Like many other avid gamers, I played The Last of Us in 2013, and at the time it felt like a revolutionary game, and a good argument for games to be interpreted just like any other text. The Last of Us puts you in the shoes of Joel, a father who takes in a teenager named Ellie during an apocalyptic event. The pair navigate across America, fighting off hordes of zombies (which are never actually called zombies, but as in The Walking Dead, we know what’s up), as they journey to Salt Lake City so that doctors can examine Ellie’s immunity to the cordyceps infecting the world.
The Last of Us attempted to show players that humans are the villains, not zombies, and that every action—even those made with good intentions—has consequences. The Last of Us Part II picks up where the first left off, following Ellie as she journeys to seek revenge. But what’s shocking is just how much revenge Ellie wants, and what she’ll do do obtain it. Enter: extreme violence.
Some spoilers for The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II to follow.
One of the rare happy moments in the game.
The Last of Us Part II unfolds like a matryoshka doll of violence and revenge. Ellie wants to kill the people who murder Joel (very early in the game), who in turn wanted to murder Joel because he killed someone dear to another main character in the game. Revenge begets revenge. That’s all fine and somewhat expected as far as video games like The Last of Us go. We, the players, need to be dealt a moral lesson, and the best way to do that according to this formula is to impart a highly moralized tale of how humans are the real monsters. David Sims discusses how the games’ turns and didacticism can push one to hate the games (or at least their endings). And it’s true—being forced to make violent choices when a game pretends to give the player the option to be benevolent or stealthy feels wrong.
The heart of this argument goes back to a debate that’s been going on in the gaming world for years—ludonarrative dissonance. Essentially, ludonarrative dissonance speaks to the conflict between the played experience of the game and the story that the writers and game developers are trying to tell. For example, if you slaughter entire towns in Red Dead Redemption, but then emerge in the story as the hero the west deserves, there’s some dissonance in the way you’ve played the game and the way the game wants to portray a set story. The story might be on rails, but the player is not.
This is particularly evident in The Last of Us Part II, where Ellie kills so many people, and yet the player is still invited to view themselves as a hero, or if not a hero, a complex character. But is there anything complex in murdering hundreds of humans (yes, humans. I’m not even including zombies in this equation)?
Not only does Ellie kill people, but she kills people who seem like people. They have names. When you shoot one enemy, another might yell out for them. These enemies have lives, one can assume, and relationships with their comrades. Worse yet (in my case), many of the enemies have dogs that travel with them to sniff out Ellie as she slinks around the post-apocalyptic terrain. When you kill a dog—and you are forced to do so several times—an enemy might yell out their name. It’s always something cute. RIP Bear. You were a good boy.
Chris Plante argues that violence is inevitable in AAA games (or high-budget games) because that’s simply what sells. People play games for a variety of reasons, but action games make up the bulk of the mainstream games market. Action/adventure games that Naughty Dog is known for—like The Last of Us and the Uncharted series—feature big budgets, generous development timeframes, and huge teams of workers (often overworked in the case of Naughty Dog, among other game studios) that contribute to a game; given the investment that goes into making AAA games, it makes sense that studios want them to be financially successful, but that also might mean taking fewer artistic risks in order to create a game that is guaranteed to sell. Other things go into the financial success of games—like marketing—but that’s probably an entire other blog post.
The point is that violence and action, in part, are what make games sell to a larger demographic. There are gamers who just want to play a game filled with twists and turns and head bashing, but there are also those (like me) who just want a good story and don’t mind a little head bashing if that gets them there. I understand the reasoning behind including graphic violence in video games, but I question if its inclusion always benefits the story being told.
Abby has muscles and can kill with her thighs, and apparently that isn’t feminine enough for most men.
Back to ludonarrative dissonance. Playing through The Last of Us II, I felt compelled to question whether the characters I inhabited were really good, or if the writers just told me they were good. I know that I killed many humans—who might have been good or bad—throughout the game as Ellie, but I also know that I, the player, didn’t have a choice in it. The writers and developers forced me into a narrative corner and took away the option of mercy.
Games can present options that have consequences. For example, the 2012 game Dishonored provides players with the option to kill enemies outright or stealthily knock them unconscious. The non-lethal route is somewhat trickier, but ultimately the player character turns out to be good, idolized by his young daughter because of it. If the player chooses to kill, his daughter still idolizes him, but for the fear he’s caused throughout the kingdom. This presents an interesting consequence for players that keeps the narrative outcome roughly the same (cutting off the need for lots of branching story arcs). Either way, the player character is celebrated by his daughter, but the reasoning behind it changes depending on how one plays the game. Dishonored is also a AAA game, and it also includes graphic violence and action, but it does so while also giving the players a choice in how they play the game, and how their player character will be perceived by others in the game.
Other games (like Red Dead Redemption, in my experience) revel in ludonarrative dissonance by letting players do whatever they want in-game, and leave the narrative untouched by the player’s decisions. The Last of Us, and by extension The Last of Us Part II, give the illusion of choice, but there’s not a real option there. If an enemy falls to their knees and begs for you to spare their life, you can either kill them outright or give them time to pick up their gun and go right back to attacking you. There’s no real mercy, no real option to be kind.
I’m not sure whether I can recommend The Last of Us II, but I also can’t exactly put my finger on why I’m having such an issue making my way through the game. I’ve been playing it with my husband (yes, readers, husband now!), and I’ve had to hand off the game to him during some of the more violent bits—especially if there’s a dog involved. I’m not a squeamish person, but I can’t revel in violence like this. There’s too much dissonance in how I want to play and how the game is telling me to play.
There are some good things worth mentioning in The Last of Us Part II, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring them up at least briefly. Ellie is a queer character and a total badass. Abby, while not queer, does not present as overtly feminine (she is absolutely ripped). A minor character later in the game turns out to be transgender and is accepted by Abby, if not his religious cult, and the lack of fervor around his gender seems somewhat revolutionary for an AAA game. All that being said, the game kind of undoes some of its own progressiveness. Before the game’s release, some bloggers speculated that Abby herself was transgender, and were even more enraged to discover she’s just a very muscular woman. That kind of controversy surrounding the very possibility of a character being trans shows that we have a long way to go in the world of representation in games.
The Last of Us Part II is enjoyable, more or less, but it might give you reason to pause if you love animals. More importantly, it opens up a discussion about the juxtaposition between gameplay mechanics and narrative, and how the two categories can interact in ways that make sense…or not.
If you’ve played The Last of Us or The Last of Us Part II, we’d love to hear from you! Leave us a message on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or comment here.
