“Technology allowed us to at least move away from cartoony characters and to realize more human characters and tell more nuanced stories, and that’s kind of the trajectory we’ve been on,” said Naughty Dog‘s creative director and writer Neil Druckmann.
Speaking with GI International, Druckmann said that, “There have been times when we’ve talked about doing other games or exploring different things, but we’d just come back to, ‘This is our strength.’ It’s what we’re good at. Maybe other games would be more successful commercially, but this is what we’re drawn to; this is what we’re passionate about. So we just keep coming back to telling these stories.”
The advancing tech (rendering realistic characters) benefits on storytelling are changing rapidly, he says “The industry is hitting the point of diminishing returns as the audience won’t really care that much about depicting eyelashes and wrinkles better than ever before.
But if you’re trying to tell a more dynamic story or use AI in sophisticated ways–some of the stuff we tried to do with The Last of Us–technology will definitely go a long way. We were running out of memory as far as how many animations Ellie can carry, or how much dialog we could stream at one time.
And that’s where going to the PS4 in the future could really help us in the dynamic area of the game where the story is responding to the player’s input on a moment-to-moment basis. Technology still has a long way to go.”
Storytelling techniques are also advancing with the technology and Druckmann feels that triple-A devs should be inspired by indies. He is specifically impressed with ‘Gone Home’ and ‘Papers, Please’ for their storytelling techniques, he was ‘blown away’ by the kind of stories they told and the mechanics used in the games.
“With big AAA titles, it’s sometimes hard to make these gigantic shifts as far as what a game is or what kind of story it could tell,” Druckmann said, adding that the rise of independent games is allowing those shifts at the AAA level to happen much more quickly.
As more and more examples come to light, I think more people are pursuing better narratives. And I hope criticism of games and game narratives is becoming more sophisticated. I think before you would have had a hard time talking about tropes and how women are represented in games, or how characters of color are represented in games.
He adds, But now I’m kind of excited by the discussion and the kind of criticism games are getting. I think that change is going to happen much more rapidly going forward, and people who don’t engage in that discussion, who don’t try to appeal to audiences that are coming on, are going to be left behind.”
“I feel like AAA games… we’re on this cusp of at the very least seeing strong, non-sexualized female protagonists starring in games. You’re going to see a lot more of those, and a lot more that are commercially successful. A lot of times in AAA games, people feel like they need to play it safe because there’s so many parts of a giant corporation working on a global scale to launch a title that they don’t want to take too many risks.
But once you have enough evidence to say ‘Hey look, this is actually not a risk, this can succeed commercially,’ then creativity can flourish and new avenues can be pushed,” Druckmann concluded.
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I think developers have always under estimated the gaming audience’s ability to recognize quality. I’ve always thought the discussion about women being over sexualized in the gaming world to be a waste of time. Why? Because games that are properly marketed and have quality content almost always sell well. The issue of gender has never really been relevant. Both women and men control the market by what they purchase. The mistake that people make is this perception that developers are deliberately making sexist games in an attempt to keep women out of the gaming world. There isn’t any conspiracy or secret organization that has agreed to portray women only as sex objects and there never has been… as far as gaming is concerned. Developers just want to make fun games. The more women get involved the better their portrayal in games will be. I’ve never heard a woman say that a certain game looks like fun “but I won’t purchase it because I don’t like the way women are being portrayed in video games.” Nor have a heard a man say that.
We are finding that the gaming audience is broadening significantly as games continue to improve in quality and immersiveness. More and more women are being drawn in and finding out that gaming is not just for the socially inept….it’s for anyone that can appreciate them. Frankly, I’m suprised it’s taken women this long to actually become more involved but it just goes to show you how powerful stigmas can be. The gaming future is bright and I, like most men, are more than happy that women are sharing the medium with us. I think it’s good for our society in a way that most people never would have predicted. I have female gamer friends who I never would have gotten to know otherwise. How can this not be a good thing?
“More and more women are being drawn in and finding out that gaming is not just for the socially inept”
Dude, we’ve always been there, we’ve just always been ignored until now. More and more women aren’t being drawn in, more and more women are raising their voices and making themselves heard, and realizing that they don’t have to put up with the sexist protrayals of their gender in video games. It hasn’t taken us this long to get involved, it was almost impossible to GET involved in the gaming industry as a women, and it’s still difficult as the gender barriers are far from down.
Women have always had the same opportunities to get involved with games as men, for the most part. It’s difficult for ANYONE to break into the gaming industry and it always has been. When I was in high school I don’t remember a single girl who played video games. There was a stigma among women and my parents generation that gaming was for nerds….male nerds. Ridiculous? Absolutely. Of course, your experience may have been different? I’m 39 and depending on where you live things may have looked and felt very different. I have 4 sisters and only one of them would play video games with me and I had to pester to her to get involved. Amy Hennig(Uncharted writer) has been involved with gaming for many years. I’m sure she would tell you something similar. From personal experience I can tell you that a talented female actually has a better chance at breaking into some gaming studios than a guy does. A mostly male team will even sacrifice talent on their team just to have a female in their midst. That being said most studios hire talent and your gender only counts against you if you let it.
Want to be sure women and minority characters are better represented in
your video games? Have more women and minorities on your staff designing
and writing for those characters. It’s really as simple as that.
Also, LONG LIVE NAUGHTY DOG!!