Special Game Dialogue Between Hiroyuki, Naoki Yoshida, and Akihiro Hino Held at FUKUOKA GAME CREATORS NEXT!

Hino: Thank you for coming to Fukuoka!

Hiroyuki: I have been working as a DX designer under Fukuoka Mayor Takashima for five or six years, but since it was entirely remote, this is my first time in Fukuoka in about ten years.

Yoshida: I heard that Hino would treat us to delicious sushi, so here I am! (laughs)

Hiroyuki: Together with two professionals from game companies, I would like to talk about the game industry. First, if a young person, like a junior high school student, wants to make games, what do you think they should do first?

Yoshida: I think it would be to forget about eating and sleeping and just play games. I believe many parents are here today, and if your child says they want to aim for the game industry, I hope you won't stop them from playing games. Making games means being a professional at games, so playing them and understanding them is incredibly necessary.

Hino: That's really true. You can't make them unless you play games and love them.

Hiroyuki: Is it better to prioritize games even during exam periods?

Yoshida: Now I want to say this to the children who love games: please keep your test scores looking decent. Otherwise, various obstacles will arise in society (laughs).

Hiroyuki: While loving games is a prerequisite, is it better to read books or watch movies as well?

Hino: That's right. I always tell the planners that rather than acting well-behaved, it is better to have a thorough otaku mindset. The otaku element is the key, including things like daydreams and headcanons.

Yoshida: Nowadays, when we talk about entertainment, there's a lot of video content, and there's often a flow where people might not have read the manga, but if the anime is interesting, they'll read the manga too. However, as Hino said, the power of fantasizing is incredibly important! Making a game means creating something that does not exist in the world, so I think reading is definitely the way to cultivate that power of daydreaming. If there are no pictures, you have no choice but to imagine it yourself, so I would definitely like people to read books.

Hiroyuki: Does whether or not you can play sports have anything to do with making games?

Yoshida: Currently, games are still mostly made by teams, so I think the experience of having played team sports or team play might actually be useful. Even for game designers, if someone wants to rise to the top because they want to include as many of their own ideas as possible, I think they need the ability to bring people together.

Hino: Leadership is indeed nurtured through things like senior-junior relationships in clubs or human relationships. When I was a child, I wasn't in a sports club, but I did a lot of all kinds of play, including sports, fishing, plastic models, and radio-controlled cars.

Yoshida: When I was a child, I used to change the rules to create new ways to play. Even with a game of tag, you get bored playing the same game every day, right? So I would say, "Let's change the rules a bit," and I did that often. I think this is fundamentally similar to game design, and nowadays, there should be almost no ideas that truly no one has ever thought of or tried before. However, fun can also be brought out by changing things that have been built up, so I think childhood experiences are useful.

Hiroyuki: They won't become unemployed, but young people are losing opportunities to polish their skills. Instead of taking the time to write code, they design to some extent and leave it to AI, so the work for people in their 20s who exist to create according to specifications is no longer very necessary. However, because the IT industry itself has a labor shortage, it doesn't surface.

Hino: It seems like a realistic issue that task-oriented work will inevitably be taken over by AI and decrease.

Hiroyuki: People called full-stack engineers, who write everything themselves from hardware to middleware to the front end, are common among those in their 40s and 50s. I wonder if it will become quite tough for the kind of engineers nowadays who only do a part of it when 10 or 20 years later they are told AI is fine.

Yoshida: I think people who will become unemployed will do so whether AI exists or not, so I don't think AI is very relevant. AI fundamentally exists to make our labor and lives easier, so we can just do something else with the time we saved. If someone can't switch their mind to that way of thinking, there might be people who can't keep up. But since this can be said about all sorts of things, I don't think it's limited to AI.

Hino: I am worried about whether people currently doing creative work will be able to abruptly switch what they are doing and adapt to that flow when the wave of AI comes. I do want them to do it, though.

Hiroyuki: If writing code according to specifications can be handled by AI, have game makers started narrowing down their hiring?

Yoshida: No, on the contrary, for massive games, there are inevitably parts where specialization is still needed. For example, regarding optimization for game hardware, humans have to meticulously refactor code for everything from assets to eke out performance, so that probably won't disappear yet, and if AI writes part of that code, you still can't ask it, "Why is this source code like this?" Therefore, there is still plenty of room for engineers to be active, and rather, I think that by collaborating with AI, even higher-standard code will come out and things will develop.

