Naughty Dog: The Last of Us Unfairly Led to Discussion of Sexism, Industry Problems

Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us achieved fantastic review scores almost across the board. The game not only stands as the highest rated game of the year, but it also spurred a great deal of interesting conversation on what video game stories can really accomplish. Most people enjoyed the undead yearn the studio weaved, but the criticism over how females were portrayed in the game took the developers by surprise.

Even if 9 out of 10 critics love your game, that who goes out of their way to dissect it makes an impact. Neil Druckmann, the creative director for The Last of Us at Naughty Dog, and game director Bruce Straley spoke with GamesBeat about the issue, seemingly trying to understand why their game was used as an example.

“We were surprised at how well it was received. The story is a little more subtle and the material is a little more mature,” said Druckmann. “The gameplay is a little harder, more complicated than what we’ve done in the past. We thought we would have a smaller audience, or that it would be more divisive as far as how people’s reactions. But we were pleasantly surprised.”

“We were surprised by some of the criticism of our use or execution of the female roles inside of the game, and some of the backlash that we got from it,” Straley added. “I think we did an extraordinary job of creating strong characters – men, women, black, white, gay straight. We’re just trying to create completely fleshed-out characters. Yet somehow we were used as a soapbox or something for people to stand on and say that there are still problems with the industry.

“It’s good to have the conversation. We agree about all of those things. Every single one of those inequalities in the industry–We need to have that discussion and we need to be more mature about our approach to the medium. It was just odd, the way it felt like our game was being used in that way. I mean, think of all the games you could use instead of The Last of Us.”

There’s plenty of good discussion about The Last of Us out there. It might not all be positive, but more than anything, it’s important that people are putting this much thought into a single game.