Discussion Video game developers and this whole "auteur" thing

[Irene]

So I came across this video titled "Top 10 Video Game Auteurs". It listed 10 developers, with some of them being the usual suspects, so to say. (Fumito Ueda, Suda51, Hideo Kojima, etc) And it got me thinking.

A lot of game developers are framed like this. Like some kind of visionary that points with the whole hand, a sort of leadership figure that gets elevated to stardom as they sign copies of their games and does a ton of interviews. Like, it's not like "an auteur" is a loose, fluffy concept. Auteurs do exist in the common sense, and there are examples of game developers who really do have a great amount of creative control, and calls all the shots.

Auteurship can at certain times be a good thing, if you ask me. Sometimes, games and creative works can benefit from one whole, all-encompassing vision that is being brought to life without compromises or the risk of being filed down and streamlined to appease focus groups.

But in general, I think the auteur concept when applied to game developers more often than not feels a bit... weird. Take Hironobu Sakaguchi, for example, listed in the video mentioned. An excellent developer. But are Final Fantasy VII "his" game in the way that we typically think of auteur-made games? I would say no. That would be dismissing Kitase, Nomura, Nojima and the gang entirely. When people nowadays dislike Zelda, they are quick to say "Aonuma has ruined Zelda!". Sometimes, someone at some point does have to be some kind of public figure for a game or series, which can result in them taking the brunt of criticism, but still. He is not responsible for every game mechanic that caused someone to dislike the game. Yoko Taro (Someone that many likes to see as an auteur) also said that he thought Takahisa Taura and the junior Platinum crew was a blast to work with during the development of NieR:Automata, and that it was unfortunate that Hideki Kamiya was looked upon as the de-facto Platinum star.

This is what made me think for a while upon seeing the video, and I'm curious to hear other thoughts about this whole thing.

 

[JazzPotatoes]

Game development is usually a team based process. You do get solo projects (such as mine) but that's always in the indie sphere. Developing big projects is inherently collaborative.

That being said: a good director or project lead who understands the development process end to end is worth their weight in gold. When we look back at games that got stuck in development hell or ended up being cancelled, the overriding issue you see time and again is teams not knowing what type of game they are creating, not having a unified vision or goal for the project, and getting stuck throwing different concepts in and out. The role of a good director isn't to stick their name on everything, it's to keep everyone working towards the same vision and goal so that wasted development is kept to an absolute minimum.

A good director should be able to understand how character and level art design informs game readability and playability, and make sure the art teams work within that brief.

They should be able to understand how sound design can both inform and distract the player, and ensure the sound designers are working in unison with the composers to ensure the soundscape doesn't clash or distract the player (having vocal music playing over dialogue is a big example of this).

They should be able to understand how the different mechanics work with each other, and make sure every mechanic is implemented as part of a balanced whole. We've all played games that advertise themselves as a mix of shooting and melee, only for the melee part of the game to be woefully crap compared to the shooting.

So yeah... While games are collaborative, it's usually impossible for individual teams to have a complete view of the game they're working on, which is where having a really good director and management team comes into play.

 

[AllEchse]

So I came across this video titled "Top 10 Video Game Auteurs". It listed 10 developers, with some of them being the usual suspects, so to say. (Fumito Ueda, Suda51, Hideo Kojima, etc) And it got me thinking.

A lot of game developers are framed like this. Like some kind of visionary that points with the whole hand, a sort of leadership figure that gets elevated to stadom as they sign copies of their games and does a ton of interviews. Like, it's not like "an auteur" is a loose, fluffy concept. Auteurs do exist in the common sense, and there are examples of game developers who really do have a great amount of creative control, and calls all the shots.

Auteurship can at certain times be a good thing, if you ask me. Sometimes, games and creative works can benefit from one whole, all-encompassing vision that is being brought to life without compromises or the risk of being filed down and streamlined to appease focus groups.

