“In art there is no such thing as perfection.” – Marcel Duchamp¹

During a 1996 conversation about Super Mario 64, producer Shigeru Miyamoto sat down with auteur Kenji Eno (D, Enemy Zero) to debate aspects of the game’s design as it was turning heads in the industry with its then-revolutionary 3D platforming.

The back-and-forth feels testy at times, especially as Eno gets into his disappointment with Miyamoto’s work, but it’s clear even 30 years later both were speaking from a place of passion and mutual respect. At one point, however, Miyamoto brings up Aquanaut’s Holiday – an artsy-fartsy ocean life simulator directed by Eno’s best friend Kazutoshi Iida² – in response to Eno comparing Super Mario 64 to a “really strict after-school sports club” with less freedom than the demo shown at the Shoshinkai trade show one year prior:

“In an ideal world, I’d want to make things more lighthearted and open. So you’re right, the Shoshinkai version held more potential in that regard. However, I believe the retail version has a better level of polish. After all, there are also players who want a proper sense of tension alongside a moderate amount of freedom. I’ve got both of those sides in me: the urge to just play freely, and the desire for actual tension.

And while I’m not carrying the cross of Nintendo on my back, I am conscious of the need to reach a larger audience than before. So I completely understand what you’re saying, but if we made the game that was too extreme in either direction, there’s no guarantee we would mobilize millions of people. I think it’s great in terms of future potential, but a game like Aquanaut’s Holiday, for example, has high ambitions but falls short as a commercial product.”³

Eno, for his part, didn’t let up on his criticism, adding that his expectation of Super Mario 64 was that it would be deeper than Aquanaut’s Holiday. A laughing Miyamoto countered by suggesting a game of that scope is something Eno and Iida should work on themselves, which all these years later still feels patronizing.

I can’t stop trying to make sense of why Miyamoto would mention Aquanaut’s Holiday at all. He’s right that it wasn’t a commercial blockbuster – sales were respectable despite its laissez-faire gameplay proving divisive among the public and critics alike – but why would an artist of his influence endorse such a narrow view of success, especially at a time when Nintendo was itself leading the charge into uncharted territory with Super Mario 64?

“A game that you don’t understand, but where you end up understanding yourself”

Iida was studying oil painting in the early 1990s when he first became acquainted with the Macintosh II. His university acquired this computer at a time when Iida was struggling to see a future in his chosen medium, and after tinkering with computer graphics for a bit, he decided to switch his focus to digital art.⁴

It was also around this time Iida first met Miyamoto through a free, year-long game development course provided by Nintendo Dentsu, the Nintendo subsidiary now known as Nintendo Cube. Iida tells a story about how Miyamoto, who assisted with the seminar as an expert panelist, helped him improve the blood-sucking mechanics of a Dracula game Iida created while in attendance.⁵

Of course, this didn’t stop Iida from being a “complete deadbeat”⁶ who spent his time playing pachinko and bouncing between part-time jobs, but that all changed when he put his experience with computer graphics to good use by applying to video game studios. Iida got his start working as a subcontractor for Hudson before joining Artdink around 1994. Six years into his game development career, he was given the opportunity to direct his own project, Aquanaut’s Holiday.

Aquanaut’s Holiday debuted on PlayStation in Japan on June 30, 1995, and would arrive in North America and Europe the following year.

“At the time, games ‘without a goal’ were unusual, so it got quite a lot of attention,” Iida said of Aquanaut’s Holiday. “It was actually one of my objectives at the time I made it. There is art in the content of the game. In art history, we saw a transition from realism to abstract. I thought that it would be interesting to apply that to games as well: facing a game that you don’t understand, but where you end up understanding yourself. This is the type of contemplative experience I wanted to create.”⁷

Aquanaut’s Holiday‘s story begins where most games’ might end. The player assumes the role of a world-famous oceanic researcher whose Nobel Prize-worthy work has ensured “the seas and all life within them are safer, healthier, and highly respected.”⁸ But realizing this global achievement came at a heavy, personal cost. A superior, noticing the ill effects of stress and pressure on the scientist’s psyche, offers them a new mission: surveying a section of deep ocean and building a habitat for the sea life there. They’ll work at their own pace, with no interferences or deadlines.

