Last week, the city of Nottingham became Gamecity with events dotted around the town through the duration of a few days. I wish I had known they were putting this event on this year, before it started; I'd have tried to get some time off and would have happily gone along to build Elite origami because these are so cool!
Anyway. Somewhere near the start of that, it was announced that Keita Takahashi is starting work on designing a children's playground for Nottingham City Council. He expressed an interest in doing that four years ago, and was approached by Nottingham City Council two years ago. So it's good that that's underway.
"I'll go along when it's finished, and take a load of photos!" was what I thought. ^_^
I just read an interview with him yesterday about it though... it sounds like he's glad to be away from Namco-Bandai to work on this, and he seems to have a lot of ideas, but at the same time he sounds a bit lost - like he doesn't know what's going to work and which of his ideas are good or bad.
He says that he's not suited to the games industry, which did seem evident before he said it. It's like Jeff Minter says he isn't suited to the games industry, but at least he's suited to the medium of making-machines-play-awesome-games so it eventually works for him and we do get a good game once every few years. Maybe as the article suggests, Mr Takahashi is just not suited to working for a giant company like Namco; he'd be better off with indie games or as a freelancer.
I read a comment from someone saying he's the kind of artist who is not suited to any kind of industry and it constraints - if that's true, I don't know if working for Nottingham City Council is going to be any better of a ride for him. He's only got 8 weeks to work in. It sounds like he could do with a bit more support than he's been given too; I think that he would benefit from working in a team, collaborating with (for example) a translator, a structural engineer, a landscaper, a materials specialist engineer (e.g. one who knows about the best kind of plastic, rubber, metal etc for a given situation), a child psychologist and possibly a sound engineer. Or, something like that. So that he can discover what's possible, impossible, good, bad, and the limitations of this medium, and in a short amount of time.
I do feel a little worried about him after that interview.
Part of me thinks that he would be better off starting small again, and building up from that. Perhaps designing toys for toddlers, something with soft material and no hard edges, which they can grab onto and chew on, accidentally change and discover new ways to play, and have fun. For example something like sticklebricks that aren't a choke hazard and some kind of elastic velcro hybrid without the annoying "road rash" kids get from brushing against it too fast. Give him the right materials and you'll have 100 strange cute random fun things made before you know it. ^_^ Then build up from around that.
Though I guess if there's one thing I have found out from Katamari Damacy and Nobi Nobi Boy, is that he's definitely one to realise the grand scale of things, and in great detail!
