I love and respect the hell out of Kamiya's brand of entertainment, from the insanely stylish vibe his games give off to the satisfying nature of their play.
But I think he's missing the point. He's just another social media curmudgeon that's come under some criticism and scrutiny and kind of entirely misunderstood why.
He's created entertainment media perhaps with no overt intention of harming anyone, and just being self-indulgent in his interests, but I think he's missed the point that games have gotten much more ubiquitous than they were as many of us audience members grew up with them and creators grew alongside the industry as well, and with the huge new following and with people growing up and maturing alongside the medium, there's coming an inseparable link between our adult lives and the media we desire to continue consuming.
That's to say, men and women are becoming far more socially conscious -- and not in a social-justice-warrior way, I mean from a level of actual adult interactions and experiences -- of their interactions with other people. The entertainment is still there to provide a reflection or escapism from whatever we've been dealing with in our adult lives, and I think that's why a growing consciousness for games-as-art has come about -- because the industry as a whole has largely advanced in age and those themes and ideas being explored as part of our growing is resonating a lot.
Now, I wish I had statistics to cite this, and I can really only cite anecdotal and flawed data, but it seems to me like I run into a lot more people on the 'net that are in their 30s or 40s and still discussing games with almost feverish enthusiasm. Sure, there's still a lot of younger folks than that, but I remember when I got my start in games discussion by way of GameFAQs, the old-school and then-not-taboo subject of "A/S/L" yielded a lot of late teens and early 20s any time it got asked -- and the tone of conversation tended to reflect that age group and what you might reasonably expect from people of that age and level of life experience. I think it's just around 23 or 24, as people tend to leave college or kind of hit that age where they're very much coming into their adulthood independence, that people tend to start to have a shift to higher levels of social consciousness, either by understanding their need to get better at certain types of interactions or starting to have enough experiences interacting with other people that they start to understand what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong when it comes to winning over social favor, and it starts occurring in a far more dynamic and arguably empathic way. That, or it's the age where you double down on your perceived social strengths and decide that it's for sure the type of person you want to be -- either way, that type of person probably had pause to be challenged and had to make a decision to continue or change.
Speaking personally, I grew up a military brat and within a pretty conservative social bubble, which was then overlapped with sort of the early-2000's-"gamer" persona, i.e. the type of crowd that had its mind blown when Mountain Dew was running Halo code promotions and thinking it was a clear sign that gaming had "gone big." In other words, kind of the foul-mouthed, socially unaware, stereotypical jerk bag. I mean, it didn't completely define my personality, but that's how I tended to present myself to other people as I was just breaking into internet forum discussions about videogames. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a game that would very much have appealed to my late-teenage tastes, but being 31 years old now, I have a difficult time interacting with it. So what's changed since then? I left home at 18 to attend college, experienced something of a culture shock, realized that my "full-stop nerd" presentation was so small and insignificant to the larger culture I had found myself moving into, I bumped into people that had life experiences so far removed from my own that I started to grasp with concepts and experiences that I had never been capable of imagining before (some positive, some horrifically bad), and all of that continued as I stayed away from that bubble I grew up in for 18 whole years. I'm still learning stuff about people and what they have to go through that's entirely different than what I did, and I feel like it's personally enriching to me to listen and to understand and I enjoy expanding the scope of my empathy. Not everyone digs that, but I know for sure I'm not alone in that notion. See, growing up the way I did, it was very much the sort of "alpha male" personality that was taught and expected of me, and despite my interest in games and anime growing up, I tried to apply those concepts to the entertainment I consumed, and the violent power fantasy was always there to sort of back up and reinforce that in videogames and the type of anime I watched. It was my idea of male identity and male success. It's also a culture, I learned, that did a pretty good job of suppressing and hiding the horror and hurt of sexual harassment and assault, because I had grown up around a lot of domestic violence and possible sexual assault (hate to say it, but seemingly not uncommon in military circles) -- domestic violence was actually a part of my household, too. SHAMEFULLY, I grew up for about 14 years just thinking this was typical man controlling the household behavior. One particular bout of domestic violence between my parents when I was 14 shook me and made me feel genuine fear that the entire illusion snapped. I held that experience to myself and tried my hardest to cope (often failing and giving way to depression) until I left home. At 18, running into other people with a wide range of really positive experiences and really negative experiences like mine kinda helped me establish a way to redefine myself, and I was really blessed at the time that a lot of game developers seemed to be trying to explore more narrative possibilities that either brought kind of a sense of hurt to all of the violence on display or tried to explore things beyond violence all-together. Now, I'm not saying that games made me a violent person, but they kind of reflected and reinforced the ways I was taught to view violence and its place in adult life as I was growing up, and I don't think it ever, ever came from a place of game developers trying to mind control the masses or anything, but rather it just came from a place of them not really having an opportunity in their lives to run into other types of experiences and understand that it's not all as heroic and cool as we think.
