Well, I finally finished The Last of Us (2013). I picked up where I’d left off — from a save file last updated March 18, 2020. It was the very beginning of COVID, and I guess at the time I thought it might be personally amusing to play a game about a fictional pandemic during an actual, IRL one. Four days before that last save, I blogged about the experience1.
It's about a guy, Joel, and a young girl, Ellie, who have been brought together because society collapsed — in their world, a mutated Cordyceps fungus has begun infecting humans and turning them into... things. They act like zombies, but they look like funguses, with the characteristic chalky, mushroomy growths. (Many species of Cordyceps are parasitic, which is presumably where they got the idea.) Ellie and Joel are on a mission to save humanity, because she was bitten by one of the Cordyceps-infected people and has somehow survived. She might be the cure.
I haven't finished the game yet, but the story is one of the best I've ever encountered in a video game. (Seriously! It's so good that HBO is turning it into a series.) The characters are lifelike — Ellie is an annoying teen, sometimes! — and the portrayals of grit and sublimated grief really work. You're taking a ride with some deeply traumatized people who nonetheless do what they must, as the saying goes, because they can.
It helps that the world of The Last of Us is beautifully rendered and thought out. (It masks thousands of hours of developer suffering.) You walk through ruined, abandoned cities, just the two of you; there are notes, diaries, and graffiti to read that all fills in what exactly happened to the places you're trekking through. The lifelike textures and lighting make the familiar stuff more eerie: it's possible to deduce how things got that way. You can see how society broke down, and how nobody could pick up the pieces, at least in most places. The quarantine zones feel realistic.I've been staying inside for most of the hours in my day, leaving my apartment pretty much only to go to the grocery store for something I've forgotten. It's started to change my relationship to time, but mostly, it's changed what I think when I see other human beings doing other human things. When me and my girlfriend were walking to the (stocked!) grocery store near my house last night, I saw a man get out of a beat-up pickup truck, cough a few times, adjust his hat, and then walk into the store ahead of us. I shivered. Because a cough means something different now. I thought of Ellie and Joel and how, in the game, you're tasked mostly with sneaking around the zombies you encounter — because they're fast and strong, and while Joel is basically superhuman he does get overwhelmed, and when he dies so does she. I wanted to sneak through the crowded, narrow aisles, hiding from the maybe-infected.
Here in New York, we're only in the first stages of what's going to happen with the coronavirus. We don't know yet if our collective staying inside will be able to flatten the proverbial curve — will be able to slow the flow of the infected into the ICUs around the city. But things have palpably changed. People are suspicious. Society isn't breaking down, but its threads are fraying. Going outside means regarding everything and everyone with suspicion, and being regarded the same way, in turn. And it's fair: you can spread the coronavirus even before you know you're sick. We're not in the same universe as Ellie and Joel, but what's happening now is exactly what happened to them, because society collapses the same way every time. It never happens all at once.
I hope you’ll forgive the lengthy quote; I think we can all agree that I was in my bag with this one. In any case, I’ve been thinking about the game / blog a lot, now that I’ve finally finished the story.
The ending of the game is sublime2. Joel, that avatar of practical ultraviolence, has to make a choice about humanity’s future. And here he is uncharacteristically impractical; Ellie has become his family, and families are least rational about each other. And even though the moment is totally scripted it feels like a choice, which is a wonder of narrative execution. It felt shocking but totally in keeping with what we know of Joel, Ellie, and the gradual development of their relationship.
In any case: all this has got me thinking about the stories we can tell with video games. Narratively, I think they’re closer to novels than to films, just because of how much time you spend getting to know the characters; though, as in film, we get a real sense of them by seeing how they act in and on the world. But the amount of time you have to put into finishing a game fosters a strong bond with the people you’re playing as.
Here’s probably where I should say that I didn’t really care for the gameplay of The Last of Us. Even so, by the end, after tens of hours playing as Joel, I understood that it helped characterize him and ground the setting. There’s a sense of physicality to the animations of him picking up various useful scrap around the game’s world. Spending 15 hours watching a guy pick things up is a good way to get to know him; it’s akin to learning someone’s quirks when they go from a stranger to a friend. You know you’re there when you find yourself viewing the way they organize their liquor cabinet as an idiosyncratic outgrowth of their personality.
It’s hard to make a game in general. It’s harder still to make something fun. And I think it’s even harder to make a game that’s fun to play that also has a story worth spending time on. That it happens so often feels like a small miracle, at least to me; I guess mostly because I’m the kind of player that values story over just about everything else. Though I am not immune, of course, to the charms of a really good FPS. I mean, I’m not a saint.
Love,
Bijan
For my pandemic blog, Indoor Voices, which is still an eerie time capsule from the era.
Naturally there’s been a lot of discourse about it, lol.