Who are video games for, exactly?

It's a question that games and developers have wrestled with through the decades. While glitzy marketing campaigns for first-person shooters like Call of Duty amplify the message that gaming is dominated by males out for blood, a different narrative is being painted by Nintendo.

Last year, the Japanese game maker sold millions of copies of its city-building franchise Animal Crossing: New Leaf. It helped raise Nintendo's stock this summer after a rocky launch in 2011.

One of its directors, Aya Kyogoku, called the series part of its own genre: inclusionary games.

"When I think of inclusionary games, I think of ones that all genders and ages and peoples can play and join. That was certainly my approach with creating the development space and filling it with all different kinds of ideas and experiences through the staff," Kyogoku told Mashable in an interview at this year's Game Developers Conference.

Kyogoku said the development team on New Leaf was a 50/50 gender split, something American game studios might be surprised or envious to see. (Plenty of talks at 2014's GDC focused on getting more women to join the games industry.) Kyoguku said she worked on male-dominated teams in the past — her long history with Nintendo includes working on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii — but she has seen more women join her teams in the past few years.

"And having worked in that environment with a more gender-balanced team, I can certainly say that I've seen an effect in our daily communications in the development process because you do get a greater variety of ideas and opinions and those all come from personal experiences," she said.

It wasn't enough to bring in a lot of voices, though; Kyogoku stressed part of her job as director was to make sure everyone's opinions were part of the conversation.

"There are people who will openly share their opinions and they are very used to that. There are others that may not feel like they can express themselves until maybe you ask them. I will actually go out of my way and approach those people who maybe don't feel like they can openly share their opinions and really try to draw it out of them. It's one thing I take it upon myself to do," she said.

While Kyogoku was quick to point out this wasn't a new idea to development, its importance was was significant in a game like Animal Crossing, which gives players granular control over everything about their character, house and town. Small, cute details like hairstyles or outfits may be easy to flip aside, but because the players care about them, the team cares about them.

"There might be some hairstyles that men think are cute, and some that women think are cute, even though the character may be a female," said Kyogoku, gesturing to an Animal Crossing character on the screen. "One person might think a particular hairstyle is cute, but when you get a room of different experiences and different perspectives, you can really flesh those out, and say OK, the majority of people think this is cute, regardless of gender.

"If one person is responsible for defining what is cute and what is appealing then you'll get less diversity in the end, and less representation of what is actually true."

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