That said, I think my own story there is just ONE TINY part of a bigger movement that's kind of just caught on as other people that partake in this industry have also found opportunities to grow as people, and that comes from both the audience and the development side of things. I think God of War 2018 might be one big indication of that, going from a high-octane, extremely glorified romp of masculine power fantasy when I was just getting ready to leave for college to a story about that kind of man trying to grapple with the pain of the violence of his past and the threat it poses to his current circumstances with his son, a loss he can't endure to suffer again. Cory Barlog went from expanding upon Kratos' then-hyper-masculine icon status to turning him into a desperate father on a quest to honor and protect the only family he's got left in pretty bold creative contrast to Kratos' origins, and I don't think that's an accident -- I think Cory (and much of his team at SSM) had a slew of adulthood experiences that shifted him as a person over time. That's just the most recent example I can think of, I think older-running series like Yakuza have continuously grappled with these ideas since they debuted on PS2, and I think that lends a huge part to its cult following and new-found wider appreciation -- Kiryu was always young and impressionable to his ideal of the Yakuza in the early games but had to constantly face various other interpretations and life experiences of Yakuza that threatened his own well being and challenged his notion of what it meant to be Yakuza over the course of the series, and I think audiences absolutely understand what that's like, because that's just adulthood if you find yourself having to live outside of your known comfort zone and bumping into other people all the time.
There's a lot of talk about how gaming social culture is very male dominated and there's been obvious backlash to the idea of inclusion in some circles of gaming culture that seems to hope to preserve that good old notion so that it can just continue to almost exclusively pander to those tastes. On one hand, I can kinda get why the culture might resist growing up -- because when I got culture shocked into being exposed to people from vastly different backgrounds with different income levels, experiences, etc... It was not comfortable to feel so insignificant after all. People latch to the escapism of games so hard and it's typically been very reinforcing of masculine domination that for some people, especially people who are perceived as "nerdy losers," it might be the only constant outlet of comfort and support for their belief system. You get a whole lot "incel" types that fail to realize that their own social failures are their own inability to adapt to the presence of other personalities that come from entirely different experiences, and there's a sort of "persecution" to being a nerd that backs up their need for a comfort zone, which games more than often tend to provide -- again, not out of malicious intention in most cases, just that I think many developers themselves lived through those types of experiences and probably never really ran into alternatives. I mean, think about your college's computer science or computer programming program about 10-15 years ago -- probably not super diverse, or if you lack data, you probably don't THINK of it as super diverse.
It's not an apology for their behavior, just a theory about the cause of the behavior. Kamiya probably achieved his status long ago before this industry started to reflect a more diverse range of backgrounds, before the audience expanded due to a lot of social and technological factors beyond its scope, and his game design to me does feel very rooted in an old-school design philosophy when it comes to sort of the skill-based aspects of the gameplay and the absurdly fun over-the-top narrative vibe of many of the games. Since he was established and had his identity as a game designer so reinforced in that day and age, I bet he's having a lot of difficulty with people challenging his self-perception, especially since he achieved it probably at the same time in his life that I explained earlier -- kind of the mid-20s to mid-30s age range where I think many people become open to the formation of their adult selves. There's a part of me that greatly appreciated his work when I was younger and still exists today -- I still contribute to Kamiya's ongoing success, even though I'm unafraid to be openly critical of how his style can run against some of my personal perceptions about the world now. I think it's okay that Kamiya is still doing well, and I still love playing his games, even if they don't cater to the real-world ideals I've adopted, but I think it's perfectly okay for me to say so without trying to get Kamiya banished out of the industry or failing to inspire him to change at all. He does, however, seem to be the type to double down and feel threatened any time someone tries to criticize him, and that can be problematic to an audience that's growing in such a diverse and rapid way -- that much is undeniably apparent in the OP's webcomic, and it's a shame.