Interviews// Yasuhiro Wada, creator of Harvest Moon

SPOnG: When I say slow-paced game, I mean in terms of a comparison with most other videogames.

Yasuhiro Wada: Ok, I see, yes.


SPOnG: Could you say more about your own personal background, where you grew up and why that was so influential?

Yasuhiro Wada: [laughs] I was born and brought up in a city right at the southern tip of Japan, where time went very slowly – in comparison with Tokyo and urban-areas where life is lived by the minute… or even by the second! Where I grew up there were only three times of the day – morning, daytime and evening – you didn’t need to think in terms of seconds, minutes or hours just simply in those terms of what part of the day it was. The pace of life was totally different to urban living. So, I wanted to reflect that kind of timescale in a game.

Also, where I grew up, there weren’t many sources of information or media about. Where you have a limited number of information sources around you, you find you have less need to think or deal or react quickly to things, you just take your time, little by little.


SPOnG: OK. At the opposite extreme of this, are you a fan of any particularly fast, violent videogames yourself?

Yasuhiro Wada: I don’t like violent games per se. But I do like Grand Theft Auto, purely for the level of freedom the game offers the player. Also, at the moment I’m involved in a Wii project called No More Heroes – which is actually a very violent game!

[note: No More Heroes comes from Goichi Suda’s – A.K.A. SUDA51, (the creator of Killer 7) Grasshopper Manufacture studio.]

SPOnG: It’s often said that there are too many games with violent content being made – purely for the sake of having violent content – do you agree with this?

Yasuhiro Wada: One reason there are so many violent games, is because violence is one of the easiest ways of stimulating or generating arousal in somebody. I don’t deny or dislike violence per se in games, but I don’t like the use of violence merely to bring about this sense of heightened, excited emotional state in humans. That I don’t like.

If the violence is used to make the player realise that violence is a destructive and often negative force, if it is used in a ‘balanced’ way, then I don’t mind violent content in games. So I wouldn’t say I was ‘anti’ violence, I just want to bring so many other elements into games in terms of proper pacing and a better variety of emotional responses… which I think leads to a much healthier gaming scene.