We Need to Talk About The Last of Us
Last week, my partner and I completed our playthrough of The Last of Us Part II, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2013 smash hit survival horror game. With the first instalment’s legacy already established as one of the best-selling video games of all time — winning multiple Game of the Year awards from gaming publications, while also receiving widespread critical acclaim for its narrative elements, gameplay, gorgeous visuals, intricate sound design, and nuanced characterisation — it’s safe to say that there were high expectations placed on the sequel to deliver the goods.
While I thought the ambiguous ending of The Last of Us (TLOU) was near-perfect and didn’t require any additional detail or extrapolation to its mostly self-contained story, I was still nonetheless intrigued and excited to play through the sequel, especially after seeing the visceral teaser trailers that emerged online some years ago.
All that being said, with the controversial ending of The Last of Us Part II (TLOUII) now behind me, I do have some feelings about it. Since the game’s June 19th release, it’s garnered a divisive reaction among specific gaming industry figures, devout fans, curious onlookers, and contrarians alike, mostly fixated on perceived ‘SJW concerns’ and individual story choices. Now to be clear, I don’t intend to focus on these issues individually or pass judgement in either direction, as I feel that these choices were (mostly) handled with nuance and care by the team at Naughty Dog and lead writer and director Neil Druckmann, while also being respectfully integrated into the game’s overall narrative.
Instead, I want to unpack why I have conflicted feelings regarding TLOUII. To that end, this article will focus on the narratives arcs and motivations of the series’ playable characters, before assessing these elements using a selection of critical frameworks: agency, ludonarrative dissonance, and representations of violence.
Primer for The Last Of Us Universe
First up, let’s set the scene. TLOU is set in a post-apocalyptic United States where the world has been ravaged by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus, which turns its hapless human victims into various types of cannibalistic zombie-like creatures. The first game centres around a small-time smuggler with a troubled past, Joel, who is tasked with escorting a teenage girl, Ellie, across the continental U.S. for one of the remnant human factions fighting for control and power over the fallen wasteland.
In the sequel, the story picks up five years after the events of the first game, with Joel and Ellie living reasonably comfortable lives in a secluded settlement in Jackson, Wyoming. After a tragic event dramatically shakes up life in Jackson, Ellie sets out on a quest for revenge by venturing westward to the ruins of Seattle, where she encounters two new warring factions in the form of a hard-line militant group and a cult of feudalistic religious fanatics.
Characters Arcs and Motivations
Now let’s analyse the character arcs for each one of the series’ playable characters. (Note: To do so will involve significant spoilers for the entire series, so consider this your one and final warning!)
1) Joel
We first meet Joel during the early days of the outbreak that will eventually cause the downfall of civilisation. Caught in the initial fray and chaos, Joel tragically loses his young daughter Sarah, and this trauma haunts him throughout the entire series. During the events of TLOU, Joel reluctantly takes on the role of guarding Ellie, gradually warming up to her and growing to become her surrogate father figure.
At the end of TLOU in the ruins of Salt Lake City, Utah, Joel is forced to choose between continuing to protect Ellie or complete his original goal and sacrifice her to the Fireflies faction. (For additional context: Ellie is crucial because she’s immune to the fungus strain and represents humanity’s hope for a cure, which will ultimately result in her death to be manufactured.) In deciding to choose the former option, Joel mercilessly murders the remaining Fireflies to secure Ellie’s safety and (crucially) he keeps this information from Ellie, telling her that she is actually one of many immune people in the world and that the cure was simply a dead-end.
Thus, Joel’s choices in the first game ripple outwards into the sequel with disastrous consequences. At the start of TLOUII, Joel and Ellie have a cordial yet complicated relationship. Joel is still overprotective of Ellie, who is now a strong young woman establishing her independence. Through several flashbacks, we see that Ellie eventually finds out the truth about what occurred in Salt Lake City and she’s angry at Joel for making that choice for her, arguing that her life would have had a purpose as the fatal test subject required for developing a cure. Ellie confronts Joel about her feelings, admitting that she’s willing to work through them and eventually forgive him, right before Abby’s arrival in Jackson changes everything.
2) Abby
Perhaps the most controversial (and interesting) aspect of TLOUII is how it places Abby as both antagonist and protagonist in the game. When the main story of TLOUII begins, we know very little about Abby’s motivations apart from that she’s in Jackson searching for Joel. When Abby finally encounters Joel, almost by accident, she and her comrades in the Washington Liberation Front (known as the WLF or ‘wolves’) brutally turn on Joel and his brother Tommy, resulting in Abby’s savage murder of Joel. At the same time, a helpless Ellie watches on in horror.