Explaining the moment-to-moment gameplay of Aquanaut’s Holiday is like trying to describe a rainbow. We’re so surrounded by miracles big and small that the miraculous can sometimes become mundane. Stepping into the ocean represents, in some respects, a pilgrimage back to where we came from as a species, but most of the time we use the waters that spawned us to cool off between sunbathing and building sandcastles at the beach without a second thought. Aquanaut’s Holiday asks you to put down the sunscreen and return home before it’s nothing but plastic garbage and swarms of jellyfish.

The game drops you, with almost no preamble, into a submarine sheltered in a small section of ocean sandwiched between short, rocky ridges. Behind you sits a futuristic aquatic lab, acting as both window dressing and impassable barrier. Navigating out of these semi-natural confines via the one path provided to you reveals an endless, blue expanse. Bubbly ambience mixes with the subtle whirrs of your vehicle’s machinery to create a soundscape equal parts ghostly and inviting. As you encounter schools of fish and other underwater curiosities, you slowly begin to make sense of the submarine’s heads-up display, which uses esoteric symbols to indicate your speed, bearing, and ascension or descension.

The autonomy at the core of Aquanaut’s Holiday can be a little overwhelming. By removing almost all semblance of traditional, goal-oriented gameplay, the game instead transfers the responsibility of experience-making to the player. Will you travel endlessly in one direction to see how far the waters go? Do you prefer to follow natural landmarks, stopping to share enigmatic interactions with the creatures you meet along the way? Or maybe you’ll pour your time into crafting the perfect reef as a way of attracting even more sea life? More than anything, Aquanaut’s Holiday asks you to find comfort in your own thoughts because, as the manual explains, it’s “just you and the deep blue.”

Iida compared the design philosophy behind Aquanaut’s Holiday to avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, going so far as to call him the “father of modern art.”⁹

“His influence on the fine art world has been huge,” Iida said of Duchamp. “What he did was to invert the relationship between artist and audience: art is not an object that the artist presents to audience; it is the audience that discovers the art within the object. It’s the freedom of interpretation itself that’s so interesting, I thought, and Aquanaut’s was my attempt to experiment with that concept.”

Duchamp is perhaps best known today for taking everyday objects and presenting them as art, often with very little modification. This series of “readymades,” as he called them, includes “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” a store-bought snow shovel hung from a wire in his studio, and “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal displayed upside-down and inscribed with a cryptic signature.

Critical interpretations differ, but it’s safe to say Duchamp’s readymades were meant, at least in part, as a protest against “retinal art,” or art created with only aesthetics in mind. He put down artists who painted just what they saw as “stupid,”¹⁰ and believed art “should have to do with […] our urge for understanding.”¹¹ In short, the ideation that bore and is subsequently born from a piece of art should be more meaningful than the conventional skill used in its production.

“Let’s make the anti-Mario game”

It’s easy to see how these beliefs influenced Iida’s work decades after Duchamp’s death.

Duchamp fought the idea that art must be judged exclusively on traditional notions of aesthetic beauty. Similarly, video games are beholden to the concept of “fun,” so much so that critics – professional and otherwise – often refer to releases with loftier ambitions than providing players with traditional notions of entertainment or satisfaction as “non-games.” In fact, when asked about the most vicious criticism levied against Aquanaut’s Holiday, Iida summed it up with one sentence: “‘This isn’t a game!’”¹²

“For people who love games in that sense,” he said, “creating something like Aquanaut’s might be tantamount to a crime.”

The overall reception to Aquanaut’s Holiday, Iida added, was “surprisingly positive,” but this labeling of his works as “non-games” carried over into his second project, Tail of the Sun.

Tail of the Sun launched on PlayStation in Japan on April 26, 1996, with a North American release following a year later.

Iida made similar references to Super Mario 64‘s demo at Shoshinkai as close friend Kenji Eno prior to the arrival of Tail of the Sun. It was a turning point in his way of looking at video games. Tail of the Sun‘s development started with the overall design concept of “a game about games.” Iida wanted to strip away all the superfluous trappings that had attached themselves to gaming at the time and get to the “essence” of the artform.

“When I asked myself what is fun about video games, for me personally, it’s the fact that pressing a button makes something happen,” Iida said. “The enjoyment of Super Mario doesn’t come from the quest to save Princess Peach. It comes from jumping around, an action which is purely fun in and of itself. […] Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto was highly cognizant of that fact when he created it. That’s why, when we were making Tail of the Sun, I was saying, ‘Let’s make the anti-Mario game.’”

