka Miyazaki's work is praised for its confusing narrative, and the cooperation between the two is naturally slightly contradictory. In Dark Souls, key plot details may not be in the dialogue, but instead exist in the description of an item in the prop slot. Hidetaka Miyazaki uses this technique to stimulate the imagination of players, and as a child, he also used a similar way to restore the original appearance of the story from the illustrations of fantasy novels. "The power of this imagination is very important to me," he says, "leaving room for players to interpret and creating a sense of communication with the audience — and of course, facilitating communication among players in the community." I enjoy seeing my game inspire this kind of communication, and it continues to affect my work. ”

I first met Hidetaka Miyazaki in 2011, a few months before Dark Souls was released. He was working with the team in an open office space, with a digital photo frame on his desk surrounded by a row of handmade bottles and whiskey bottles that had not yet been opened. The photo frame screen loops with many quotes, criticism from game testers during development — and developers must work to improve the game accordingly. In the final months of development, Hidetaka Miyazaki only occasionally left the office to take a shower. At work, he also believes that hard work can make people feel more accomplished.

Hidetaka Miyazaki admits to being a hands-on manager. He calls his management "total supervision" because he makes his own recommendations for every element of the game, from the button style of the costume to the angle of the mountain. "I learned so much from Mr. Miyazaki," concept artist Raitani Athens told me in 2015, "it's simply too numerous to count." "Miyazaki Hidetaka can put forward his own opinions on the font and menu layout, and even performs action demonstrations for the animators, directly performing the scenes of the game characters."

Such a role does not seem to be suitable for the company's president: the requirements of running a business can easily extinguish the flame of creativity. But Hidetaka Miyazaki sees himself as an outlier among managers: He observes the company's CEO like an anthropologist and jokes that he uses it as inspiration to create monsters. He is also a leader who is good at nurturing subordinates—his team often asks for his personal opinions—and is well aware of the disasters that can result from empowering authors. "I value open communication with my team members and admit my mistakes," he says, "because of my influence on these games, people are hesitant to give honest advice, even when it's critical." So I try my best to avoid involving self-esteem and try to create trust in each other. ”

This collaboration can also be seen in Hidetaka Miyazaki's games, encouraging players to work together to overcome the challenges at hand. In Demon Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki allows players to exchange messages on the ground to provide guidance or advice to strangers. In this way, a teenager in Kansas could warn an engineer in Shinjuku to be careful of trap doors. Troublemakers can also tease other players — for example, promises that the trap door claim is too exaggerated.

In Elden's Ring of Law, if you connect your console to the network, as you explore the world, the ghostly silhouettes of other players will occasionally appear on the screen, making you realize that you are not alone. You can also summon another player to face a tricky challenge together. Two players can't talk to each other, so everything is based on trust; after completing the challenge, the summoned player disappears in a flash of light. Years ago, Miyazaki Hidetaka's car was stuck in the snow on the mountain, and a group of strangers pushed his car to the top of the mountain and then disappeared silently into the night, and his inspiration came from it.

The first time I played Dark Souls, I had just had a child of my own and was experiencing a period of chaos that had never been seen before. The game is like a kind of comfort: in a small world, everything is neat and orderly, as long as you are willing to spend time and thought, you can always sort it out. This is especially true of Hidetaka Miyazaki's game, where every force in his world is trying to expel you, resist this force, and ultimately triumph, which is deeply enjoyable.

I always wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki had a similar idea of using games to exert control. "I enjoy the process of solving problems, especially the ones I know I can solve," he told me, "and as for the challenges that are not possible, I will choose to stop here and I will be exhausted." So I feel extremely fortunate to be able to apply this process to creating games. ”

When I asked his family if they had ever played his game, Miyazaki laughed and pointed out that his daughter was only three years old. "I'm still too young." He said. But there's another reason: Despite his vague language, Hidetaka Miyazaki worries that his work will expose too many personal fetishes. "I don't want my family to play the games I make, I always feel like they're going to see my bad side, and that part of myself is a little annoying," he said. So I would like to say that Dark Souls is not allowed to play Dark Souls at home. ”

There is a paradox in Miyazaki's quest to establish a work-life boundary. The game is made up of fictional challenges that seem old-fashioned and out of reach compared to the challenges of everyday life. But Miyazaki Hidetaka's achievement lies precisely in shortening the gap between the two. By building the game on human experiences such as shame, failure, and even death, it breathes life into the game.