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‘The last of us 2’
Credit: Naughty Dog
This year, at the 2020 Game Awards, the big winner was The last of us part II, which caught the top categories for best performance, best direction and game of the year.
The day after the awards, I wrote that this was basically a foregone conclusion. The Last of Naughty Dog was a critical favorite and a fan favorite even before its release.
I also pointed out that it doesn’t really matter which game GOTY wins. It only matters what games you love to play. Your game of the year and my game of the year don’t have to be the same, and they don’t have to be The last of us part II and none of us need to worry about that.
But that’s just one category. At first it didn’t occur to me to think not only about the merits of the games for this and other awards, but also the conditions that these developers’ workers faced during development.
On Kotaku, Ian Walker makes a really excellent point: The Game Awards, including the jury made up largely of game journalists, shouldn’t award Best Game Direction to a studio that used countless crucial hours to complete a game, even a game too. -received as The Last Of Us Part II.
“Let’s be clear, ”Walker writes,“ the existence of a crisis indicates a leadership failure. It is up to the directors and producers of the game to ensure that workloads are managed correctly and objectives are met. If workers are forced to contract, explicitly or otherwise, it means that managers themselves have fallen short somewhere, either in pushing the limits of their existing staff, fostering an environment in which overtime is an issue. implicit (albeit tacit) requirement, or both. And as ambitious as The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann and his projects may be, “questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits” are not necessary to make a great game. “
This is an excellent observation. While you can safely argue that Game of the Year can be judged solely by the strength of the games themselves, Game Direction is explicitly about the strength of those leading development, including their management skills. If you’re asking for months (or years) of crisis, aka long overtime week after week, that’s absolutely a failure in the direction of the game. That failure should not be rewarded with prestigious awards.
Walker compares the game to hell from Supergiant Games, a studio that doesn’t require its employees to work crunchy, and actually believes the opposite.
“hell—And, tacitly, those who direct its development at Supergiant— also ran for the Best Directing award last night, “Walker writes. “It’s a great game, as good as The Last of Us Part II and possibly better in some ways. Why he didn’t win the Game of the Year is a subjective discussion that doesn’t interest me at the moment, but hell deserved to win for Best Direction, at least more than The Last of Us Part II, because the studio significantly avoided crisp culture in its various projects. “
It lists some of Supergiant’s anti-crisis policies, including:
- Unlimited free time.
- A minimum of 20 days off per year.
- No emails are sent after 5pm on Fridays.
And so on and so on.
Walker notes that he has no ill will towards Naughty Dog or The last of us part II or game director Neil Druckmann, but that “prodigious praise along the way The Last of Us Part II it was directed feels like an unspoken endorsement of the creak and only serves to push that conversation into the background again. “
I think it’s a strong point worth talking about, regardless of how you feel The Last of Us II.