But in general, I think the auteur concept when applied to game developers more often than not feels a bit... weird. Take Hironobu Sakaguchi, for example, listed in the video mentioned. An excellent developer. But are Final Fantasy VII "his" game in the way that we typically think of auteur-made games? I would say no. That would be dismissing Kitase, Nomura, Nojima and the gang entirely. When people nowadays dislike Zelda, they are quick to say "Aonuma has ruined Zelda!". Sometimes, someone at some point does have to be some kind of public figure for a game or series, which can result in them taking the brunt of criticism, but still. He is not responsible for every game mechanic that caused someone to dislike the game. Yoko Taro (Someone that many likes to see as an auteur) also said that he thought Takahisa Taura and the junior Platinum crew was a blast to work with during the development of NieR:Automata, and that it was unfortunate that Hideki Kamiya was looked upon as the de-facto Platinum star.

This is what made me think for a while upon seeing the video, and I'm curious to hear other thoughts about this whole thing.

I think Taura has started to get somw recognition, after all Astral Chain was marketed with his name and he also worked on the Nier Replicant remake.

But even then I guess people kind of made him be kind of a smaller auteur then?


Where is the article about Deus Ex Creator Warren Spector not linking how people attribute games to just one person when you need it?
The title would have been perfect here.

 

[Old Sorta Fan]

It’s just marketing and hype. “Buy this game because it’s a Kojima game or a Miyamoto game, or a Neil Druckmann game.” Nothing more than the noise from the hype machine.

Video games are large team project. Mr. Miyamoto may oversee the project and overall creative vision of Pikmin but it took hundreds of people to complete that project.

Same with Kojima and a boring title like Death Stranding.

As for Yoko Taro... I just don’t get it. I played Nier Automata and loved the gameplay and the visuals. The plot was the worst part of it as it often made no sense and stuff just sort of happened at random that had nothing to do with the player. It was the typical “cutscene nullifies winning the boss fight” trope over and over again. Just melodrama first the sake of melodrama. I won’t get into more details as I don’t want to spoil it.

I don’t think that most customers cared about Yoko Taro and only of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction 1) finished the game and 2) bothered to look up the head writer online.

 

[Bait02]

Video game developers and this whole "auteur" thing
An Hideo Kojima thread

Spoiler

It's marketing

But that's not to dismiss the key role of a director. I just think a particular emphasis is placed when it helps to convey a particular style of game or particular qualities associated with said director.

 

[neil]

Video games are large team project. Mr. Miyamoto may oversee the project and overall creative vision of Pikmin but it took hundreds of people to complete that project.

The difference with Miyamoto is that he was making games in the days when just a handful of people worked on them. So on Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong etc., he was maybe an auteur-like creative force. Those are arguably not auteur-like products though.

 

[Aurc]

Shinji Mikami, Fumito Ueda, and Hidetaka Miyazaki are some of the first that come to mind when I picture video game "auteurs". That said: I think there's merit in your grievance about folks kinda just putting everything on one person, when the game development process is among the widest reaching and most collaborative across media. I think both extremes (hero worship, vilification) are unhealthy, but it's still valid to recognize the impact certain devs have made through their vision. I think the Ueda - Miyazaki link is particularly interesting, with the latter opting to pursue game development because he loved his experience with Ico so much.

 

[Yoshifan31]

It’s pretty harmless honestly, some creatives have a distinct personal touch that immediately makes you recognize them. That’s it, the whole thing about giving all the credit to one person is just something that is commonly misunderstood

