These two MEN got their grubby, filthy HANDS ON this beautiful video game and you won’t BELIEVE what they did next.
Could be a cool behind the scenes. I hope it’s not just circlejerking about the game’s greatness or how deep the message is.
In an early version of The Last of Us , then titled “Mankind,” only women were susceptible to the parasitic fungal infection that brings down civilization. In that version, Ellie was the only female believed to be immune. But that concept, Druckmann said in a 2013 speech, was a terrific failure. “The reason it failed is because it was a misogynistic idea,” he confessed. “A lot of the female workers at Naughty Dog came up and said, ‘I don’t like this idea. I understand what you’re trying to do—it is ultimately a story about the love of a girl—but the way it’s coming off is you’re having a bunch of women turn into monsters and you’re shooting them in the face.”
Druckmann reworked the plot. Then he became a father. Having an infant daughter quickly charged him with the awe and terror of caring for a child. It also deepened his growing conviction that videogames had to do better at representing female characters—beginning with his own.
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I was fully ready to believe “beginning with his own” meant he was placing his infant daughter into the world of TLOU as a character.
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It’s interesting that it was having a daughter, not a life partner, which prompted him to reconsider misogyny.
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men are the only creatures born without souls, god has to force feed them one later on through discomfort, trauma, disability, or having a daughter etc and even then it’s only 50/50 if it’ll take
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“Hmm a lot of my female coworkers are saying my video game plot about killing women is misogynistic. Obviously I am not a misogynist, but I agree this issue needs to be fixed. I also just had a daughter and I feel really strongly now about proper female representation (in video games). It’s certainly reasonable for me, the sole professional creative genius, to take on this challenge and take the credit alone.”
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i wish they had still called it mankind so the big reveal could be that perhaps… man is not so kind after all… 
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Man. Kind?
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Druckmann’s memoirs are a trip:
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To Kind Man
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Did you know that when you have daughters, it’s like making a woman you have to care about out of parts of your own body?
smh this is what we get from no longer teaching the creation myth in schools
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Them coming out and just saying “this is a game about moe” is incredible to me. Love my murder daughter.
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Extremely hype from all these reviews that indicate Yes, Another Spec Ops: The Line.
(A game in which the only mechanic for progression is barrels o’ killin’ but which then goes on to repeatedly holler Why Are You Doing This, Don’t You Feel Bad About Killing People? Didn’t You Know Killing Human Beings Is Bad? in both ears but this time also with flashbacks to happier days with the puppy you just slaughtered because also killing dogs is also bad, also.)
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i can’t believe im going to actually play this game 
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Dear Player I Pray
You Pause and Consider:
To Act in Flesh Life as
You Do in Kill Game
Would Render the World Most Bitter!
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my sister wouldn’t loan me her switch to play deadly premonition unless I ordered this game and its art book for her
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The daughter game emerges as a response to one of the most significant criticisms leveled at the dad game, the obvious observation that, in any given dad game, the most interesting character is usually the daughter. As the object of protection, the one who responds and must adapt to the world instead of fighting stubbornly and protectively against it, the daughter in a dad game usually ends up, accidentally, being the most sympathetic and complex character. So the daughter game, usually made by the same folks who made the dad games, is both a gesture of contrition and a posture of defensiveness. It’s an admission that yes, you’re right, she is more interesting , followed immediately by I can tell that story, too! Games like Dishonored 2 and, to an extent, Gears of War 5 and Nier Automata are daughter games—games that attempt to center the perspectives of the women, instead of the father figures. But that’s a fraught proposition. As many women will tell you, few people arguably understand women less than their fathers. The paternal gaze can all too easily elide internal complexity in favor of external reactivity, seeing the daughter’s actions not as a reflection of her own growth and legacy but of his.
As the quintessential daughter game, The Last of Us Part II is defined by its father figure, even as it moves on to telling stories about his progeny. That father figure is Joel, and the game takes on many of his attributes. Like Joel, it’s cruel and violent, emotionally intense and a bit domineering. At the end of the original game, Joel makes a decision that cements Ellie as his surrogate daughter in the most toxic way possible, protecting her in a way that overwrites her agency, launching a cycle of revenge and brutality with no endpoint in sight. The Last of Us Part II is about the long tail of those decisions, and how they go on to shape Ellie and her own future, which is warped inexorably by Joel’s choices, sent careening toward bloodshed. Ellie is forced to bear the weight of those choices and to try to reconcile herself with them, even as they send her on a winding, often horrific quest for revenge against a new set of enemies.
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