Since helping to invent the modern video-game industry in 1981 with his design of Donkey Kong, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has repeatedly reinvented it, most notably with the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s — it introduced Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda to American households — and in the 2000s with the Wii, whose arm-waving motion controls started yet another widely imitated video-game craze.

At 60, Mr. Miyamoto is still designing games for Nintendo, but the company’s newest creation, the Wii U, has not invaded American living rooms with the speed of its predecessor. From its mid-November release through January, the Wii U sold about 940,000 units in the United States, according to one recent report. Compare that with the estimated 1.5 million Wii machines sold in roughly the same period after that device’s 2006 unveiling, according to the Web site Gamasutra. Perhaps of more immediate concern, the Wii U is selling much more sluggishly than the No. 1 home console, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which has been around since 2005.

During a recent conversation at the Nintendo of America offices on Park Avenue, Mr. Miyamoto talked, through a translator, about the Wii U’s sales, violence in video games and whether he wanted to see his games at the Museum of Modern Art. These are excerpts from the discussion.

Q. What do you think of the conversation we’ve been having in the United States about games and violence since the elementary-school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December?