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Iwata Asks: In Commemoration, Part 7 - Kikitrick

Kikitrick, Part 1 - "The Ear Pro"

by the NWR Staff - August 11, 2016, 5:44 am EDT

Part 1 of Kikitrick

1. The “Ear Pro”

Iwata - Today I’d like to ask about the Wii software “Kikitrick.” Thank you for joining me, everyone.

Everyone - Thanks for having us.

Iwata - How many years ago was it that Oto Designers (※1) first began talking to us?

※1 Oto Designers, Co.= Company based on Wakō City, Saitama Prefecture that creates new value with a focus on the concepts of “sound” and “ears.” Led by Shinichi Sakamoto.

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - It’s already been four years now.

Iwata - It’s taken quite a long time, hasn’t it.

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - Quite long (laughs).

Iwata - This time we had “extremely interesting sound technology” that allowed us to create software in an unprecedented genre, themed around “listening” and “distinguishing” sounds. I’d like to begin with self-introductions, but before that can we hear an explanation of what kind of company Oto Designers is?

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - Sure. I’m Shinichi Sakamoto of Oto Designers. I originally studied auditory perception at a hearing aid maker named Rion (※2). My specialty was in hearing aids and the hard of hearing, and I also studied auditory psychology of normal people. It turns out that auditory psychology has a long, 100-year history, and there are mountains of incredibly fascinating phenomena - and almost none of them are known to the public.

※2 RION Co, Ltd.= Hearing aid maker located in Kokubunji, Tokyo.

Iwata - In other words, these phenomena are well known among researchers, but almost none to the general public.

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - Exactly. So I thought that it would be such waste for the public to stay unaware of this research, and fled from the lab to make my own company.

Iwata - How long has it been since you’ve established your company?

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - It’s been six years now. The sound technology present in Noise-Kun, who appears in “Kikitrick” was introduced to me by Professor Rikimaru of Dōshisha University (※3), where I began my research, but when I had members in my vicinity listen to sounds and have them try to explain to me what the sounds were saying, I got mountains of rare answers where the sound was misheard, which was incredibly fascinating.

※3 Professor Rikimaru=Yuu Rikimaru. Professor of Medicinal Information Science in the Faculty of Life and Medicinal Science at Dōshisha University.

Iwata - Were you always of the mind that “this is so interesting that it’s sure to lead to the entertainment industry”?

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - Yes. And I thought, “If this could be made into a game…!”, which led me to the opportunity to introduce it to Nintendo.

Satō - I’m Satō of Nintendo’s Planning Research, and Development Division. I was involved in “Kikitrick” as the director from the planning phase through development.

Iwata - How long have you been involved in “Kikitrick,” Satō-san?

Satō - I’ve been making it ever since “DS TV” (※4), so three whole years.

※4 “DS TV”= “One-seg Receiver Adapter DS TV”. One-seg tuner for the Nintendo DS released in November, 2007. Also compatible with the Nintendo 3DS.

Iwata - OK, Nakamoto-san from Nintendo, now.

(Nintendo) Sakamoto - OK (laughs). Hi. I’m Sakamoto (Yoshio) of the Planning, Research and Development Division. I was a supervisor on “Kikitrick,” giving different opinions at a distance on things such as how this theme could be designed as a game, what could be done to make it easily playable for people, that kind of thing.

Iwata - Well then, first I’d like to ask Satō-san - what was your first impression when you heard this “Degraded Noise” (※5) technology from Noise-kun as shown in the “Kikitrick” introduction demonstration?

※5 “Degraded Noise”= Introducing a couple bandwidth noises while preserving a sound signal’s amplitude envelope, creating a synthesized sound.

Satō - When I was first introduced to this, I listened to this one short sentence that only sounded like this kind of “za za za za za…” noise - I couldn’t distinguish that it was a voice at all. But at that moment one of the other staff said, “I can hear bloody something something.” I thought, “There’s no way that’s right,” but then the next time I listened, I heard it too. That wasn’t the actual answer, however - the correct answer was “I bought some short cake and brought it home.” Even then, at that point in time we all heard “Short cake…” as “Bloody…” (laughs).

Iwata - Once you’ve thought you’ve heard “bloody,” that’s all you can hear.

Satō - Exactly. At that moment I felt it was incredibly interesting.