In Tail of the Sun, you lead a tribe of primitive humans as they attempt to build a structure high enough to catch the (gasp) tail of the sun. The gameplay loop is simple: you take control of one caveperson at a time, exploring and exploiting its massive world so that your tribe can evolve into a civilization capable of hunting the mammoths whose tusks you’ll use to construct your tower. Much like Aquanaut’s Holiday, none of this is explained in-game, and the menus provide little in the way of actionable information for newcomers (though, to be fair, it is very funny to troll confused players with a screen thanking the confectionery company whose sugar cakes are used to represent the game’s resources in lieu of guidance).¹³

Tail of the Sun instead utilizes subtle hints to guide players through this process. Every time you eat a piece of food off the ground – you’ll do this hundreds, possibly even thousands of times in a playthrough depending on your dedication and fortitude – a part of your character’s body will flash to indicate its improvement. In this way, you’ll increase your ability to run, jump, swim, fight, and propagate. Expanding your culture will allow the tribe to evolve and, eventually, they’ll develop the strength and tools you need to hunt down mammoths for their precious tusks. Between starting the game and getting to that point, however, you’ll need to spend the long stretches of time between anything exciting happening getting used to Tail of the Sun‘s slippery physics.

“If you make the action elements of your game too strong, it will turn into an action game,” Iida said. “That’s why I think it’s fine to convey an approximate level of quality and accuracy to actions like jumping and running. They don’t need to be perfect.”¹⁴

Sometimes, your caveperson will just straight up fall asleep, even if you’re right in the middle of swimming, climbing a huge mountain, or fighting a bunch of wolves. Iida claimed this was a deliberate attempt to “employ a counter-intuitive approach to the game design.” Tail of the Sun‘s “intermittent rhythm,” he added, “makes the parts where you are running around freely more pleasant and enjoyable.” It’s possible to wake up by mashing the Circle button, but doing so too often will make you liable to fall asleep more frequently or even die from exhaustion.

Life is fragile in Tail of the Sun, but while this mortality isn’t quite as foundational to the experience as in, say, the Pikmin or Lemmings series, you’ll still need to make peace with repeatedly dying and taking over where you left off as another member of the nascent tribe. Fortunately, your upgrades apply to every generation – a likely nod to psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, the origins¹⁵ of which inspired Tail of the Sun‘s name¹⁶ – but this is one of the few concessions the game makes for the player’s comfort. And that’s by design.

“Nowadays you have people saying things like, if something isn’t ‘fun,’ then it’s not a game,” Iida said. “I’m suspicious of that line of thinking. I think it threatens to stuff all games into a set mold. It’s kind of an exaggeration, but you could say I wanted to create an ‘un-fun game.’ I think the possibilities of games is wider than that. All is permitted; nothing is forbidden.”

The enthusiast press was much more brutal to Tail of the Sun than it had been with Aquanaut’s Holiday, owing mostly to the game’s chunky graphics and critics’ frustration with its ambiguous mechanics. Many seemed unwilling to approach Tail of the Sun as anything other than a tech product. My childhood magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, for example, said the game lacked substance, and one panelist even deployed the dreaded “non-game” accusation in his brutal takedown of what he saw as Tail of the Sun‘s lack of entertainment value.¹⁷

Marcel Duchamp once said that however you describe a work of art, you “must call it art” because “bad art is still art in the same way a bad emotion is still an emotion.”¹⁸ But don’t just take his word for it. We already have a fitting example of the worst case scenario when art is delegitimized in this way.

“Moral insanity and emotionalism”

Speaking at the inauguration of the House of German Art in 1937, Adolf Hitler accused artists who dabbled in styles like Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, and Impressionism – which the Nazis called “degenerate art” – of an inherent and pervasive abnormality, saying:

“And what do they fabricate? Deformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire nothing but disgust, human beings that are more animal than human, children who, if they looked like this, could be nothing but God’s curse on us. And these cruelest dilettantes dare to present this to today’s world as the art of our time, as the expression of what our time produces and of what gives it its stamp. Let no one say these artists depict what they see. Among the paintings submitted for this exhibition, there were many works that would actually lead us to believe that there are people who see things differently than they are, that there really are men who see the present-day figures of our people only as degenerate cretins – men who are determined to perceive, or, as they would say, to experience, meadows as blue, skies as green, and clouds as sulphur yellow. I do not intend to debate whether these individuals do in fact see and perceive in this way. But in the name of the German people, I mean to forbid these pitiable unfortunates, who clearly suffer from visual disorders, from attempting to force the results of their defective vision onto their fellow human beings as reality or, indeed, from serving it up as ‘art.’”¹⁹

(I probably don’t need to point this out, but take note of how similar Hitler’s whiny, hysterical complaints sound to the talking points today’s loudest far-right grifters use to stir up their reactionary fanbases.²⁰ Curious.)

