[davidroberts]

I interviewed for a job with them (Nintendo of America), and also did some freelance work over the past couple of years, and I got the feeling whatever they may have been in the past, they currently run on a fairly bureaucratic model, and are not the kind of place that inspires or rewards innovation and creativity.

They had video games in the lobby, but the recruiter warned me "Don't play them!" She told me a previous candidate she took there got a job, but was later fired for playing a video game on company time.

[w1ntermute]

> I got the feeling whatever they may have been in the past, they currently run on a fairly bureaucratic model, and are not the kind of place that inspires or rewards innovation and creativity.

You could say exactly this about most Japanese companies these days. Now what's interesting is that change may be in the air. The current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has managed to line up the incentives correctly in the Japanese government's notoriously intransigent bureaucracy and started massive economic reform (often referred to as "Abenomics"), a topic that is the cover story of this week's issue of The Economist[0,1].

What Abe has done so far cannot create permanent change by itself, but if he is able to follow through on his other goals and make lasting structural reforms to the Japanese economy and society, then we may see an economic resurgence in Japan. That's something that the West should be looking forward to and supporting, given the need for a stronger counterweight in the Asia-Pacific region to China. It was previously believed that India would take this role, but things haven't progressed there as fast as people had hoped a decade ago[2].

0: http://www.economist.com/printedition/2013-05-18

1: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21578052-shinzo-abe-s...

2: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21577373-india-will-s...

[obviouslygreen]

The problem is that the structural reforms are the one thing that actually would make a difference, and they're also the one thing that not only hasn't happened but hasn't even seen a plan put forward.

'Abenomics' is forced inflation (which is drawing more and more concern from the G8 since it's going to become a problem for the rest of the world soon) accompanied by massive public works spending (which was a failed previous LDP platform that they can't seem to get past) that provide absolutely no change, and only work in the short-term, if you can even consider this "working," as it's creating no lasting change.

[fungi]

i understand that structural reform is the 3rd phase in the "3 arrows" agenda.

printing money / pork is obviously easier politically. if there is to be any significant reforms, my guess is it will not kick in until well after the upper house elections.

edit: worryingly the gov appears far more interested in nationalism then economic reforms... so my hopes are not high.

[obviouslygreen]

Exactly my point. Structural reform is a nigh-impossible problem, upper house elections or not, in any country, and Japan has a well-established and deeply-rooted history of "change is bad."

In that culture of consensus, change simply has no chance. I have many friends in Japan, and my fear for them is that their government is even more obstinate than others, despite their situation being even worse. The thing that makes this problem intractable, though, is that their people are the same as people everywhere: They'll swallow the propaganda, they'll believe in the radical, just as long as the radical doesn't require they change their lives.

No one wants to change, and the current administration in Japan knows that. They're playing on it, just as the last administration did, and as the next one will. No one will do anything until it's too late; change is too hard, too expensive, too invasive, too inconvenient.

I hope things work out for Japan. I just really, really worry that if the current political movements go through and amend the constitution in the ways proposed, Japan will go from a traditional and slightly stilted democracy to an oligarchy in all but title, run by reactionary nationalists without their people's interests at heart.

[edit: This is a problem that's playing out in many industrialized nations and will play out in many more; Japan is just seeing more and different parts of it more quickly due to its unique situation.]

[kabdib]

A cow-orker of mine interviewed there a couple of years ago. He said it was pretty bad, too.

One of his standard questions (he's kind of a snarky guy:) "How many of your co-workers should be fired?" He generally gets answers in the range of ten percent. At Nintendo, they were saying "fifty percent."

Damn, even when Atari was screwed up, it wasn't frowned upon to play games. That's /really/ bad.

[snogglethorpe]

> Damn, even when Atari was screwed up, it wasn't frowned upon to play games. That's /really/ bad.

I dunno. The issue here seems more one of culture-shock than right- or wrong-styles.

I think the problem is that people see "game company" and they think "wacky-and-crazy-everybody-chillin'-in-t-shirts-and-playing-foosball-while-shooting-nerf-guns-at-the-boss-woohoo-caffeine!" American-style game company.

Nintendo isn't like that, and never has been. They're a large Japanese company, and one which has always been sort of conservative and traditional (even by comparison with other Japanese companies).

If you want to work for a wacky-foosball company, then I suppose Nintendo probably isn't for you, but it's pretty clear that good games can be made under either model. Whatever the opinion of some EA dev on the wii-u, and regardless of how "good" the wii-u is, Nintendo has had more influence on the gaming world than EA ever will.

Even the accusation of "bureaucracy" in the original post, which while certainly true—Nintendo is a large company, and large companies tend towards the bureaucratic—seems a bit off the mark. I don't think it's an issue of bureaucracy, I think it's an issue of culture.

I also think first impressions can be somewhat deceiving. I work for a very large Japanese company, which is crazy bureaucratic, and while this can be very annoying, there's also a lot of loyalty and flexibility at the small team level. That sort of thing is hard to see from outside.

[dmead]

a video game company that fires people for playing video games. got it.

[obviouslygreen]

This is ridiculous. Any company that expects to turn a profit can't have employees spending significant amounts of time playing video games when they're supposed to be working.

This is why the "hey, come work here, we have XBoxes and Playstations" model is crap: You don't get a job to play video games, and people don't hire you do play video games (unless you're a playtester, then you'll play them til you hate them, if you can really call that playing).

[skilesare]

I bet those guys at Mojang and Valve never, ever, play video games. I know this because their profit per employee is so high. I is clear and a logical conclusion.

/sarcasm

If I had a game company and I had an employee that was not spending at least 25% of their time playing our game and other games and telling me how to make our games better, I'd fire them.