In videogames, just like in movies, I feel like the auteur title is usually given to the “hipster” directors that make something notably different but not too commercial. Like Spielberg is absolutely an auteur but he’s not the first director to come to mind because his similarities across his movies are more subtle, plus he made a lot of blockbusters so that kind of disqualifies him, usually when people think auteur they think about the really quirky ones that you know from the first glance that they worked on the movie. Miyamoto is absolutely an auteur but now, his work is taken for granted to the point where people only mention him to use him as a scapegoat for things that they don’t like in series that he created (he wasn’t the fucking problem with Star Fox Zero, I will die on this hill). So when people think about auteurs in games they will mostly think about the one that 70% of his body is made of movies. Ueda got quickly branded as an auteur once SOTC was praised by Roger Ebert and was featured in that Adam Sandler movie. Game directors that are widely considered auteurs are mostly due to things that are easy to spot like story and presentation, I feel like people will rarely use that label in game to describe gameplay, hence how you don’t really see often this word used for people at Nintendo. The closest one I can think of would be Sakurai, I think his games often share certain gameplay concepts, modes and design philosophies but the fact that he communicates so openly about his creative process (even before his Youtube channel) helps a lot. His wife’s menus are also very recognizable

 

[Earthbounder]

I do think some Directors / Producers cross the line between being a project leader and an auteur, because they have such unique visions that their touch ends up defining a good portion of the game even if they did not come up with all mechanics, the plot, and other elements.

Miyamoto, Miyazaki, Kamiya, Kojima, and Taro come to mind in this regard.

In those cases, there's an unfortunate natural tendency to credit all of the game's laurels and downfalls to them. But we should know better than that and avoid making those generalizations.

 

[MrBones]

Games are best made when there's a singular director, or small group of creative leads, who have a singular direction for the game. The evidence of that is pretty clear compared to titles designed-by-comittee (e.g. all modern Ubisoft games).

I don't think you need an "auteur" to accomplishment that, again a small team of creative leads can accomplish the same thing if they're on the same page. But it helps.

 

[AllEchse]

It’s pretty harmless honestly, some creatives have a distinct personal touch that immediately makes you recognize them. That’s it, the whole thing about giving all the credit to one person is just something that is commonly misunderstood

In videogames, just like in movies, I feel like the auteur title is usually given to the “hipster” directors that make something notably different but not too commercial. Like Spielberg is absolutely an auteur but he’s not the first director to come to mind because his similarities across his movies are more subtle, plus he made a lot of blockbusters so that kind of disqualifies him, usually when people think auteur they think about the really quirky ones that you know from the first glance that they worked on the movie. Miyamoto is absolutely an auteur but now, his work is taken for granted to the point where people only mention him to use him as a scapegoat for things that they don’t like in series that he created (he wasn’t the fucking problem with Star Fox Zero, I will die on this hill). So when people think about auteurs in games they will mostly think about the one that 70% of his body is made of movies. Ueda got quickly branded as an auteur once SOTC was praised by Roger Ebert and was featured in that Adam Sandler movie. Game directors that are widely considered auteurs are mostly due to things that are easy to spot like story and presentation, I feel like people will rarely use that label in game to describe gameplay, hence how you don’t really see often this word used for people at Nintendo. The closest one I can think of would be Sakurai, I think his games often share certain gameplay concepts, modes and design philosophies but the fact that he communicates so openly about his creative process (even before his Youtube channel) helps a lot. His wife’s menus are also very recognizable

I'd argue Shinjin Mikami and Kamiyas auteurship is more about their gameplay than presentation.

I don't think DMC1, Okami and Resident Evil 2 share much visually or storywise.

 

[ammonite]

I think the auteur theory has just spread all over. It's amazing the number of team sports who've adopted an auteur coach model, the manager getting more credit than the players in title-winning teams. It's a really clean narrative that allows us to champion genius, which I think is something we love to do as humans, to say "This is brilliant because this guy/gal is superb at what they do, the world leader in fact", rather the just being excited by good collaboration, which is the case in every great movie, game, or even team sport.

 

[AngryAlchemist]

Counterpoint: Shu Takumi.

As much as there probably is an inherent contradiction between large scale game development and auteur theory, I don't really see why we can't simply acknowledge that contradiction while also acknowledging there are video game equivalents. Besides, there is usually only a few people making creative decisions in a game, and even less who understand the whole picture. I especially appreciate the (ex) Capcom directors like Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Shu Takumi and Hideaki Itsuno.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

I feel like there's too much anti-auteur theory stuff in video game development considering how many games have been developed by literally one person or like five people, lol.