Video Games have a Crediting Problem

With the upcoming release of the Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo announced the upcoming release of Donkey Kong: Bananza, the first 3D platformer Donkey Kong game since the release of Donkey Kong 64 in 1999. The one peculiarity of this announcement has come with a strange reluctance from Nintendo to say who is working on the game. While the assumption has been that the game is being worked on by Nintendo's Tokyo based team, Production Group No. 8, who have been responsible for the major 3D Mario games dating back 2008's Super Mario Galaxy, Nintendo have refused to confirm or deny this.

In an interview with IGN, Nintendo of America VP Bill Trinen remarked: "It's a very good question. You'll have to stay tuned. We always like to start by showcasing the game and getting people focused on the gameplay, but we'll have some information to share about the developer in due time."

Meanwhile, according to VGC, a Nintendo spokesperson at a hands-on preview event said people should "wait for the game to release and check the credits.” This is a continuation of an ongoing trend with Nintendo, who were similarly coy about both the Super Mario RPG Remake and Princess Peach: Showtime.

This push to make players wait for the credits is a calcualted one, designed to put the focus solely on Nintendo as a conglomeration, avoiding discussions around "good" and "bad" internal studios effecting long term sales and deprioritising the importance of individual personnel in a player's perception of a game.

The latter deprioritisation of individuals isn't necessarily a bad thing to avoid, I'll talk about the "auteur" approach to understanding game development shortly, but this approach to making the credits the be all and end all becomes much more shaky when games often don't put everyone who worked on it in the credits. Most notably, according to Forest Lassman writing for Kotaku, over 1000 people who worked on Rockstar's megahit Red Dead Redemption 2 did not make the credits due to an internal policy to only include those with the studio at the time of release, a tactic to punish those who don't stick through the company's notorious 'crunch' culture.

Auteurs vs Companies

While spotlighting the specific company working on a game has its benefits, allowing players to build connections with studios that produce work they like, it can be used to obscure the individuals who have contributed to the work. For instance, with the recent release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard the people working on the game at Bioware were vastly different to the team that worked on the previous entry over a decade ago. For example, David Gaider, a key piece in the creation of Bioware's narrative style, left the company not long after the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

To counteract this, players, media, and even specific publishers have leaned into the culture of the "Auteur"; people so influential in the creation of a game they become seen as the de facto creator of the game. Nintendo themselves have leveraged this perception, Shigeru Miyamoto is the Mario guy, Eiji Aonuma is the Zelda guy, Masahiro Sakurai is the Smash Bros guy etc. Square Enix typically elevate the directors of Final Fantasy games to this status too. Historically, Hironobu Sakaguchi gets much of the credit for the creation of Final Fantasy as an IP, Tetsuya Nomura is the face of FF7 and Kingdom Hearts and more recently Naoki "Yoshi P" Yoshida has been elevated to a similar status for his involvement with the MMO Final Fantasy XIV and the most recent entry Final Fantasy XVI.

I myself am guilty of this. I'm currently using the framing of "the Kojima Files" for a review series of every game the enigmatic Hideo Kojima is considered to have played a key role on. This of course is not a phenomena unique to video games, the auteur film director has been a recognised thing since at least the 1954 essay by french film director François Truffaut.

While game development has always been a collaborative endeavour, the early auteurs like Shigeru Miyamoto can hold some weight. The original Super Mario Bros. was created by just 5 people, Miyamoto acting as Director, Assistant Director Takashi Tezuka, 2 programmers Toshihiko Nakago and Kazuaki Morita, and musician Koji Kondo. In this instance, Miyamoto's position as Director would have led to his vision being a dominantn force in the cration of the game. And this situation is not terrible for the other 4 memebers of the team too. While, Miyamoto is the face of the Mario Bros. IP, all 5 of these men have gone on to hold key positions in the Nintendo ecosystem. Tezuka has become part of the executive suite at Nintendo alongside Miyamoto, Nakago and Morita are directors of Systems Research and Development, a programming company that primarily works on Nintendo games, and Koji Kondo has reached a legendary status in his own right, composers often being the other part of a development team that will get public plaudits.

In modern 'Triple A' game development however, the number of people required to make a video game has ballooned. Death Stranding, the debut release of Hideo Kojima's new independent studio, Kojima Productions, had a team of 80 people who worked on the game. And this number is surprisingly low for modern big budget games, that now typically have in-house teams in the 100s. Despite this, Death Stranding is sure to let you know that it is "a Hideo Kojima game." Even though Kojima's influence comes through much more potently than any other single director working on the industry's biggest games, it still is an act that diminishes the work of 79 other very talented people. This leaves players in a dilemma where studios they follow can be entirely different on the inside from when they fell in love with their work but following the "auteurs" of the industry fails to capture the sheer scale of effort put into making a video game.

Outsourcing

There is one more major problem with this situation. Upon completion of Death Stranding and it's main credits listing the star actors and reminding you that you have indeed just played "a Hideo Kojima game" you are greeted with almost 10 minutes of credits. In reality, Death Stranding is a project made with the work of 100s if not 1000s of people. From artists, animators, and motion capture to marketing, publishing, and social media management, an enourmous amount of the work put into making video games is outsourced to other companies and these companies get almost entirely no fanfare for their contribution at all.

As reported by People Make Games a lot of the backbone of 'AAA' game development is built on the backs of outsourcing studios, making the creation of the largest video games a globe-spanning endeavour. And the player will hear nothing about these studios and the people working at them unless they wait deep into increasingly long credits sequences. (Cyberpunk 2077's are 45 minutes long!)

These people who are hidden away in the game industry, without the public support that has come from larger awareness of "crunch culture" have become targets for continued exploitation. In many ways, not only are big studios exporting the work while reducing the amount of credit they need to give to the people making the game, they have also exported the crunch culture.

This is especially true at studios like Indonesia's Brandoville who have been criticised for their extremely poor treatment of their workers. Workers who are payed less to work more in far worse conditions than their counterparts at the main studio making the game. Brandoville workers even reportedly being subject to physical, emotional and financial abuse by the bosses at the studio.

The game industry struggles deeply with appropriately crediting those who work on the games we all love. At its best it highlights a select few, largely for marketing purposes, while leaving everyone else a footnote in ever expanding credits. At its worst crediting, and the withdrawal of it, is used as a tool for exploitation of incredibly talented people.