Art deemed degenerate was displayed during a companion exhibition – which mocked the works of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, and many others by labeling them with propaganda slogans like “revelation of the Jewish racial soul” and “filth for filth’s sake”²¹ – and then either destroyed, sold, or stolen by high-ranking Nazi officials for display in their homes.

It’s a small blessing Duchamp, who emigrated from France to the United States long before the Nazis occupied his home country during World War II, was able to avoid this persecution, but many of his German contemporaries weren’t as fortunate. Lohse-Wächtler, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was murdered as part of the Nazi euthanasia campaign against people with disabilities and mental illnesses. Dix was removed from his position as professor of painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, forced to adhere to Nazi ideals in future art under threat of further punishment, and eventually conscripted into the German army. Klee fled to Switzerland during Hitler’s rise but was refused citizenship due to the rise of Nazi-inspired fascism in that country’s politics as well.

Although the concept of degenerate art is most often linked to the genocidal actions of Nazi Germany, it was first conceived by social critic Max Nordau in his 1892 text Degeneration. Nordau tried to explain then-modern art’s shift away from realistic portraits and landscapes (which, in his mind, represented “law,” “decency,” and “modesty”²²) in favor of more abstract forms of expression (or “moral insanity and emotionalism”²³) by applying the pseudoscientific theories of early criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Just as Lombroso believed criminals could be identified by the features and sizes of their skulls or the presence of left-handedness, Nordau pointed to so-called degenerate art as a reflection of a dangerous, deep-seated blemish in the artist’s psyche, and the Nazis were more than happy to carry this fallacy out to its predictably violent conclusion. Nordau would go on to become a figurehead of the Zionist movement after meeting Theodor Herzl, a man considered by Israel to be its “spiritual father.”²⁴ All in all, not a great track record.

It’s not my intention to accuse every myopic video game critic of being a literal Nazi, but I do think it’s at least a little Nordau-like to treat anything that doesn’t exist with the sole purpose of flooding your brain with dopamine or making hundreds of millions of dollars for do-nothing business executives as less-than or somehow outside the accepted scope of the medium. And while there are those who think this behavior unique to right-wing reactionaries, I’ve also seen it recently in those I’ve considered peers, who wield capitalist ideals from which they’d otherwise distance themselves like a cudgel to bash artists they believe have sinned in some way (see: Hideo Kojima losing PlayStation as a development partner on Physint over reported budget concerns,²⁵ Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger failing to make a profit at the box office²⁶). We would all do well to kill the fascist shareholders in our minds.

“An instant meditative gadget which everyone can use”

Kazutoshi Iida, long before the rise of the modern, cinematic video game, anticipated the dangers of thinking every release should be a crowd-pleasing studio blockbuster. Not only was it “boring,” he also worried about the industry succumbing to “autotoxemia” should it ignore the importance of supporting small developers and encouraging experimentation.²⁷

It’s this fear of stagnation that influenced Iida’s love-hate relationship with Nintendo. He admired the company for its creativity but also thought it focused too much on mass appeal, an opinion Kenji Eno would echo during his conversation with Shigeru Miyamoto some months later. Iida, however, took his assessment one step further.

“I think Nintendo’s great,” Iida said, laughing. “But there’s something a little fascist about it all, too.”

Nintendo established the foundations of early 3D platforming on the Nintendo 64 with Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong 64, and Banjo-Kazooie, but the console’s lineup lacked the diversity of Sony’s PlayStation and, to a lesser degree, Sega’s Saturn. As such, Nintendo partnered with Recruit – best known today for owning a vast network of employment sites that includes Indeed and Glassdoor – to establish Marigul Management in 1996.²⁸ This new venture’s goal was simple: finance small, independent studios capable of developing unique Nintendo 64 games within five years.²⁹

Around the same time, Iida left Artdink and co-founded a new venture called Param. In addition to enlisting developers like Ambrella (Hey You! Pikachu), Noise (Custom Robo), and Saru Brunei (Cubivore), Marigul set its sights on Param with the intentions of helping fund Iida’s first major project at the young studio, Doshin the Giant. Miyamoto’s belief that Iida didn’t make enough money with Aquanaut’s Holiday for the game to be considered a success was apparently no longer a concern.

