Monday, November 2, 2015
Why Did Hideo Kojima Leave Konami?
On Friday, October 9th,
Hideo Kojima left the Tokyo offices of Konami, the video-game company where he
had worked since 1986, for the last time. The departure ceremony, according to
one of the hundred or so guests who attended, and who asked that I not use his
name, took place at Kojima Productions, the director’s in-house studio, and was
“a rather cheerful but also emotional goodbye.” He said that he did not see
Konami’s president, Hideki Hayakawa, or its C.E.O., Sadaaki Kaneyoshi, at the
party, but some of Kojima’s colleagues from other studios showed up to pay
their respects, as did many of the people who worked on his most recent
directorial project, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The game, which
takes place in mid-nineteen-eighties Afghanistan and Zaire, made a hundred and
seventy-nine million dollars on its launch day, in September—more than the two
highest-grossing films of the year so far (“Avengers: Age of Ultron” and
“Jurassic World”) combined. In the past several decades, Kojima’s name has
become synonymous with such blockbusters, and with the Konami brand itself. His
impending resignation had been rumored as early as March, but the fact of it
remains startling—as much as if Shigeru Miyamoto, the originator of Donkey Kong
and the Mario brothers, left Nintendo.
This Japanese schoolgirl looks so lifelike you won't believe she's not human
Meet Saya, a Japanese
schoolgirl from Tokyo.
While she might look
like a regular teenage girl, Saya actually isn't human. Instead, everything
from her lifelike eyes to her brunette bobbed hair is entirely computer
generated.
Saya started gaining
attention after people online began tweeting pictures of her recently, debating
whether or not she was actually human. It's an understandable debate. If you
stare at Saya long enough, it can be hard to remember she's not a real person.
Saya was engineered by
Japanese husband-and-wife team Teruyuki and Yuka Ishikawa. The computer
graphics designers created the schoolgirl in their spare time, the Daily Mail
reports. You can check out their portfolio here, which is full of similarly
impressive creations.
Japan's startup scene: Centuries-old craft and new tech
Where it seemed there
was no room for startups in Japan, Yuu Sumiyoshi succeeded. He set up a web
development and tech consulting business aimed at foreign clients (i.e.
outsourcing IT). This is a particularly popular occupation for a startup.
However, the opposite can be said about Japan as a whole. The workforce is just
too expensive here.
Sumiyoshi went around
the expensive workforce issue by starting a new trend. He migrated his company
from Tokyo to a nearby rural town that, after several other tech founders had
arrived, became known as Kamacon valley.
Locals love their new
neighbours and some even get to work with them, either in creating material,
product testing or just plain, full-time work. His firm’s two major projects
are online supermarket Iichi and Crazyville.
According to Sumiyoshi,
what makes Japanese businesses unique is the combination of sometimes
centuries-old craft and a passion for new technology. What better example can
there be than custom-built dog armour from a real Japanese craftsman?
Inneract Project Teaches Underserved Kids Design And Technology
Design plays just as big
of a role in technology as computer science. That’s why it’s no coincidence
that boatloads of successful startups have designers on their founding teams.
Since 2010, 27 designer-founded startups have been acquired by large tech
companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Adobe, Dropbox and LinkedIn, according
to the Design In Tech Report, produced by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer
Design Partner John Maeda. What makes design so important is that it’s become
imperative to creating a great user experience with everything that technology
touches: web sites, mobile apps, smartphones, tablets, computers, headphones,
and so on.
“Technology needs to be
considerate of empathy, of how people learn and how people use devices, and
that’s design,” Maurice Woods, a designer at Yahoo and founder of Inneract
Project, told TechCrunch. “That’s what designers do. Without that, it’s hard for
the consumer to be able to digest and understand that technology.” He later
said, “I feel like technology needs design more than design needs technology.”
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