This event motivates the entire narrative of TLOUII, as we follow Ellie on her search for Abby and her WLF accomplices in Seattle. Then, roughly halfway through the game, our perspective shifts dramatically, and we begin to play through as Abby. This risky move allows us to view these previous events from Abby’s POV, where we learn that she is the orphan daughter of the Firefly surgeon who was developing the cure and murdered by Joel in Salt Lake City to protect Ellie. Abby’s murder of Joel is now framed as an act of revenge and violent retribution. Throughout the game’s second half, we see Abby struggle to deal with her fears, desires, and loyalties, as she slowly comes to terms with her actions and their (perhaps unintended) consequences.
3) Ellie
In TLOU, Ellie starts as a defensive and standoffish young girl, who is terrified at the prospect of being alone and losing the people closest to her. Over a year, she learns to respect and care for Joel, who in turn, gives her love, guidance, and security. While Joel and Ellie are often forced to do heinous things to survive in the morally bleak reality of the wasteland, there’s a pervasive sense of hope and optimism that the two foster in one another.
However, in TLOUII, this optimism quickly bleeds away and is replaced by the thirst for vengeance. Abby’s murder of Joel catalyses Ellie into a hardened warrior, who will go to any length to satisfy her bloodlust. This desire quickly turns to obsession, as Ellie puts her happiness and relationships with friends and lovers at risk, as she struggles to process her trauma and is consumed by thoughts of revenge.
With the narrative arcs and motivations of our primary characters fleshed out, let’s explore some critical frameworks for analysing TLOUII.
Agency
In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Markus Schlosser explains that the standard conception of ‘agency’ typically denotes the performance of intentional actions:
In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. The philosophy of action provides us with a standard conception and a standard theory of action. The former construes action in terms of intentionality, the latter explains the intentionality of action in terms of causation by the agent’s mental states and events.
For our purposes, what we need to consider are the empirical challenges surrounding the ‘sense of agency’ and how these inform knowledge of our actions. In one account, Schlosser notes that the basic sense of agency can be thought of as “an online and phenomenologically rather thin experience that accompanies the performance of actions, and that does not necessarily require the presence of a conscious intention.” Accordingly, an agent’s judgement about their agency occurs “offline and usually post-act,” wherein the agent may be subject to “various biases that may distort the interpretation of one’s own agency.”
This formulation of the sense of agency is known as the “feedback-comparator model”. It becomes useful when applied to a medium such as video games because it allows us to distinguish between “the awareness of what (the goal), awareness of how (the means), the sense of intentionality, the sense of initiation, the sense of situational control, and the sense of motor control.”
Ultimately, proponents of the feedback-comparator model insist that these individual components are so thoroughly enmeshed within the sense of agency that they constitute a “fused” phenomenological experience. And I believe that we see this phenomenon play out directly in the form of contemporary AAA gaming, where physical player gameplay, controls and movements are heavily integrated with visual and narrative storytelling devices. Which brings us to…
Ludonarrative Dissonance
For those unfamiliar, the concept of ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ is something of a “whipping boy” term within the online gaming community, being either mildly abused and/or vehemently hated. And while I don’t wish to completely retread the debate here (as it would take far too long to do so), I do, however, recommend checking out YouTuber Dan Olson’s excellent defence of the term for a short and straightforward explainer on its origin and contemporary usage.
Ludonarrative dissonance denotes the presence of a disconnect between a game’s physical or playable interactions (the ludic elements; ‘ludo’ stemming from the Latin ‘ludus’ or ‘ludi’ for ‘play’) and the storytelling interactions (the narrative elements). Simply put, it’s the feeling a gamer experiences when the mechanics of a game interfere or contradict with the fiction of the game. In his 2016 literature review, “Ludonarrative Dissonance: Is Storytelling About Reaching Harmony?,” semiotician Frédéric Seraphine described this feeling as a form of detachment or ‘emersion’: “the opposite of the experience of immersion in videogames,” where ‘emersion’ is “the sensation of being pulled out of the play experience” (2).
Writing for Inverse, Danny Paez discusses the prevalence of the term in online gaming criticism and commentary and its connection to the world of TLOU:
It’s the type of term you’d only encounter in a literary dissertation, but the basic idea is that some video games present their main characters as endearing heroes during cutscenes, but then require players to slaughter hordes of computer-controlled enemies to progress through the narrative. In essence, the gameplay doesn’t match up with the story. In The Last of Us Part II’s lawless and zombie-infested universe, violence is a requirement to survive, and most characters are morally questionable as a result.
