SAN FRANCISCO – "What's Animal Crossing?" asks WIRED's photographer, as we're waiting outside the room to interview Katsuya Eguchi and Aya Kyogoku, the producer and director of the Nintendo 3DS game Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
I'm not sure how to answer. A game where you're a mayor of a town of animals? A social tool where you can celebrate holidays (and even go clubbing) in real-time with your friends? An opportunity to create your fantasy home and share it with the world?
It's not a game that reduces well to a single sentence, not least of all because there's no real objective to it except creating and communicating, but at least a few things about it are clear: New Leaf is addictive, innovative and immensely popular.
Since its release in 2013, New Leaf has sold 7.38 million copies worldwide, and is credited by Nintendo with helping the handheld 3DS system reach 42.74 million units sold. It also boasts another striking statistic: Nearly half of the Animal Crossing: New Leaf game development team was female. And according to Eguchi and Kyogoku, the two are far from unrelated. Indeed, they believe that the diversity of their team was crucial to their game's success.
"When I first started [at Nintendo], it wasn't uncommon to be the only woman on the entire team," said Kyogoku during the recent Game Developers Conference.
The approach to Animal Crossing was different. Not only did they want to make the game for both men and women; they wanted it to be made by men and women. As obvious as it might sound, it's an atypical approach on both counts. Perhaps it's not as surprising from Nintendo, a company that has often been willing to buck the conventional wisdom about games. The success of New Leaf proved revelatory to both Eguchi and Nintendo's CEO Satoru Iwata.
"In the first three weeks of Animal Crossing sales, by the end of November, the largest group was 19- to 24-year-old women," Iwata told the Nikkei newspaper earlier this year. "I've never seen something like this before."
During that period of time, Iwata said, 69 percent of the 3DS units Nintendo sold were to men. But among those who purchased Animal Crossing: New Leaf along with the hardware, 56 percent were women. "These numbers left me speechless," Iwata said.
In America, the Entertainment Software Association said in 2013 that 45 percent of all game players were women. Though they may play games on mobile or social platforms more than they do on dedicated game hardware like the kind Nintendo makes, its chief executive points to New Leaf as evidence that this need not be the case.
"You often hear today that because smartphones exist, there's no need for dedicated gaming machines," Iwata said. "But, this 19- to 24-year-old female demographic, they're the smartphone people, right? It's often said that female casual gamers don't need dedicated hardware, and yet here they are reaffirming the value of these machines."
Turning Over a New Leaf
Aya Kyogoku, who was the first female director at Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development group, emphasizes that she always felt welcome there. But, she says, working with a team made up of half men and half women was a revelation.
"Having worked on this team where there were almost equal numbers of men and women made me realize that [diversity] can open you up to hearing a greater variety of ideas and sharing a greater diversity of ideas," she told WIRED. "Only after having working on a project like this, with a team like this one, was I able to realize this.”
Producer Katsuya Eguchi, who directed the first Animal Crossing on the Nintendo 64 and has led the team ever since, agreed.
"We wanted to make sure that the content allowed all the players to express their individuality," he said during the GDC talk, "that it is was something men and women of all ages would enjoy. So in order to view the project from a variety of perspectives, we made sure the team was made up of people from various backgrounds and life experiences."
It's a scenario that sounds similar to what happened to the NBC comedy Community, when a female executive asked showrunner Dan Harmon to make his writing staff half women. Like games, comedy is often a very male-dominated industry. Although Harmon was initially skeptical, once he dug a little deeper to find more women for his team the results just weren't more superficially diverse – they were more creative.
“Now you have a staff that is just as good as the staff you would have had, but happens to be half women," he told the AV Club in 2011. "And the male writers across the board, from top to bottom, in their most private moments drinking with me... all they can say is, 'This turned out to be a great thing.'" It's not about quotas, Harmon concluded, but common sense.
"In my years at Nintendo, I have come to discover that when there are women in a variety of roles on the project, you get a wider [range] of ideas," said Kyogoku. Not only was the team half women, but Kyogoku and Eguchi encouraged everyone to contribute ideas, regardless of their role.
There's often a symbiotic relationship between games and game development teams. Not only do the games tend to echo the perspectives of the people who make them, but they tend to reinforce those perspectives and the structures around them. For the Animal Crossing team, the game's mechanics, which made it rewarding to celebrate real-time events like seasons, holidays and birthdays together with friends, made the team want to start celebrating those same things together in real life.
Eguchi also believes that diversity can be useful in game development in ways that extend beyond gender, even to people who don't identify as gamers.
Pointing to non-traditional Nintendo game experiences like Wii Fit and Brain Age, he said, "My experience has been that when you bring people in with a variety of interests beyond just games, that opens you up for the possibility of discovering new ways of playing and new experiences to provide to our users... possibilities for exploration beyond just 'I want to make games.'"
The New Leaf team included both experienced developers and newcomers, as well as people of a variety of ages, since they wanted to game to reach both the young and the old. Kyogoku related an anecdote about a grandfather who loved fishing and how he connected to his grandson by fishing with him inside the game. "It's really facilitated communication across distances and across generations, and that was certainly one of the goals for us," she said.
Despite the game's focus on diversity, however, there's still room for improvement. Although the game allows players to customize many elements of their character, including hair color, the only way to change your skin tone is to temporarily "tan" it.
When I asked whether future versions of Animal Crossing might allow users to change their skin tone, particularly for the international audience, Kyogoku didn't answer specifically but said that they wanted the game to be accessible to players worldwide and allow them "to represent and express their individuality, so there are a variety of things we are planning on doing to facilitate that in the future."
Throughout the Game Developers Conference I saw three standing ovations, all of them relating to issues of diversity: one for a panel about women in games, one for Feminist Frequency creator Anita Sarkeesian, and one for game developer Manveer Heir's moving talk about issues of racism, sexism and homophobia. Game developers weren't just open to hearing about diversity, they were hungry for it.
Based on the success of Animal Crossing: New Leaf – it's outsold everything on Nintendo 3DS that isn't Mario or Pokemon – it seems like the gaming audience is hungry for it as well. Development teams that span a variety of ages, genders and backgrounds won't just create better games for people from those groups, but for everyone.
"In hindsight, seeing how diverse the users and fans of New Leaf are, I feel we have taken the correct approach," Eguchi said.
