This meme is so obviously stupid, even I, as someone who has never actually played a Hideo Kojima game in their life, know that whoever actually believes that these two men are even remotely on the same level should probably be banned from having any opinion on any media ever.
First of all, Kojima clearly cares deeply about making his games feel like cinema, but he also understands what makes games unique as a media. His works are chock full of experiences and weird goofs that could only ever work in a video game, such as Psycho Mantis’ shenanigans in the original Metal Gear Solid, the fact that you can defeat The End in Snake Eater by moving forward your PS2’s clock, and Death Stranding’s gameplay pretty much revolving entirely around meditation and community-building. For Druckmann, on the other hand, gameplay is clearly secondary to the cinematic experience, and is therefore far less abstract and “game-like”. You could watch a Druckmann game being played instead of playing it yourself and still get roughly the same experience. I have, in fact, done this several times.
Furthermore, while both creators are praised for incorporating heady themes into their games, Druckmann builds heavily on very classic, traditional themes like fatherhood, humanity’s cruelty towards the Other and the cyclical nature of revenge. These are themes that are classics for a reason and give his works as veneer of prestige, but they are also not particularly original, especially since it’s not hard to name several works considered to be the absolute masterpieces of their genres that deal with these exact same themes. This is, of course, entirely on purpose. Druckmann explicitly wants his works to directly compete with the stone-cold classics of world literature and cinema, but doesn’t seem to realize that merely aping them makes his stories feel derivative. Kojima, on the other hand tends to centre his works around themes that are a bit more “out there”, but as a result, they come across as far more personal and original, and have often been praised for their prescience, such as Sons of Liberty’s warning on disinformation in world politics and Death Stranding’s plea for connection in a world ravaged by alienation.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, though… I dunno, Kojima just seems like a fun dude worth listening to, blessed with a critical mind and a great sense of empathy, and the less "savoury" aspects of his personality come across as more silly than actively harmful, as the whole “ashamed of your words and deeds” shebang with the character Quiet in The Phantom Pain can attest. Druckmann, on the other hand, just appears to be a pretentious hack with a messiah complex and an eight-year-old’s understanding of the world, which are reflected in, amongst others, his ridiculous Zionism and his extremely out-of-touch views on generative artificial intelligence and crunch, all of which are actively detrimental to the art he claims to create and the values he claims to espouse.