Hino: I have a mindset that is a bit more fearful than Yoshida's, and as a company, I am careful about hiring large numbers of people as we did before. Until now, we hired people saying, "I can draw these kinds of pictures" or "I can create these kinds of processes," saying "If you have that ability, then by all means," but I wonder if their ability to speak or their sociability will be able to withstand the AI era. Since I've started looking at those aspects as well, I feel like I'm becoming more cautious in terms of bringing people in.

Hiroyuki: Even in IT, I feel that way when writing code. AI finishes it to a certain extent just with the specifications, but there are definitely fine-tunings of the code. Humans are there for that, and I feel like completely removing humans is still a bit far off.

Hino: Hiroyuki plays our games a lot, and we are very happy about that, but your reviews are incredibly harsh, aren't they? Where do you judge the fun?

Hiroyuki: It's very difficult, but even if you do the same thing in the same way, what you receive is different. In Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, the protagonist doesn't play soccer at first, right? If you start thinking it's a soccer game, it somehow becomes a game about winning arguments. Then, when the story progresses and you can play soccer, you think, "Ah, finally I can play soccer," and as a player, I also find myself in the mood of having wanted to play soccer. Depending on whether you think it's boring until you reach that point or whether you do it with the expectation that it will surely get interesting ahead, the fun will be different, so I feel like I can't simply say it's fun because it's this kind of game or this part is boring.

Hino: Thank you. That is very interesting.

Hiroyuki: At a movie theater, since you paid 2,000 yen, you'll endure it for about 20 minutes even if it's boring. But if it's on TV, you won't watch it. While being conscious of the player's endurance—how much endurance a person has—fun has to build up something like a catharsis, so I feel it's quite difficult.

Yoshida: If I'm told to talk about it after playing, I can logically explain roughly why it's interesting. However, fundamentally, when I can't think about anything else but that game, I think, "Ah, this game is interesting." While I'm thinking about how this is made or how it's being directed, I realize it's interesting.

Hiroyuki: Even with dramas and movies, I feel that the ones where you realize time has flown by are, as a result, probably interesting.

Hino: Staying in the heart is, after all, a valuable thing. I also believe I have to put out what is expected, and I am thinking about whether I can create situations that sway the heart just a little bit with an "ah."

Yoshida: I will speak as an office worker. This is not about Square Enix (laughs). Looking at the general game industry over 30-plus years across various companies, one of the flaws of many Japanese game companies is that management and the creators are separated. For example, in the past, it was often the case that "It's the end of the fiscal year, so we must put it out no matter what. I don't care if it's ready or not!" Recently, we've entered an era where doing that drops the credibility of games released in the future and people won't pick them up, so it has surely decreased. However, as a company grows and the number of people involved as a public corporation increases, there is inevitably a profit that must be raised annually—something promised to the shareholders—so I don't think instances where a cut-off is performed there will ever reach zero. But my feeling is that the kind of things that everyone calls trash have disappeared compared to the past. Wait, maybe not quite... (laughs).

Hiroyuki: My conclusion is that smartphone games inevitably have to become 100% trash, but social games continue forever, don't they? Everyone reaches a point where they think "I've had enough," "I don't need to play this game anymore," or "I don't need to pay anymore," and they feel the game isn't interesting and quitting is the end. So a boring impression always remains.

Hino: It might be true that the impression from the last time you played continues for a long time.

Hiroyuki: As a maker, are there moments when you have to put it out even if you think it's a trash game?

Hino: Every company has circumstances where they have to recover even a little bit of the development costs they spent. Now we can wait until it's finished to release it, but back when there were clients, there were definitely times when we had to say, "There are about 100 points we aren't satisfied with, but we have to make it look decent somehow and put it out."

Yoshida: For the past three years or so, we have been working with the keyword of properly having the courage to cancel midway. That way we don't spend more money, the developers don't get exhausted, and we don't have to put out something that isn't good for the customers. Instead, we act in a way where for things with good potential, everyone supports them to make them into something good no matter what before releasing them.

Hiroyuki: So, it's a matter of whether there is someone prepared to be the disliked one when everyone is vaguely thinking they should stop.

Yoshida: I have also experienced projects that were canceled in the past, and I am truly grateful to the person who stopped them.

Hino: Speaking of which, when you were selected for the rebirth of FINAL FANTASY XIV, did you move like that, thinking it had to be stopped, Yoshida?

Yoshida: When I took over, I presented the president with two choices: "This cannot continue as it is, so we either remake everything or we work hard on version updates to make it even slightly interesting and close it in about three years. Which will it be?" When I was asked, "Can you really remake everything?", I said, "If you let me do it, I'll do it," and I was told, "Then let's do it."

Hiroyuki: Saying "I can make something better, so let me do it"—Yoshida, that is a logical conclusion because you succeeded, but back when it was still unknown what would happen, if you said something like that, wouldn't people ask "Why are you so confident?" Even so, why were you able to think that at the time?

