Video Game Magnate at Japanese Video Game Conference Delivers Keynote Saying ‘Video Games are Evil’

Nice fringe.

The man behind the Gundam series and its subsequent video games, Yoshiyuki Tomino, was invited to give the keynote address at Japan’s CEDEC conference in front of hundreds of game developers and publishers. Here’s what he opened with:

“I think that video games are evil,” says Tomino. “[Gaming] is not a type of activity that provides any support to our daily lives, and all these consoles are just consuming electricity! Let’s say we have about three billion people on this planet wasting their time, bringing no productivity at all. Add 10 billion more people, and what would happen to our planet? Video games are assisting the death of our planet!”

Wow, I hope there’s been some sort of massive mistranslation. This isn’t biting the hand that feeds you, it’s more like chopping it off then pissing on it. But even though he isn’t exactly the greatest at wording it, he claims to be trying to influence the way developers make games, and make them more productive for society as a whole.

“You have to find the median — that games are not evil, perhaps not necessarily good either, but something that can be considered a pastime. What would make people enjoy a game? How do you make them feel like it is not just a waste of time?”

“If finding answers to these questions were easy,” says Tomino, “then something better would have been out by now. Has there been anything better than Tetris since it first came out? How many years has it been? This is what I want to tell you: I want you to create a game that does not negatively affect our daily lives and is something that is considered more productive.”

Alright, nevermind, he’s just an idiot. “Games that are not evil, perhaps not necessarily good either, but something that can be considered a pastime”? So uh, most video games? What the hell has Tomino been playing the last twenty years? Oh, Tetris, got it.

I understand the man is seventy, but how he can go out there and tell a room full of people that their life’s work is useless and borderline evil is just flat out being an asshole, and nowhere near the “sage wisdom” he wishes it to be. Not only is he just being kind of a dick, he’s clueless if he thinks that there’s been some fruitless search for a video game that’s as good of a “pastime” as Tetris. Practically every video game falls under that category, and there are only a handful of games I’d actually consider evil (looking at you Superman 64), but that’s for different reasons entirely.

Old people: just because you’re old, it does not give you license to be condescending and completely uninformed. And Tomino, I challenge you to a game of Super Smash Bros.

[via Gamasutra]