Consumer game site GameSpot recently spoke to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata for his perspectives on the video game industry and Nintendo's present and future role in the console market, but also asked him about virtual worlds.

Sony is promising to unveil its PlayStation Home virtual world this year, and Nintendo recently added more interaction and sharing for the Mii user-generated avatars, letting users aggregate and vote on them. So it's a logical next step to wonder whether Nintendo is considering evolving those avatars and its network one step further.

Though he avoided a direct yes-or-no outright, Iwata first stressed that accessibility's one of Nintendo's primary values, and that they wouldn't build in anything that was especially complex:

Take the Miis, for example. Sure, we could go crazy with the interface until it was so customizable that you could make an avatar that looked like anyone you could imagine. But it's because the interface is the way that it is now that the average person can pick it up and create a family member's portrait and feel a personal connection to games unlike anything available in the past. Mii is the answer we came up with after a long process of questioning just how low we could keep that entrance threshold.

Iwata essentially feels like it's not the right time for Nintendo to go in that direction:

In that respect, the virtual world services out there now still aren't at a place where we'd like to join in--and certainly not to the point that we'd want to jump into competition with everybody else. We'd rather focus on doing things that nobody else would do.

Our job is to constantly look into what people find fun and interesting. I mean, nobody else wants to develop a video game where you get on the scale and see how much you weigh. [Laughs] That's how we're able to keep offering people surprises and entertainment, so even if we were to make a virtual world-like product, we'd be sure to make it something that nobody would call it a product similar to another company's offering.

It's a safe bet, then, that if Nintendo were ever to show any interest in the online worlds space, it would have to be when that particular sector was established enough for the company to weigh its wisest options. That's not surprising, given Nintendo's reputational history of innovating in its own direction even when trends seem to be moving elsewhere.

[Q&A - Nintendo's Satoru Iwata | GameSpot]