In a discussion regarding the use of a lifting mechanic in TLOU — where Joel (as the player) provides a boost to Ellie (as the game AI) to move past obstacles and obstructions — Seraphine notes how the deliberate subversion of this established mechanic is evidence of intentional momentary dissonance:
However, the game’s true stroke of genius is that it was hiding the narrative structure’s directives, behind changes in the ludic structure’s incentives. The disruption of the game mechanics that the player got used to, suddenly creates a new incentive within the gameplay. The player needs to walk toward Ellie–the player needs her to go further, and is probably not going there with the intention to cheer her up — but through a masterful use of incentives, the game manages to have the player acting in the best interest of the story’s dramatic tension. And this might be only a tiny example of the potential use of ludonarrative dissonance as a game-design tool. (7–8)
In a comment on Dan Olson’s video explaining ludonarrative dissonance, fellow YouTuber and cultural theorist Peter Coffin argues for the intrinsic value of this phenomenon:
From a metamodern approach, it’s not even taken as odd or bizarre to hold two dissonant ideas. One can be genuine and ironic or hold two ideas that are in conflict (note: not ideas that are mutually exclusive). So, keeping this in mind, one could even use the conflicting gameplay style and apparent narrative specifically to say something. I don’t think we’ll ever have anything like that without the critical tool of ludonarrative dissonance and people using it to specifically point at this phenomenon. The fact is I would love a game doing something like that. Actual awareness of the dissonance and usage of it can only come from ~being aware of it~.
And on this notion of awareness, Seraphine agrees, closing out his literature review with the following postulation:
It seems that more games in the near future might use ludonarrative dissonance as a way to tell more compelling stories. In essence, stories are about characters and the most interesting stories are often told with dissonant characters; as it is the surprise, the disturbance, the accident, the sacrosanct disruptive element, that justifies the very act of telling a story. (8)
While I agree with both Coffin and Seraphine here to some degree, the effectiveness of this approach to game-design ultimately comes down to execution and overall player experience. Despite using the same combination of directives and incentives carried over from TLOU, my primary issue with TLOUII stems from how representations of violence appear to be intentionally dissonant within the narrative and ludic structures of the game.
Representations of Violence
In the hostile and deadly world of TLOU, violence is represented as both a utility and a necessary evil. Characters are placed in positions where they must lie, cheat, steal, maim, and ultimately, murder one another for their continued survival. While some characters revel in the freedom to employ these violent methods, others are inherently reluctant, clinging desperately to some semblance of the law and order that prefigured the world’s eventual collapse into a Hobbesian nightmare of “the war of all against all.”
It’s a brutal reality, sure, but it’s also one that’s coherent within the fictional setting of a dystopian ‘fallen world’ and the survival horror genre as a whole. As Elana Gomel argues in Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (2003), there’s also an ethical dimension at play within the nexus of violence and narrativity:
If narrative provides the templates of violent identities, contains the visceral horror of killing, and allows murderers to function as social subjects, would it not be better to do without it altogether? The answer, also implicit in the project itself and elaborated in the conclusion, is “no.” There is no return to storyless innocence. Human beings are narrative animals, finding themselves only through the lineaments of a tale. The attraction of violence lies precisely in the phantasmagoric escape from the strictures of narrative coherence, into the timeless realm of the sublime. If violence enters culture through narrative, it is also through narrative that it is apprehended and resisted. (xlvii)
To understand how violence operates in the world of TLOUII, to appreciate how it may be focused, apprehended, and resisted, we need to interrogate the narrative and ludic elements through the use of directives and incentives.
First, let’s look at the ludic elements. Throughout the game, the player can utilise three primary mechanics: combat, stealth, and scavenging. The player fights for survival by using a wide variety of methods and tools, including physical combat (kicking, punching, striking), melee combat (bats, knives, shivs, crowbars, pipes, and other improvised weapons), shooting combat (handguns, rifles, crossbows, bow and arrows), and incendiary combat (grenades, Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers). Stealth can be used to listen to the playable environment, sneak around enemy positions, and progress through levels unhindered. Additionally, it can also be used as a weapon in of itself to silently approach enemies, dispatch them discretely, and avoid detection. Scavenging is an integral part of the player’s survival due to resource scarcity. The player must scavenge to find limited caches of ammunition and supplies, repair damage inflicted by enemies, and to upgrades weapons and gear.
