From our other sites
The story
A user who noticed that lists of famous directors and creators in the gaming industry were overwhelmingly male posted about it on 5ch’s hardware/industry (“Geha”) board, sparking a discussion. Replies pointed to several real examples from Japan, including Aya Kyogoku, director of “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” and Shiho Takahashi, who worked on the Fire Emblem series — while others raised industry-specific factors, like how big-budget game development tends to drag on for years, with sleeping over at the office once being the norm. The thread also repeatedly compared this to manga and illustration, where it’s far easier for an individual to break in as a creator, unlike game development.
What people said
Aya Kyogoku, you know.
She's about the only one I could think of.
Isn't she the one who called Yamaoka "trash"?
She's world-class, honestly.
Probably the best-selling female director on Earth, and there's hardly a man who can even touch her lol
why don't new creators on the level of Director Kojima, Sakurai, Zelda's Aonuma, or Mikami just pop up anymore?
The manga world gets plenty of new blood — it's not like One Piece has been the sole reigning champ forever, Demon Slayer came along too.
That's because games are developed on such a massive scale.
Big titles take years, and landing a director role at a major studio means building up a career until a certain age anyway.
Well, manga is something you can draw with just a pen, while games need money and manpower — they're not even playing on the same field to begin with.
Toby Fox and Eric Barone can stand shoulder to shoulder with those guys on units sold alone.
as long as you don't turn it into an ugly game ruined by political correctness, nobody's going to complain.
Overseas publishers who don't get that sure do love taking big group photos of all their female staff.
Is that where "Sega Sammy Phoenix" comes from?
What game did Yamaoka make again, anyway?
"The Ultimate Menu: Best-of-Three Showdown"
They're around plenty, normally.
Otome games (romance games aimed at women) are almost all directed by women, right?
Exposure to that kind of work is probably what raises up — or inspires — the next generation of creators.
Games just don't connect to that the same way.
Maybe it's that game development has this vague "boys' club" image to it?
Might be worth having some big publisher with room to spare put together an all-female team to make a game and cultivate that kind of development culture.
Not making them churn out otome games or "games for women" specifically, just having them make something ordinary and mainstream —
I'm genuinely curious what that would turn out like.
Not happening, it's a company.
The gap between an author and a corporate department head is about that big.
Wasn't Forspoken basically that?
Yumi Sano → The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Yurie Hattori → Girls Mode (Style Savvy)
Shiho Takahashi → Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Kaori Ando → Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, Sushi Striker
Junko Kono → Suikoden
Misuzu Watanabe → The Great Ace Attorney 2
Azuku Shiratori → Toraware no Palma
Ikumi Nakamura → Ghostwire: Tokyo
[Hall of Fame]
Empress Keiko Erikawa → Angelique
Yeah well, these are all fairly recent names, I guess.
The generation before this one, sleeping at the office for a week straight was just normal — no way a woman could pull that off.
Nintendo really is something else.
They actually give women real positions and get real results out of it.
Do you really think that, looking at guys like Kojima, Nagoshi, and Harada?
"I wanna be glamorous"
(wrong reply target)
Part of why PlayStation won is that it aggressively scooped up young talent who wanted to be glamorous back in the day.
Compared to guys like these, film directors and manga artists are downright tame.
You've got it backwards. Movies have the same division-of-labor culture as games, but thanks to a culture of criticism and awards, audiences are the ones who decided a film "belongs" to its director.
In other words, it's not the director who decides whether to be glamorous — it's the audience.
It's simply that most directors capable of shipping a real game happen to be men.
Game directors are basically always buried in work, so really it just comes down to whether you can handle that workload.
Minae Matsukawa — who is, in fact, a woman.
Anyone who can't even tell a producer from a director is bottom-tier even by Geha standards.
Nintendo's just relatively "white" (employee-friendly, as opposed to an exploitative "black" company) about that stuff, so they happen to have a decent number of women.
Are they actually getting paid properly for it, though?
Demon Slayer's author, Rumiko Takahashi — they're the minority, right.
In seinen manga, women actually make up a slightly larger share of new-talent award winners too — I think there are quite a few female manga artists out there.
https://youngjump.jp/comic_award/interview/2023/11/
That's just because you've only looked at Day 3 of Comiket, isn't it.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
As the thread itself noted, there are in fact several real examples of female directors in Japan, such as Aya Kyogoku (director of the “Animal Crossing” series) and Shiho Takahashi (“Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn”), so the headline’s claim of “not a single one” doesn’t quite match reality. Part of the backdrop to this discussion is an industry-specific circumstance: big-budget game development tends to become a multi-year project, and there was once a period when sleeping over at the office was the norm. Some replies also conflated the roles of producer and director, and the fact that job titles in this industry aren’t always clearly distinguished added to the confusion. The repeated comparisons to manga and illustration were meant to highlight the low barrier to entry for individual creators in those fields, versus game development, which requires a team and a budget.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, aka “Geha”) thread “[Sad News] Game Directors Oddly Have Not a Single Woman Among Them, Becomes Hot Topic”.
Leave a Reply