Well, we’ve got our map back, and a lead as to what might have happened to our favorite journalist. The trail is starting to warm back up!
It has admittedly been a very long time since I’ve watched Zero Punctuation, but when Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw made a point in his review of the game that I do think about when I replay it. The vast majority of the people we are killing in the gameplay sections are various non-white minorities.
By no means do I say that with the intention of passing judgment on Naughty Dog specifically, because that was far from uncommon in the mid-to-late 2000s era of game development, especially since the “war on terror” was still firmly in the hearts and minds of Americans back then. It is still a point worth dissecting for how it tells us more about our culture than we’d be comfortable admitting to.
To Naughty Dog’s credit, this is something that gets addressed(?) in later entries, but it’s still a reminder of how much the industry has grown, despite how much more room it has left to grow. We are making progress, even if it’s at a frustratingly slow pace.
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