At the recent CEDEC conference venerable anime director and writer Yoshiyuki Tomino weighed in on the state of games. Now, Tomino is all about the context of his statements and whilst he proclaimed games to be “evil” this was wholly meant in relation to a game’s creative worth. In that, without the creative quality to back up a game’s existence it’s very much a waste of resource and hence “evil”. He cited Tetris as qualitative benchmark to this and that functionally games haven’t really outmoded this, which is actually pretty accurate. So his comment was in relation to games themselves and not something unrelated.

Naturally, a few places have got a little carried away and focused purely on the “evil” comment without comprehending the context of his speech. Some have even gone as far to think Tomino actually hates games, which is pretty facile considering the fact he wrote and directed Overman King Gainer in which the main protagonist is a very skilled gamer and hence able to pilot the titular mecha. Finally, some have said the comment is hypocritical in relation to the creation of multiple Gundam games over the years but Tomino has no involvement in these tie-in games whatsoever so the linkage is not at all valid to be honest.