By Nelson Schneider - 09/21/25 at 01:11 PM CT
It seems like Nintendo is the only Big Gaming company making headlines this year, what with both Microsoft and Sony appearing to lie down and die while the gaming landscape changes around them. Earlier on this past Summer, Shigeru Miyamoto – the father of Mario, Link, and basically every Nintendo IP that actually matters – mentioned in an interview that he was urging Nintendo to bring more diversity to its board of directors.
Naturally, whenever a Gamer sees that hateful word, “diversity,” he will immediately assume that it means the same thing it has come to mean in the West over the course of the last 8 years of insane political activism. However, in Japan, and at Nintendo, at least, it seems that “diversity” actually falls more in-line with what most sane people would consider to be “good” diversity, and not the tainted spawn of Identity Politics.
Rather than encouraging Nintendo to create mandatory quotas for hiring Blacks, women, and Lesbians, Miyamoto has instead encouraged Nintendo to extend their old Blue Ocean strategy from the successful Wii era of hardware and software by hiring directors who have primary experience in fields outside of Gaming.
Perhaps this is a reaction to Nintendo’s hiring of Doug Bowser, formerly of Electronic Arts, who has been a poor steward for Nintendo of America. Perhaps Miyamoto, as he nears retirement, wants to ensure that Nintendo has some Diversity of Thought and people who are both able and willing to think outside of the rigid frameworks that corporations – and especially Japanese corporations – tend to put in place. Either way, it’s a net positive that Nintendo is specifically focusing on Diversity of Experience rather than Diversity of Identity, as the former is where the mantra “Diversity is Our Strength” actually holds true, whereas the latter has demonstrated, in practice, nothing but divisiveness.
Hopefully Nintendo will see fit to hire-on even-more-diverse directors in the future who might be willing to tell them to stop trying to patent unpatentable game mechanics, stop suing fangame and emulator developers into oblivion, and stop paywalling their classic games and soundtracks behind perpetual subscriptions.
