What Video Games Do

Ten years ago I secured lucrative bragging rights by actually doing what other white fuckboys merely gestured at — teaching English to primary school students in Kham, the historical Tibet.

Over eight weeks I got fat on butter tea, introduced frisbee to my charges, and immersed myself in a culture so foreign as to reframe my sense of wonder.

I also encountered some of the problems endemic to poor and politically disenfranchised communities. Work was physically punishing; alcohol abuse was common.

One of western Sichaun’s most persistent and generational issues, however, felt wholly sui generis. According to the director of the NGO I worked for, the most pressing threat to our students’ education wasn’t booze or violence or apathy but a small fungus that preyed on local caterpillars. It was called cordyceps.

Like something out of a sadist National Geographic, cordyceps spores would germinate inside the larvae of ghost moths, killing and occupying them, and eventually erupting from their desiccated bodies.

So, yikes. Who among us would not run from the Exotic Death Mushrooms? But as it turned out, powdered cordyceps are prized in traditional Chinese medicine, and their scarcity makes them more valuable ounce-for-ounce than any other resource on the Tibetan Plateau.

Which meant that instead of yak herding or subsistence farming, Khampas often felt compelled to scour thousands of acres of mountainous grassland, collecting these parasites wherever they could be found. And for a family on the financial brink, it often made more sense to deploy children as an extra set of eyes than bet on the vanishingly slim chance they’d merit scholarships to an eastern university.

It was a knotty, ongoing concern for the region, but if I’m being honest, not one that I devoted much thought to after I left.

Cordyceps themselves, though — their brutal and nauseating nature — had burrowed into the folds of my deepest ganglia, adding one more phobia to my list of useless phobias, so that when I finally started playing The Last of Us ten years later, and first confronted the human victims of a fungal parasite that drives its hosts to violent madness, and that resembles in many ways a cordyceps, and that in fact is a cordyceps, a fucking nightmarish mutant strain of cordyceps that has pole-vaulted across the animal kingdom to infect soft and fleshy human bodies like my own, my sympathetic nerves were as jacked, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, as they have ever been.

And I was hooked.

Even in the current pop-entertainment landscape, which is saturated with undead fare, any story that premises a zombie apocalypse on the natural selection of little-known fungi warrants a second look. Most zombie fiction just doesn’t try that hard. The Walking Dead are animated by a mysterious virus; 28 Days Later depicts the aftermath of Monkey Rage.

But The Last of Us, from its opening moments, offers the kind of grounded details that signal a seriousness of purpose — many of which are lifted from the precepts of prestige TV. Despite its pulpy setting, the game succeeds as a narrative at least partly by adopting the tonal and thematic conventions we recognize as highbrow: deep characterization, ambiguous moral concerns, and a plot that doesn’t pander or shrink away from its consequences.

In fairness, there’s not much plot to speak of. When the outbreak begins, Joel loses his twelve year old daughter to a soldier’s deliberate gunshot while trying to flee their city. It’s the first in a series of escalating heartbreaks, and it unfolds over fifteen minutes. The game then jumps twenty years forward — humanity clings to the margins of life, surviving mostly in militarized quarantines. Joel and his partner Tess work as smugglers in the Boston area, and they’re given One Last (or at any rate, Big) Job: deliver Ellie, a fourteen year old girl, to a dwindling rebel outfit called the Fireflies, who ostensibly fight for whatever civil norms are salvageable in this hellscape. It soon emerges that Ellie is immune to those goddamn cordyceps, and so the stakes are set: Joel must get humanity’s last hope to the only people who can develop a cure. Needless to say, allies die, the goalposts keep shifting, and the plan’s very validity remains in question throughout.

The story’s broad strokes are visible from the game’s cover art. Does Joel, still grieving the death of his Ellie-aged daughter, try to keep this new dependant at emotional arm’s length? Does Ellie, passed around between grownups with guns while shouldering the weight of the literal world, put up a guard as stubborn as the old man’s? Do these two broken souls form an attachment that rivals — surpasses even — the blood commitment of biological family?

Yes, yes and yes.

But that synopsis doesn’t begin to address the actual experience of playing the game.

The Last of Us exhibits craft in spades — its haunting score, nuanced dialogue, and starkly gorgeous art direction all evince a richly textured drama. But those are table stakes in 2017, and their role here is to bolster and justify what happens alongside them: the gameplay itself.

