In the final days before the election, the Democratic Party aired a national ad accusing “Bush cronies,” Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove, and “shills for big business” of “stealing our democracy.” The spot depicted an old woman getting mugged. The image, though, was hackneyed, and the message simplistic. It was almost impossible to explain to the public

—You wish you were part of some wonderful video game conflict with a clear moral objective.

this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without. Schtitt then falls into the sort

(In Filterworld, everything must be a meme, like a remixable joke or image optimized to travel across the Internet.)

Look at Nintendo, they’ve created their own world with their own characters. Not just like, “Oh, I’ve got to create characters.” No, it’s a culture, it’s a world, it’s a flavor, it’s a brand, it feels unique, something unique and fun, or interesting, and so it is. This is a very big topic to talk about. But I’m trying to distill it down as much as

Mario Odyssey and Zelda: Breath of the Wild were built by internal studios within the company, each with its own creative directors and game designers. Imagine having hundreds of people Flintstoning to launch a new network—that’s what happens in the world of new consoles. The strategy worked,

he did something that no one had ever done, but every presidential candidate seems to have done since: he asked a simple but now legendary question, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ He said:

former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once said, “Campaigning is poetry. Governing is prose.” Governing not only requires very different skills, it may also require different personnel. The very people who thrive on the electricity of a War Room may be ill equipped to handle the relentless routine that governing entails.