Yoshida: There is a secret to this. Originally, there is a bad state before that, right? Even if I did it and it didn't work out after that, I wouldn't be that angry!

All: (laughs)

Yoshida: People would cheer me on saying, "You've got guts!", and if by any chance it didn't work out, they'd say "You did your best!" When challenging things, it is definitely better to have that kind of mentality.

Hino: True. You are praised for your courage. I see.

Hiroyuki: So, do you also wait and see without raising your hand until an atmosphere is created where the people around you will support you?

Yoshida: I create that. That's exactly why I said I could do it after checking every single thing, listing about 12,000 items of what was bad and how it should be fixed, and submitting a report. It's not like I'm saying "Leave it to me" without any basis.

Hino: I'm impressed you could move the company. That's real boldness.

Yoshida: This is exactly what we were talking about just now! It's true not just in the game industry but in any company: it is definitely advantageous to take the lead in doing work that others dislike, especially while you are young. Because work that people don't want to do is either troublesome, high difficulty, or has a high probability of failure. In other words, even if you raise your hand and challenge it and fail, you won't be that angry. Especially while you are a newcomer, instead of being angry, they will take it as you having guts or a strong will to move forward. If you just repeat failures and end up 0 for 4, that's no good. But if you take that as experience and take the lead in accepting work that people dislike, allies will undoubtedly follow you anywhere.

Hino: I think that's because it's Yoshida that people don't get angry (laughs). What if a child who doesn't have a strong impact fails in a small way?

Yoshida: It's about not letting it be small. You say things like, "Since I'm doing such a crazy job, make sure you watch me if it goes well!" You just have to play that kind of character.

Hiroyuki: There is a sense of reading the atmosphere when someone at the top with decision-making power says "We have to do something about this, so someone please do it."

Yoshida: That is undoubtedly true. It's not very good to stick your hand in when things are in a halfway state. You might receive jealousy from others. Normally, when making things as a team, there is a proper scope of responsibility, and at first, you try to produce the best results while helping each other within that. However, there are times when things become helpless and problems are left unaddressed, and once the entire organization recognizes that, it's a matter of "Now what will you do?"

Hino: Getting promoted is about being recognized by your boss, isn't it? Is there a trick to getting right into your boss's heart?

Yoshida: There were probably two types of bosses. I think about half of my bosses always thought "Yoshida is really annoying" because I would say things regardless of my position like "Why are you making it with such incomprehensible specifications? If you decided on it, then fix it with your authority." But certain bosses said "If you're going to say that, you try doing it" or "I'll leave it to you." When I work hard and manage somehow, the one praised by the company first is the boss. And then they feel like Yoshida is somewhat capable, so they'll use me next time too.

Hiroyuki: There are times when "Let's leave it to Yoshida" doesn't go as planned, right? It's super scary to be thought of as just talk.

Yoshida: It is scary. That's why you have no choice but to work yourself to death, and when you fail, you have no choice but to say you're sorry.

Hiroyuki: What kind of people find it easy to get promoted at Level-5?

Hino: I think people with high communication skills are easy to recognize. I think many people think it's uncool to claim their achievements as "I did it!", but if we don't pick those people up, we don't know who to choose. If we don't strengthen proactivity, the company will wither, so we have to recognize energetic people and let them be active.

Yoshida: Hiroyuki, you are more often in the position of a boss, so what kind of people do you recognize?

Hiroyuki: It's different from the general interpretation, but I emphasize whether they are interesting. I feel that whether it is interesting to work together results in the team having fun. Projects that successfully remain and continue for a long time until release and operation are often those where people are getting along well. If it's "They are capable people but it's a bit strained," it doesn't really go well until the end.

Hino: When I am asked in interviews what I thought was good about becoming a president, of course "being able to make what I like to some extent" is one thing, but what I feel most is being able to answer "I can work with people I truly want to work with." I think this is the ultimate luxury.

Hiroyuki: Because it won't be finished. I think things like "This would be interesting if it existed," but in terms of personality, I am the type to do summer vacation homework on August 31st, so I don't think I'm suited for it. Also, because I have many IT and community-based projects, I often just create the system and leave making it interesting to others.

Hino: If you had a capable director, couldn't you make it that way?

Hiroyuki: I feel like I'd become a really nasty guy who only speaks but doesn't move his hands. Also, the genres I think are "interesting" or "fun" don't really become popular. I like things like flight simulators.

Yoshida: Hiroyuki is clear. When logically conveying to people, you're like trying to turn this sense of fun into a law somehow.