The Last Of Us: Surviving The Gaming Industry

Even though the prologue’s climax is basically a foregone conclusion from minute one, it’s a conclusion that carries an emotional impact the game earns through effectively wedding narrative with limited gameplay. Sarah dying after being shot by a solider isn’t just a turning point for the plot, but the defining moment we need to experience in order to understand one of The Last of Us‘s main characters. A good film can use a prologue as the warm-up vignette to the real story ahead (2009’s Star Trek comes to mind), but a great one will be able to turn a self-contained opening into an appetizer for the main course (lead writer Neil Druckmann cites Finding Nemo as the game’s animated inspiration, but Up, another Pixar classic, succeeds at using this same structure).

Within minutes of meeting them, Sarah and Joel are already capable conduits for emotional transference (theirs onto ours, not vice-versa) because they’re identifiable as actual human beings. A blue-collar dad looking to save his daughter from zombies sounds like incredibly simple stuff in light of how revolutionary I’m building it up to be, but it’s not a matter of details so much as efficacy. Simple should not be a four-letter word when it comes to proper storytelling, but all too often, game narratives will ignore fundamentals for lack of time, effort, or belief in their value, leading to stories that are built on lazy, or dramatically dishonest foundations. This is evident when looking at the underpinnings of many game stories, of which, two recurring themes pop-up frequently: amnesia and revenge.

Amnesia is a more common characteristic of video game protagonists than left-handedness, because giving the player a “fish out of water” point of view is more important to developers than actually providing the player a character to actually care about (again, there’s that indulgence creeping in). Often tied in with the amnesia cliché is the Deep Dark Secret the lead character keeps hidden from everyone, including the player, until such a time that the truth can be revealed for maximum dramatic effect. In other mediums, protecting that reveal sometimes means the entire production has to wrap and form itself around the surprise. However, development of a game’s story is never so fluid, and neither is the production of the game surrounding that story. It’s not impossible to make a good twist in a game, but forcing one in to save a poor story can just lead to narrative hemorrhaging, which further exacerbates the shoddy construction of the story to begin with. Last year’s Dishonored kept one of the story’s core relationships so secret that it’s optional for the player to discover; when hugely important story details are treated like easter eggs, it’s a reminder of how lowly narrative is prioritized in the grand scheme of game design.

Revenge as a plot-motivator is the other trend Dishonored double-dips on, as it overlaps in the Venn diagram of generic gameplay design (killing things of increasing challenge) and standard story arcing (overcoming increasingly difficult obstacles to achieve a single goal), becoming the go-to conflict in character-based stories. Though it’s often the throughline of most shooters and action games, it’s not an inherently bad one: Grand Theft Auto IV did an admirable job of weaving Niko Belic’s desire for a fresh start in with his need to settle a score from his former life. Though it worked in a vacuum, the cleanness of the conflict got lost when placed in the broader world of the GTA universe, which has a satirical edge more grating than usual if it’s suffocating the human element at the story’s center (Rockstar did a much better job with Red Dead Redemption, which both textured the warpath of its lead with more nuance, and contextualized the character’s violence within the world more believably).

A bigger problem occurs when games use revenge, or other singular plot-motivating emotions, as shorthand for character depth. The God of War games are both commendable for how strongly their gameplay and story commit to one man’s vendetta as the fuel for an entire franchise, and disappointing for how utterly banal that motivation becomes well before the story’s conclusion. By the end of the GoW trilogy, the player has killed not just Zeus, the fixation of Kratos’ hatred, but literally everything else in the world of God of War, save for the buzzards. It’s an appropriately operatic and tragic ending, considering the Greek subject matter, but it fails to impact the player because Kratos doesn’t register as an emotionally identifiable entity. There’s even an entire subplot in the third game dedicated to trying to humanize him, but the choice he makes (arguably the only one of dramatic value in the entire franchise), only serves to reaffirm his position as an outlet for innate player desire to see lost family members avenged, and bad guys punished.

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