It's hard to make friends as an adult. Everyone already has their lives, their preferences, their own baggage they carry with them- it can almost feel like you're trying to forcibly borough into someone else's life just by asking for a phone number to keep in touch. It would be especially difficult if you just so happened to be, oh I don't know, a messy lad with a habit of turning all the world against you with incendiary articles written about everything wrong under the sun. If you absolutely live to kick over chairs and scream your name out to a world that see's you less and less as the auteur it once did. Think of it like the 'reverse Kojima effect', where the more people see of him the more convinced they are that the man's farts are made out of solid gold? The more we see Neil try his hardest to prove his intellect, the more of an idiot he appears to be.
This all began with the lead up to The Last of Us Part II, the long awaited follow-up to the much beloved original game that many expected to push the brand foreword to even greater heights. And it it's credit, The Last of Us Part 2 seems to have been every bit the technological marvel that people were pining for! But it also came with some narrative and tonal shifts that some people found to be deeply incongruent with the charm that made the original so beloved. What was a story about hope, even at it's most twisted and self destructive, was disseminated into a cynical and mean-spirited diatribe on 'The cycle of violence', which fails to really 'speak' in any manner more substantive or coherent than shock. Honestly, the game feels like emotionally mature than it's original.
Neil, of course, has defended his baby as best as he can, but just as the director of the game received all the applaud of the original, he has endured the brunt of the askew brows and quizzical glances of it's follow-up. People who want to know exactly what he thinks he's touching on by sneaking in out-of-place reference to conflicting wars in communism and the like. Kind of feel like he had several dozen ideas that he wanted to enact all in the exact same moment and that sloppy feeling conflux of half-digested concepts was the result. At least the game played good. If only people came to The Last of Us games purely and solely for the gameplay. If only.
He was even threatened with the worst fate a studio like his could possibly endure, being strung out on a live service gravy train for the rest of Naughty Dog's natural life through 'The Last of Us Factions' which bounced around the studio for far too long until it was cancelled. They were talking about that game for years before the obvious question of support, which everyone was asking about from day one, reared up and killed the project dead. I can't rightly say what took them so long to come out and scrap the thing, but I won't pretend I don't hold a little bit of appreciation for the way that Naughty Dog handled themselves in that cancellation message which smacked back at the wide spread mandate for these wastes of time as a question of working to your strengths versus working to a vapid bottom line. Rare W for the Druckmann.
But then you have to bring up the biggest hot button issue of the year and what do you get? Well, you get Neil talking about the revolutionary possibilities of AI within game development which just... man, it totally boggles the mind. A man from a studio of some of the most talented artists in history, extolling the virtues of a technology fostered and primed to put those very artists out of a job. What could possibly have been going through the man's head? Not only is it a marble-mouthed condemnation at his own team's area of speciality, but it's also horrifically untrue in the manner which AI is currently being spoken of.
Basic learning models that flood any and everywhere desperately lack the reasoning and deduction to be put to creative tasks. At the very best they can fiddle about with provided tools and assets and throw them about to the vague tune of a model you explicitly lay out for them. Which is just generation software, that has been used in popular gaming since before the days of Minecraft, but arguably most popularly in Minecraft. This is the breed of tool that Neil is praising and calling potentially revolutionary to development. And sure, perhaps he's looking forward to the potential of what might happen with generalised AI in the future. We know he isn't, but let's pretend for a bit- eh?
Now of course, we would be remiss to omit context from this. Neil was pulled up under Sony, not Playstation, to ramble in front of technological luddites about matters they clearly know nothing about. So maybe he used simple words to keep their tiny minds chugging along for the ride and it was his misfortune that such a figurative sound-byte was captured and waved under his nose to make him look bad. But seriously- even in such straits the man has to know the effect of what quotes like that can do when waved around the industry, spoken by one of it's supposed creative leaders, the AI truthers at Ubisoft have been salivating for anyone with an ounce of credibility to endorse these tools. (as obviously no-such creative exists within their walls.)
I stand by my title, Neil Druckmann is a punching bag for certain chunks of the industry and that likely is only going to ramp up the more successful the man becomes. He's no moron, just a bit full of himself, which is why gaffes like this puzzle me so. I detect a bit of the Ken Levine from him, a tint of the 'out of touch'- and placing himself firmly on the wrong side of history in this conversation is a shining beacon to that sullen truth. Whatever the circumstance, whoever the audience, this conversation is really exposing those who think first about the people, those who thinks first about the art and those who think first about the product. Not the 'art'. The 'product'.
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