This being a survivor-horror-stealth-action title aimed squarely at the 18-to-35 demo, gameplay often requires Joel to liberate the infected from the bondage of their disease via some sturdy American firepower and an ad hoc assortment of guerilla munitions. But combat is desperate, not gleeful. Your goal is almost always to escape wherever you are with minimal bullets spent or trouble incurred — the practical effect of which is to make the game anxiety-inducing at all times. Most of the infected are categorized as runners, which concisely summarizes their threat. They reach you fast and are elusive at range; dropping them efficiently entails strict adherence to a whites-of-their-eyes policy. If you miss and they grab you, the only way to throw them off is by smashing a button as fast as you can for what seems like an eternity. Meanwhile, more are advancing.

And that’s just Joel. The Last of Us becomes downright devious when it throws Ellie into the mix — or vice versa. (In one chapter, you control Ellie while Joel is grievously injured.) Most of the time your companions hold their own in fights and don’t need protection. But occasionally the game contrives more complicated scenarios. In one memorable set piece, Joel and Ellie are traversing a town abandoned but for its last resident — an old smuggling contact of Joel’s named Bill. The town is overrun with infected but Bill survives by laying sophisticated boobytraps around the cordoned-off section he calls home. On your way to meet him you stumble, as Joel, into a snare trap, triggering a brief cutscene. Joel is hoisted by his feet until he — and you — are hanging upside down, your POV flipped. Joel directs Ellie to cut down the counterweight keeping him/you suspended: a refrigerator twenty yards away.

As she climbs on top of it and starts to hack at the rope, a wave of runners appear, heading towards you. Joel screams at Ellie to hurry up and suddenly you’re in control again, madly training your gun on a series of upside down zombies while you shriek falsettos in your studio apartment.

You kill the initial horde, but Ellie falls off the refrigerator, causing the trap to hoist you even higher. Now Ellie is on the ground and you’re farther away from it, looking down on her from a sharp angle. More runners round the corner. You’re out of reach — but she’s not. They sprint to her. Your blood having since curdled in your veins, your sphincter resolutely puckered, you force yourself to adjust to this new position and dispatch the five infected with your eight remaining bullets. You pause the game to go dry heave over your toilet. You resume. Ellie climbs the refrigerator again and severs the rope, releasing herself back into your care.

I can only presume this is fatherhood.

It’s a masterful example of what The Last of Us traffics in: improvisation, disorientation, dread. It also manages to deepen Joel and Ellie’s relationship — and by extension, your investment — within the confines of the gameplay.

Most of the emotional punch hits like that. There are, to be sure, dozens of devastating cutscenes throughout the game. But so much of its lingering power transmits through unscripted experience.

As you and Ellie journey across the country, you discover pockets of narrative that provide a bleak backdrop to events of the past twenty years — letters, photographs, and other domestic detritus offering glimpses of what actually happened to people. And here it should be said that people are the true subject of The Last of Us. From its first fifteen minutes, when the soldier kills Joel’s daughter, a broad theme materializes: trust nobody. The survivors are more dangerous than the diseased. Which, ok, sure, is basically the central tenet of zombie lore. It’s the kind of recycled trope you’re likely to find in any genre fiction. And yet through the weird alchemy of gameplay — supported by the writers’ laudable commitment to pessimism — it feels fresh and cutting.

At one point Joel, Ellie, and two allies venture through a sewer system on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. They come across the grisly remains of a makeshift settlement, and as you explore the space you piece together its sad history. In the wake of the outbreak a survivor took up temporary residence there to hide from the infected and raiders. He eventually met a friendly family while trading supplies aboveground, and offered to shelter them. The group, which included a number of young children, lived in relative comfort until someone forgot to close a door.

The infected you kill while moving through the tunnels are the (former) members of this commune, minus a few. You find the rest in a locked room, where a cluster of small skeletons huddle together under a blood-spattered tarp, a larger one laying beside them. On the floor is scrawled a last message: “They didn’t suffer.”

Would any of this play better as a film or a show or a miniseries? Would stumbling upon a room of dead kids startle me as much if I hadn’t made the choice to jimmy open the door? Would Joel’s relationship with Ellie become my relationship if I didn’t fight to preserve it chapter after chapter, killing after killing, each failure providing a clue to a possible future in which we both survive?

A number of critics have lately suggested that gameplay and narrative aren’t natural companions — or even that video games would be better off abandoning traditional notions of story altogether. But The Last of Us proves what games can do in the service of character and premise and plot. In the right developer’s hands, even a gantlet of death will make you feel more alive.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.