A film director has control over the source material and the result (hopefully has, at least). Whereas I'm not sure that there's a single person with such respo

A film director has control over the source material and the result (hopefully has, at least). Whereas I'm not sure that there's a single person with such responsibility in game dev: afaik someone like a director or a PM overlooks the development, but it's more just a management job like with film directors in the past or on TV. Game designers decide the mechanics, but don't control the team. I'm not really versed in the modern process of gamedev, but I haven't heard of such a central position—maybe other than Kojima and a couple other guys. Likewise, I think the role of a director is diluted in animation: it's hard to imagine one guy pestering main animators until they come up with a desired look—surely it's much more of a team effort. In the end, I think a cinema director chooses a room and a camera, and then shouts at the actors until they do as he envisions—it's glorified theater, after all. Whereas in games and animation much more of the result depends on the artists and programmers at each point: they have to prepare every single bit in advance for the player to experience, and the PM can't just tell the characters to act less stiffly in the next take. IMO about the same thing happens in software development in general: UX and UI designers are in large part responsible for how the product should feel to the user, but they almost never control the process—with just a couple exceptions that I know. And we usually don't hear about these designers, unless it's a statement of fashion.