For all three mechanics described above, the game directs the player to choose from these available options through a combination of incentives and directives. If the player does not fight enemies, they will die (often through a gruesome cutscene) and not progress through the levels and game’s campaign. In some levels, the player will encounter too many enemies to fight directly, and instead, stealth and retreat are evidently the preferred options. Alternatively, if the player has not been diligent enough in scavenging around the environment, either one of these options may become untenable.
Secondly, we have to consider the narrative elements. Most of the game’s story takes place through lengthy visual cutscenes. These cutscenes act as directives in of themselves, steering the story in a guided and pre-determined linear direction. At times, however, these cutscenes are mediated by minimal player interaction (either using button or command prompts) as incentives, to either temporally sustain or maintain the story’s dramatic tension and the player’s emotional investment. In reality, though, the player has very little input in how these narrative elements play out within the larger story of TLOUII.
Referring back to our discussion of agency above, we can see that within these structures of narrative elements, the player has an awareness of what (e.g. the goals of the playable characters), awareness of how (e.g. the actions and means by which the character is trying to achieve those goals), and can exercise a sense of motor control through the discussed ludic elements. Crucially, however, what’s missing from these narrative elements are a sense of intentionality, a sense of initiation, and the sense of situational control.
Simply put, the player has no control or agency over the violent actions of the playable characters as they are depicted within the narrative elements of the game. The player’s sense of agency is only fully realised through the ludic elements of the game, and even then, those elements are informed and guided by the existing (and unwavering) narrative elements. This lack becomes an issue when the representation of violence as a narrative theme overrides or suspends the established motivations or goals of the characters.
Thematic Resonance or Dissonance?
By intentionally placing each character within cycles of violence, TLOUII asks us to consider the following thematic questions:
Is revenge ever justified?
Revenge is central to the plot of TLOUII. Abby is motivated to kill Joel because he killed her father. Ellie then becomes motivated to hunt down and kill Abby and her friends because Abby killed Joel (who was Ellie’s surrogate father). In terms of justification, the player can correctly understand both motivations, even if the narrative of the game positions Ellie and Abby in opposition to one another. To deny justification in one action undermines the legitimacy of the other. We might say that Ellie is ‘more’ justified in her act of vengeance because the player is already familiar with Joel as a fleshed-out, three-dimensional character.
Like Ellie, the player has already developed an emotional attachment to Joel by playing as him during the events of TLOU. In turn, the sequel cultivates empathy in the player when we’re forced to watch a seemingly random villain ruthlessly murder him. We mourn Joel’s loss with Ellie; her trauma becomes our trauma. However, the same cannot be said for Abby’s father, who is only established as someone we should care about through brief flashbacks after much of the game’s narrative has already progressed well past his death.
And if so, by what means and at what cost?
But okay, let’s say we agree that both acts of motivating revenge are justified within the confines of the game. How exactly are they achieved? Abby searches for Joel, finding him and his brother Tommy by accident during an escape from a zombie horde. Joel helps Abby, unaware of her real motivations, rescues her and leads her to her WLF friends. Once Abby figures out who Joel is, the group turns on him and Tommy, quickly outnumbering them. Abby then brutally beats and tortures Joel, before summarily executing him in front of Ellie as she pleads her to stop. Throughout the rest of the game, Abby will isolate herself from the WLF cause and eventually turn on her former friends, murdering countless individuals in the process.
In avenging Joel, Ellie travels to Seattle and likewise commits hundreds of murders. She tortures Abby’s WLF friends for information of her whereabouts, picking them off one by one. Ellie deliberately infects one person with the fungus. In another instance, she kills Mel, who was (unknowingly to Ellie) a pregnant woman, and stabs Abby’s lover, Owen, in the neck. At a later point of confrontation, Abby executes Jesse without hesitation, wounds Tommy, and almost murders Dina and her unborn child. Abby and Ellie beat the living shit out of each other, with Abby ultimately victorious and deciding to leave Ellie alive. However, Ellie cannot let her trauma go and searches for Abby once more. Ellie goes on to kill many more people, eventually rescuing Abby from capture and torture, only to fight her once again. This time, Ellie lets Abby live, and both characters go their separate ways.
In terms of cost, Ellie loses most of her human connections established within the game. Joel is gone, as is Jesse. Tommy is angry with her for not settling her vendetta with Abby and avenging Joel. Her relationship with Dina and their son crumbles. In the game’s final moments, we see her return to an empty farmhouse with missing fingers that prevent her from playing the guitar — a permanent and lingering reminder of her trauma, her thirst for revenge, and her ultimate failure.