Iwata - People tend to get excited about how they hear things different from others, don’t they? Once one person says, “It’s this!”, everyone gets wound up in thinking that’s what it really is, taking them further and further from the real answer - it’s an incredibly unique type of fun. Satō-san - once you got ahold of this software, were you convinced relatively quickly that it was meant for the Wii?

Satō - Nope, originally I went for a more personal way to enjoy the sounds on handheld. But when I saw the way people around me laughed going from “bloody” to the real answer, and everyone reacting with their best guesses during development I began to think that it had the potential to bring people together, and began making it with development on the Wii in my sights. But this time, as I was going over my very first notes from development, I found “Make mom who’s standing in the kitchen turn around” written there, which surprised me. Now that I think about it, during a meeting with Nakamoto-san of Oto Designers, the idea that “it would be nice to get family members who aren’t necessarily in the same room to turn around and take notice while playing” came up, and when I mentioned this to you, you said “then make mom in the center of the household turn around.”

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - You have kids playing Wii in the living room, and mom making dinner with her back to them in the kitchen, but then she hears the sounds, turns around and begins participating herself - that kind of image.

Satō - Thinking of it that way, we had the idea to grab people’s attention from a pretty early stage of development. That’s why we decided that everyone wouldn’t necessarily need their own Wii Remote, and aimed to make it so that three people around you could argue as they please.

Iwata - It really does allow for any number of people to participate. On the other hand, even with a game like “Rhythm Heaven”(※6)already being a thing, there’s not really any precedent for a game themed around listening to sounds themselves. To put it another way, since you had to carry out development based on gaming grammar, it must have been difficult to make the base structure, no?

※6 “Rhythm Heaven”= Rhythm game released for the Game Boy Advance in August, 2006. The latest entry in the series was released as “Everyone’s Rhythm Heaven” for the Wii in July 2011.

Satō - Yes. For the first six months we didn’t build anything on a computer, but played sounds we recorded in reverse, sped them up, and went to Professor Rikimaru’s lab at Dōshisha University to listen to different interesting sound examples.

Iwata - So you went to the research professor to get his advice.

Satō - Yes. That’s why it took so long to finally begin making the actual game. We spend half a year exploring whether we could make a game themed solely on “peculiar sounds,” rather than rhythm or musical scales. Cooperation from Oto Designers is what helped us take that idea far enough to finally understand just what it could become.

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - I would often get emails from Satō-san asking, “Do you have any more ideas?” I would then offer a couple, and after a while I’d get a reply that said, “That was really interesting!”, ending with “but we can’t use these. Is there anything else?” (laughs)

Satō - Obviously we were aiming for something that everyone could laugh together about, rather than taking a scientific approach, so we tried and tried all kinds of things, like whether we could make a game from onomatopoeia, or apply sound to what’s called Gestaltzerfall in the realm of vision… And after testing everything we could think of, we had collected quite a few ideas.

※7 Gestaltzerfall = A phenomenon where, having looked at one letter continuously for a long period, one loses recognition of the whole, and only recognizes individual parts, feeling as if the letter was just a random amalgamation of lines.

Iwata - So you spent time and energy looking at all of the massive amounts of research and selected those ideas that could be made into entertainment.

Satō - Yes. Then in the end I received some advice from my boss, Sakamoto-san - “How about bringing it all together with the idea of an ear pro?” “What if it was about making sounds feel more familiar?” That’s how we pulled it all together in the direction of “listening to and comprehending peculiar sounds” and distinguishing sounds in different situations, like in the middle of a loud shop inside the train station.

Iwata - Shop is the game where various orders are being made at you in a loud place, and you have to distinguish them like Shotoku Taishi, isn’t it?

Satō - Yes, it’s one that uses the Cocktail Party Effect(※8).

※8 Cocktail Party Effect= The ability to distinguish important information within a noisy environment.

(Oto Designers) Sakamoto - “The Cocktail Effect” - you know how there are these cocktail parties where you’re standing, eating finger foods and drinking cocktails among plenty of chatter? If you analyze the acoustics, it’s so loud that you’re not actually supposed to be able to hold a conversation. But it’s a capability humans have. That’s what we call this extremely developed hearing ability that humans have.

Iwata - If you just analyze as an audio signal, even though it should be incredibly difficult to single out just that person’s voice, for some reason humans have this ability to converse under loud conditions.

Satō - By using these familiar ideas as a listening game, I think we were able to bring out that familiar feeling of “Oh, I know that kind of person!” By expanding like that it formed into a game where you test your hearing ability in eight completely different types of games we call, “Ear Pro.”

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