Jörg Tittel, writer and director of The Last Worker, is not the type to mince words. While most developers tend to come across overly-composed and PR-trained in interviews, Tittel can’t help but tell you exactly what he thinks. For example, Tittel detests the way we use the word ‘content’ to describe art. “I like to say a bucket of shit has content in it,” he says. As a writer, filmmaker, and indie game developer, he’s not interested in creating things just for the sake of broad market appeal. “There’s a part of me, maybe it’s arrogance, that thinks if you’re good enough it doesn’t matter how big the user base is,” he explains. “I’d rather be wanted by ten percent of a small user base than by zero percent of a super large one which is overcrowded with bullshit - or as they call it ‘content’ - these days.”
Throughout our conversation, Tittel speaks openly about his views on end-stage capitalism, takes aim at Amazon, AI, and the triple-A games industry, cracks jokes about Microsoft, J. K. Rowling, and the MCU, and calls Hideo Kojima the “weirdest writer on Earth.” If anyone ever told Tittel to dial it back, he’d probably double down out of spite.
The Last Worker is the kind of blunt critique you’d expect Tittel to write. It follows Kurt, the last human worker in the city-sized, fully-automated Jüngle Fulfillment Centre, as he aids a group of anti-corporate activists who want to expose the dark secrets kept by the mega-corp and its billionaire CEO, Josef Jüngle. Like all good sci-fi, The Last Worker is both a projection into the future and a reflection of the world as it is today.
“I really don’t like the world we live in right now very much,” Tittel says. “You’re talking to me in the UK and maybe f***ing Vladimir Putin will blow us up tomorrow. We’ve never been closer to the Doomsday Clock’s final time than we are now. This amidst all of losing jobs and being replaced by AI, everyone walking around staring into their phones - it’s all pretty f***ing dire.”
Tittel was interested in exploring how we cope with that reality in The Last Worker, but his intention was to create something far less bleak than real life. “The idea was to make a world that feels fun and colorful. Even though it’s a dystopia, I wanted it to be a colorful and pleasant dystopia.” Tittel says he wants The Last Worker to give people a little perspective about what’s happening in the world while also offering a sense of hope. In order to escape the future depicted in the game, Tittel thinks we need a cultural mindshift - one that recognizes the role technology is meant to play in our lives.
“We have become tools instead of actually using them. The Tools are starting to use us as their assistant. It’s just because we are profoundly lazy idiots as humans. We don’t realize that when the spider weaves its web, it’s doing so with a purpose, instead of just wrapping itself in it, which is what we’re doing at the moment.” His point is that tech is something we must embrace holistically as opposed to something that wants to eat us up. We have to see tech CEOs - like Jeff Bezos or Josef Jüngle - as tools as well, and not our leaders. “As soon as we make that shift in our minds and realize that we actually are in charge of our own lives, of our own narrative, I think we’ll be alright.”
As a student at Tisch School of the Arts, Tittel got his start working in games as a writer for the Official Dreamcast Magazine and Next Generation Magazine. After graduating, he briefly worked at Activision as a designer on Minority Report. “It was hell,” he says. “Yes, everything you hear about [the people in charge at Activision] is true. It was a cubicle nightmare and I hated it very much.” Finding triple-A development to be too corporate and soulless, Tittel left games and went into film, where he found success telling his own stories in movies like 2016’s The White King. He has always remained close to games, and in particular VR, which he sees as the inevitable future of the medium. For his next film, the upcoming A Winter’s Journey, he worked with Sony and Media Molecule to storyboard in Dreams.
“VR is the place where we’re eventually all headed,” Tittel says. He sees the future of storytelling as interactive, immersive experiences, a combination of games, film, and theater that we’ll share with others. To him, this idealized future version of VR will be the only worthwhile form of entertainment. “Why would we want to do anything else?” he says. “It’s certainly much better than holding a stupid ass phone up to your face all the time while sitting next to your partner on the couch and ‘second screening’, the nightmare reality that we’re inhabiting now.”
His aforementioned disdain for ‘content’ was part of what led Tittel to The Last Worker in the first place. He holds Amazon responsible for popularizing the term, and turning everything - even ourselves - into content. “We are all attention-seeking data packs and we all create things to seek attention, seek clicks, so eventually they can all be reduced to the lowest common denominator that ultimately only make money [for] the corporation, and very little for the actual creators, or the packagers or pickers inside the fulfillment centers.” Tittel sees the fulfillment center as the most prescient example of end-stage capitalism, but also believes it’s something we’re all burdened by. “I believe we’re all living it now,” he says. “With all the layoffs and all the other horrors that are happening recently, people being replaced by ChatGPT, et cetera. It’s harrowing.”
It’s easy to see how the games industry is affected by and complicit in the end-stage capitalism hellscape too. Layoffs affect thousands of developers each year at triple-A studios while CEOs and shareholders continue to enrich themselves, consolidation erodes the free market and limits the choices for customers and workers, and companies get away with repackaging and over-monetizing their games every single day. Tittel says so much of the exploitation in gaming comes from our failure to value individual expression and authenticity. “A lot of [triple-A] is garbage,” he says. “We’re still playing Tomb Raider all the time with a new skin on it. While I appreciate the production value, the budgets are insane [because] of the quest for realism. We have to make a new tech demo each time to prove how powerful the hardware is, which makes it so every two years you need an HD remake because that stuff ages so quickly.”
Tittel says we’ve lost the plot, and the more we pursue realism as a guiding principle, the easier it will be for games to be made by AI, “because it’s easy to replicate things based on the endless amount of bullshit we throw into the internet with our selfies.” If we’re going to avoid the future where AI and automation replace fulfillment center workers, game developers, and indeed all of us, Tittel says we require a mindshift. “Technology is human and natural, but it can only be good for us if we embrace it as that, as opposed to allowing a bunch of big tech assholes pretend that they’re doing something untouchable that we will never understand and that they have to sell to us.”
That perspective is what keeps Tittel from becoming a nihilist about the future. In the face of corporate greed, automatization, and gross economic disparity, he remains an optimist. He thinks that if your art is weird, original, challenging, authentic, and beautiful, it will still find a way to reach people. That’s what he hopes The Last Worker will be. “That’s the thing I like to hold onto, because otherwise I’d give up.”