For Abby, everything she loves is stripped away: her father, her friends, and her home with the WLF. Her search for the remnants of the Fireflies is, as yet, unresolved. At the end of the game, Abby is battered, bruised, and broken, nothing but a thin, emaciated shell of the hardened warrior that starts the game. Her only solace is a devoted friendship with the young Lev, who she is now willing to protect with her life.
Conclusion and Reflection
In the end, I’m still not sure what I expected (or wanted) a sequel to TLOU to ultimately deliver. As Gomel writes, works within the horror genre often indulge in sequels to establish a sense of renewal and revival:
From the soap opera to any successful blockbuster, popular culture uses sequels as a marketing ploy. But the sequels of horror almost always involve actual death and resurrection: since the monster is most often physically eliminated, its return indicates the rebirth of the monstrous body, not just the repackaging or extension of the original text, as in other genres…. The horror sequel is a reflection of our ambivalence toward violence. Sickened by torture, we turn away, only to sneak another look at the sight that is both intolerable and compelling. Condemning bloodshed, we are held spellbound by its magic. Casting out the monster, we secretly dream of becoming it. (30)
And it’s clear to me that this was the ‘something’ that the developers were trying to say: the tension that exists within our culture between the ambivalence, fascination, and condemnation of violence. As Plante notes in his review of the game for Inverse, game director Neil Druckmann stated that TLOUII was “about the cycle of violence” and the intention was to leave the player feeling “repulsed by some of the violence they are committing themselves.”
Taking this into account, we might then ask: Does the human propensity to perpetuate these cycles of violence make us somehow less human and altogether monstrous? Perhaps. And as we reach the gut-wrenching climax of TLOUII, who can we say is the real monster? Ellie? Abby? Joel? The player? On this question, the game refuses to pass judgement and, mostly, remains steadfast in its desired ambiguity. As Chris Plante argues in a recent essay for Polygon, TLOUII appears to suggest that violence is inevitable and this worldview is intrinsically connected to the state of AAA gaming:
The creators imagine a dystopian America in which survivors have divided into warring factions, each convinced its side is the good guys, each willing to commit horrendous acts of violence to protect itself. As Ellie eviscerates dozens of humans who cry for the help of a friend or beg for mercy, the story reveals these people aren’t as bad as Ellie once thought — that their motives are just as valid and complicated as her own…. But whenever The Last of Us Part 2 starts to be about something bigger, that thread is flattened by its relentless, suffocating violence. So no, Ellie can’t change. She can’t change because AAA games can’t change. Let’s say Ellie learns her lesson, that violence begets violence. That to save the world and herself, she must put down the gun. What would she even do? Literally, what would a AAA game even allow for her to do? AAA game design is built and marketed around killing. So, I suppose Ellie would shift from killing humans to something more morally simple, such as killing the zombie-like baddies that lurch about her world — which, while less morally mucky, is no less predictable.
For me, at least, TLOUII felt like it was more concerned with achieving a ‘profound’ sense of thematic resonance, and did so at the expense of its characters and overall narrative completion or payoff. In turn, what I felt the game actually achieved, to Druckmann’s stated end, was a clumsy (lack of) resolution that, while perhaps being philosophically thoughtful, was thematically dissonant in terms of telling a compelling fictional story and, ultimately, ended up being wholly unsatisfying.
Works Cited
Gomel, Elana. Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject. Ohio State UP, 2003.
Paez, Danny. “Coined: How a Galaxy Brained Video Game Term Made It Into the New York Times.” Inverse, 29 Jun. 2020, inverse.com/gaming/ludonarrative-dissonance-meaning-video-games-origins-definition. Accessed 29 Jun. 2020.
Plante, Chris. “The Last of Us 2 Epitomises One of Gaming’s Longest Debates.” Polygon, 26 Jun. 2020, polygon.com/2020/6/26/21304642/the-last-of-us-2-violence. Accessed 30 Jun. 2020.
Plante, Corey. “The Last Of Us Part 2: The Most Emotionally Corrosive Video Game Ever.” Inverse, 25 Jun. 2020, inverse.com/gaming/last-of-us-2-review. Accessed 29 Jun. 2020.
Seraphine, Frédéric. “Ludonarrative Dissonance: Is Storytelling About Reaching Harmony?” Academia, 2 Sep. 2016, academia.edu/28205876/Ludonarrative_Dissonance_Is_Storytelling_About_Reaching_Harmony. Accessed 30 Jun. 2020.
Schlosser, Markus. “Agency.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/. Accessed 29 Jun. 2020.
