Shiggy explained the "Nintendo difference" with three elements of their corporate vision. The first, which he admits we might have heard a bit too much about by now, is the "Expanded Audience." Miyamoto has his own personal way of measuring success in this field…the “Wife-o-Meter.” After the laughter subsides, he continues, “It has only one variable: the interest of my own wife!”

Hits like Super Mario Brothers interested us, but not Mrs. M. Nor did Tetris. But when his daughter began playing Ocarina of Time, Mrs. M began to watch the gameplay. The Wife-o-Meter increased imperceptibly. When Animal Crossing came out, he assured her that there were no enemies in the game, and his wife agreed to touch the controller. Soon she was a full-fledged player. Another blip on the Wife-o-Meter. Mrs. M Likes cats, while Shiggy prefers dogs. (63% of wii owners like dogs, says the giant Everybody Votes screen.) Miyamoto looked at people with their dogs, and wondered that if he could get them as interested in video games as they were in their dogs, Nintendo could expand its audience. Enter Nintendogs. Another notch on the Wife-o-Meter.

This past Valentine’s Day, Miaymoto came home from work late, expecting his wife to be asleep…but he entered to hear the sounds of the Wii: Mrs. M was casting votes on the Wii. She had used the Wii and downloaded the Everybody Votes Channel on her own. “It would be more normal to come home and find Donkey Kong eating at my dinner table!” You get the picture. This man is adorable.

Nowadays she says to her husband, “I can beat you at Brain Age!” Miyamoto glows. “She’s bragging. To me! But look at her scores: she’s right. She turned into a hardcore gamer overnight.” Mrs. M is a big fan of the Mii Channel, and is making Miis for everyone else in the neighborhood. The crux of this is that she’s being creative, and beginning her own first steps toward game design. “And when she does come up with an idea, I can retire!”

The second element of the "Nintendo difference" is “Balance” – Miyamoto has been involved in the design of every Nintendo controller since the NES, often working with the same people as a well-oiled team. “It’s a group collaboration,” he says. Creating the Wii was more intense than anything that came before, with different teams trying to reconcile their various viewpoints: one team wanted to revolutionize gameplay; another was focused on backward compatibility; engineers wanted to create a new type of game controller, and software designers were excited but nervous – the result was a slew of Wii controller designs, many of which you may have seen before. Finally they decided to mimic the look of a TV remote, and the Wiimote was born: balancing the needs of hardware and software. “As a controller, the Wii remote does a lot of what I have always dreamed about, for years and years.”

Creating new and better kinds of entertainment for everyone is Nintendo’s mission. To that end, Miyamoto brings up slides of a museum for the beautiful painted Japanese playing cards that Nintendo makes. Inside the building, each visitor gets a modified version of the DS, and screens on the floor display the cards with verses of poetry – all changeable by the visitors through the use of their DS. Seeing how the project bridges the gaps between generations is exactly what Miyamoto loves – these types of museums normally only appeal to the elderly, but by integrating the DS and video screen technology, they expand and entertain younger audiences as well.

This brings him to the third aspect of Nintendo’s corporate vision: “Risk.” Nintendo took on the risk of challenging their own definition of what a video game is. Miyamoto points to the DS as an excellent example. But no risk, he admits, compares to the design of the Wii. The Gamecube controller’s multicolored buttons were meant to attract new gamers with an easy-to-use device. Nintendo wanted to take a greater risk. We were used to the two-handed controller, he says. He wanted to do away with that. Risk.

It wasn’t until he saw the long, long Wii lines at E3 that Shiggy and crew knew that the risk had been worth taking. “But corporations don’t make video games,” Miyamoto says, “People do.” He turns to his own personal inspiration and involvement in design: the harder you look at the individual parts of a game, the further away from Miyamoto’s creative vision you'll get. This is because his inspiration comes from a very abstract source: “I think of the core element of fun when I’m designing the game…to do that, I think of one thing: the look on the player’s face when they’re playing the game.”

He points us to examples from MyFirstTouchDS – where you can see faces of people playing the DS for the first time…we see video of women and men and girls and grandfathers squealing in delight over the handheld. Not only are the people playing the games happy, but so are those watching them play. This is the core of what Miyamoto wants to see in games…spreading glee. Other designers may want to frighten, or create tension, and that’s good for them, but Miyamoto wants the experience always to be positive. If he’s not seeing that delight in the game he’s designing, then he’ll take the risk (as he mimes turning over a table: his legendary passion is palpable). He’s willing to upend or delay a game, if that’s what it takes.

Miyamoto believes that these positive emotions help expand the audience. When one member of a household hears or sees a family member experiencing that joy, they want to feel it for themselves. Wii Play, for instance, has a new value, Miyamoto explains: it gives our non-gamer friends a way to play, or at least a way to begin to play.

“Maybe you game reviewers out there need to add a new category for judging a game: how fun it is for people who don’t play them.” This time, the applause is as legendary as the man himself.