Iida’s reputation in the United States post-Tail of the Sun was such that, when Nintendo announced his involvement with Marigul, major video game website IGN ended its coverage of the news by saying, “Let’s hope that Nintendo will look over Marigul’s shoulder to make sure that the game is also technically up to par.”³⁰

IGN was, in effect, encouraging Nintendo to institute the kind of fascism Iida had highlighted in the company previously. Any message or emotion Iida and his team intended to impart was, in the minds of some industry voices of the time, secondary to providing a product for mindless consumption, despite Marigul’s stated mission of bringing unconventional games to the Nintendo 64 and Miyamoto himself affirming his confidence in Doshin the Giant‘s development. But video games shouldn’t just accept inputs and spit out fun. Video games shouldn’t be bubblegum machines. Video games shouldn’t be toasters.

Doshin the Giant released in Japan on December 11, 1999 as one of the six games developed for the Nintendo 64’s DD add-on, with an upgraded GameCube port following on March 14, 2002. Europe also received the GameCube version on September 20, 2002.

In many ways, Doshin the Giant is Iida’s most traditional game. It opens with a cutscene establishing the player’s role as a massive, yellow deity responsible for guiding a society of tiny island-dwellers. A narrator pops in from time to time to provide short tutorials about the giant’s abilities and relationship with its subjects. The action is broken up by in-game days, and once night falls, the giant receives comments from the island dwellers about its performance, though from what I can gather, these comments are just fun bits of world-building and don’t affect progress in any way.

As for what you do in Doshin the Giant, most of your actions revolve around fulfilling the terraforming requests of the villagers, which you can approach at your leisure. This mostly involves transporting trees from untamed regions of the island to population centers to encourage farming and raising or lowering the ground to establish level geography suitable for construction. The humans reward Doshin’s good deeds with love, represented by a ring of hearts that slowly fills the edges of the screen clockwise and, once completed, further increases the giant’s size. But while growing larger makes Doshin’s tasks easier, it also means having to more closely watch where you step, as an errant stride is liable to crush someone or something.

“This is a representation of the fundamental disease, that is ‘the friction between an increasing self-consciousness and its surrounding,’ which has been possessed by the modern society, in the form of video games,” Iida said in a letter published ahead of Doshin the Giant‘s release. “I can say that it’s my karma to incorporate these literary and philosophical matters into the world of entertainment and it also proves my proposition, that is ‘a video game is an instant meditative gadget which everyone can use.’”³¹

When a civilization grows large enough, its citizens build a monument to Doshin’s generosity. Monuments are the crux of Doshin the Giant‘s explicit goal, as inspiring the villagers to build enough of these structures over the course of several in-game days is what will ultimately allow you to reach the credits screen. But inspiration comes in many forms. With the press of a button, Doshin can transform into a demon whose goals focus on destruction rather than creation. Killing villagers or destroying their buildings earns Doshin a ring of skulls that, as a mirror image of the hearts, occupy the screen counter-clockwise. A full complement of skulls will also make Doshin grow larger, but the subsequent monuments built will instead be representations of the islanders’ hate for the giant rather than love.

Doshin the Giant wasn’t the last time Iida would work in video games – he contributed to Rebuild of Evangelion: 3nd Impact for the PlayStation Portable during a short stint at Grasshopper Manufacture and led development on WiiWare release Discipline alongside Harvest Moon designer Yasuhiro Wada – but it did fulfill the loose, three-game limit he’d given himself at the start of his career. Iida “put all [his] thoughts and everything [he] wanted to make” in Doshin the Giant in the hopes of examining big questions like why humans seek out and, in turn, create entertainment.³²

Iida currently works at Ritsumeikan University’s College of Image Arts and Sciences as a professor. He teaches classes on art fundamentals, video game production, and audiovisual study. As part of the college’s 2026 curriculum, Iida also led a course on designing interactive spaces using Unreal Engine.

“I have two main tasks here at Ritsumeikan University,” Iida said. “The first one is to teach what I learned in the game industry and what enters the domain of art. Although you can find art in video games, I also want to show that there is also video gaming in art. The second thing is finding what excites people. What makes it that people, or myself, will be excited? That is why observation is very important, this is what I am trying to teach.”

