Games are More Than The Last of Us

In so many respects, HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us is brilliant. As an ambassador for gaming, it shatters stereotypes of the childish, simple games. Unfortunately, it also hammers home the ever-present criticism that the unique selling point for games is giving the opportunity to act out violence. If The Last of Us is seen as a highlight of games as a medium, it seems like the more visceral the violence, the better the game. This is a poor way to show games to the wider world, and in any case, The Last of Us is a bad example of what games can do.

The level of violence in other games familiar to non-gamers, like Fortnite or Call of Duty, is fairly abstract. When you kill another player, their bloodless body drops to the ground or disappears. In The Finals, your opponents disintegrate into coins, almost like the whole thing exists in the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. There’s rarely any depiction of real pain. The violence is abstract enough that you might argue it’s not violence at all; it’s just a familiar placeholder for some other more interesting means of interaction with the world.

For games like The Last of Us though, violence is very much the point. Both the game and TV series seem to want to tell a story about redemption, about beauty in decay, and about situational morality. But they do this through some remarkably realistic representations of pain and aggression.

The violence in The Last of Us is different from that of games like Fortnite, or even gratuitously gory games like Doom. The Last of Us is gratuitously gritty. It seems to revel in depicting as much photorealistic violence as a graphics card will render. Enemies, human or not, will bleed and writhe and scream with uncomfortable realism. If detractors want to argue that all games are violent, they need only point to one of the most popular and now one of the most famous stories in gaming as an example of a game that glorifies gore.

Not all violence in stories is negative, even when it’s as realistic as it is in The Last of Us. Violence can be incredibly powerful or even necessary to tell a story. To take an example from TV, Breaking Bad has some pretty grim moments. But they are infrequent enough to be powerful, shocking illustrations of how much of a monster the series’ anti-hero really is.

The Last of Us, in contrast, can’t decide if it wants to say that violence should be avoided, or it’s an inevitability that should be accepted at worst, and applauded at best.

The game begins with Joel’s daughter being shot and killed. The game ends with Joel shooting a surgeon about to perform a fatal operation on Ellie as he tries (though will probably fail) to isolate a world-saving vaccine from her. Joining these moments are events like Joel showing his trust in Ellie by giving her a gun; Joel saving Ellie from a cannibalistic man who is threatening to sexually assault and then eat Ellie (and who Ellie subsequently hacks apart with a machete); and Ellie killing a man who is trying to kill Joel (putting her machete to work again). Each of these moments is rendered in glorious HD and surround sound. Violence a necessity, a panacea, a fully justified means to an end.

The second game, like the second series of the TV show, revolves around Ellie seeking to avenge Joel’s murder by Abby, the daughter of the surgeon Joel killed. The story has a more nuanced take on violence. The final scenes of the game involve Ellie and Abby deciding not to kill each other, and with both of them looking very much worse for wear from their actions. Violence won’t fix what damage has been done, the story says, but you wouldn’t know that from the gameplay.

For a story that revolves around vengeance of a murdered loved one, Ellie and Abby create an awful lot of murdered loved ones. The game treats its characters completely differently to the people who happen to be in your way. Ellie, Joel, Abby and her father are important; their deaths deserve vengeance. But the tens or hundreds of people you kill along the way? Fodder.

The confused focus on violence is reason enough not to applaud The Last of Us as some of the best of gaming, but I think this complete mismatch between game and story also provides a poor example of what  experience games can offer.

Games are at their best when they give players agency, and when that agency is woven into the story the player experiences. The most impactful games are the ones that can only be properly experienced by those actually playing them.

Titles like The Outer Wilds, Tunic, 1000x Resist contain stories and experiences that cannot be told through any other medium than a game. They work because the player-driven discovery of mechanics or story beats is the experience. The staying power of Hollow Knight, Dark Souls, or Undertale has been so great not because their worlds are necessarily richer than anything in other media, but that becoming a part of these worlds and their atmosphere creates an experience that TV, film, and books can’t offer. But HBO’s TV adaptation of The Last of Us, instilling the same experience as the game, has proven that The Last of Us is not one of these examples.

The Last of Us really gives you no more agency than letting you decide when and how you kill something. It presents that violence as so unavoidable and so justified that the game gives you no choice but to be complicit. The Last of Us Part II even has a “press X to beat someone to death” moment. This is hardly Dishonored, in which you are given every opportunity and tool to kill everything, but no obligation to do so, coupled with a world that adapts to your decisions.

The Last of Us on the other hand gives the player no real agency – it’s a story to be experienced in the same way that a film or a TV show should be.

A better game might make a point about violence by making it mechanically uncomfortable to perform. You could argue that The Last of Us’s frantic and desperate combat is designed to do this. But if the point wasn’t to make it enjoyable, why create a rogue-like mode to the game in which the combat is the primary selling point?

The strengths of great games cannot be translated properly into any other media. It’s the limiting linearity of The Last of Us, its reliance on violence, and its lack of interdependence between gameplay and story that probably made it so amenable to a TV adaptation. There are better experiences in video games than The Last of Us, and I wish it wasn’t the poster child for games that’s been pinned up.

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William is a writer based in the UK, spending his free time writing about games while complaining he doesn’t time to play them.