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone”

Every game in Iida’s oeuvre imparts a different message. Aquanaut’s Holiday asks you to slow down and appreciate the small wonders of the world around us. Tail of the Sun is about not getting discouraged by gradual, sometimes imperceptible growth. Doshin the Giant teaches that change can be driven by both love and hate and the importance of learning to differentiate between the two. But the major throughline present in all his work is about making room to be inconvenienced in a world of instant gratification. We should seek out difficult art, if only to remind ourselves that art serves a greater purpose than providing frictionless entertainment.

Too many seem to think the goal of art is wholly to take up space. We see this play out every day in the non-stop glut of AI slop elbowing its way into every facet of our daily lives. Art has been reduced from its provenance as a pure distillation of the human spirit to “content,” something that fills the wide-open spaces of existence with blinding lights and deafening sounds rather than thoughts or ideas. It reminds me of what writer David Foster Wallace called the “pure unalloyed pleasure”³³ of all-you-can-eat candy, 24/7 television, and virtual reality porn. Many of us, especially in video games, need to stop substituting empty calories for actual meals, or at the very least not treat those who attempt to create something more fulfilling as illegitimate.

Art lives in the mind, not the stomach, but that doesn’t stop our brains from being hungry. At best, we spend a couple hours with a movie, a handful with a book, or maybe even dozens with a video game, but afterward, all we have is how a piece of art embedded itself in our memories. Even a work as ubiquitous as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa exists as billions of discrete recollections, the motley result of a game of telephone played not only through the enigmatic filters of perception and bias but time and space as well. An artist creates, but we are all partners in giving that creation meaning.

Marcel Duchamp, several decades after finding a postcard depicting the Mona Lisa and reappropriating da Vinci’s masterpiece as an “assisted readymade”³⁴ by adding facial hair and a lewd caption, told a group of fellow artists “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.”³⁵ He believed an audience brought art “in contact with the eternal world” through viewers’ attempts to analyze a work’s deeper meaning, which in turn “adds his contribution to the creative act.” This also, Duchamp said, has the benefit of giving forgotten artists a second chance at notoriety.

Seek out art that asks you to be active participants in the experience rather than mere consumers. We should want to be challenged, and not just in the Soulslike, “wow this boss is hard” way. There’s nothing wrong with indulging in a Super Mario 64 from time to time, of course, but if your entire diet is dedicated to snacking on video games where pressing a button is always met with an immediate and pleasurable on-screen action, you are going to starve. Treat games less as products to be labeled “inferior” for not fulfilling the rigid standards foisted on them by an industry steeped in fascist and capitalist thought, and more like the grand, humanistic endeavors worthy of interpretation they’ve always been.

“The thing I focus the most on is ‘kansatsu,’ observation,” Iida said. “It doesn’t necessarily allow [you] to think of new ideas immediately, but when observing things for a long time, one day you start to make connections. Those connections become inspiration sources, that ultimately give birth to creation. It is important to keep observing around us for that day to come.”³⁶

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1. Duchamp, Marcel, et al. “Eleven Europeans in America.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, vol. 13, no. 4/5, 1946, pp. 19-21. ↩︎
2. “Which way to the underground?” Next Generation, vol. 3, no. 36, Dec. 1997, p. 81. ↩︎
3. Game Hihyou. The Book of Kenji Eno. Translated by Shmuplations, Micro Magazine, 1996, pp. 64–67. ↩︎
4. Hagiwara. “The subtle relationship between art and games.” GAME BUSTERS, K-NET Inc., 16 July 1997. ↩︎
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12. Ono. ↩︎
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14. Ono. ↩︎
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17. Boyer, Crispin, et al. “Tail of the Sun review.” Electronic Gaming Monthly, vol. 10, no. 95, June 1997, p. 46. ↩︎
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23. Nordau, p. 19. ↩︎
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25. Schreier, Jason. “Hideo Kojima’s Physint Video Game Dropped by PlayStation, Goes to Xbox.” Bloomberg, 11 Sept. 2026. ↩︎
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27. Ono. ↩︎
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31. “My Giant.” IGN, 18 Mar. 1998. ↩︎
32. Archipel. ↩︎
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34. Tomkins, pp. 221-222. ↩︎
35. Duchamp, ART News. ↩︎
36. Archipel. ↩︎