The Last of Us – Video Games as Jazz and the 4th Wall

This Review Contains Spoilers

Score: 10/10

I’m going to admit something that I suspect not a lot of game reviewers will cop to: the vast majority of video game plots are either incomprehensible or mind numbingly stupid.  Let’s be honest… I loved Bioshock Infinite but if I’ve got to read the wiki to understand what happened then something is broken in the storytelling mechanic. Bioshock isn’t Primer – I should be able to understand most/all of the plot on the first play through.

Allow me to explain why I think it’s so difficult for video games to tell a coherent story.   Umberto Eco wrote in How to Recognize a Porn Movie:

Go into a movie theater. If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic.

Eco’s whole essay is worth reading, but the crux of it is that a movie is pornographic if you spend your time watching and waiting for characters to do the mundane as an excuse to get to the action.  By this definition almost all video games are pornographic because during most cut scenes, or  reading logs/books, or listening to found audio, or overhearing NPC conversations, or whatever device the game makers are using to tell a story I’m usually thinking “when am I going to get back to the game?”  I suspect I’m far from alone in this.  I also think this is why online play has taken off so much – it strips out all the story elements and exists as a universe where characters shoot at other characters.

Naughty Dog has done the seemingly impossible – they created a game where the story and gameplay are so tightly interwoven – and so well done – that during the expository elements I never find myself thinking “shut up Joel so I can go kill some cannibals”.  The story is coherent and engaging to the point where my entire family sat down and watched me play through the game a second time so they could see it unfold.  That doesn’t happen with games.  Heavy Rain accomplished it a little bit, but not to the level The Last of Us has.  It’s a damn near perfect game and difficult to improve upon in substantive ways.

Blemishes

The game is not without some minor flaws.  In most instances I’d call them “game breaking elements” but because of how tightly woven the narrative is I’d rather call them “fourth wall breaking elements.”  The stupid pallet/ladder puzzles are wildly out of place.  There were better ways to establish that Ellie couldn’t swim.  But the biggest break in the fourth wall was the constant necessity to search every room in every building for supplies.  There were lots of moments where I thought – “sorry Ellie, I know you’ve just run away on horseback, but let me search through this here kitchen for alcohol before I go upstairs and find you” or “hold up Tommy, I know you want to show me this power plant, but I’m gonna rifle through you cabinets for broken scissors first.”  These complaints are very minor and in a lesser game wouldn’t have stood out at all.

Wait here Ellie – I need more duct tape.

The End

The reviews I’ve read of this game seem to focus on what a bad guy Joel is and… I don’t get that at all.  Perhaps I’m in the minority, but if I were in Joel’s shoes I can’t see myself making substantively different decisions.  He spends the bulk of the latter part of the game being one bad moment away from eating a bullet.  Ellie’s death would have meant Joel’s death and, if Joel is anything, he’s a survivor.  I suppose it’s arguable that he should have taken Ellie’s desires into account but you don’t survive 20 years in the zombie apocalypse without becoming narcissistic.  My wife’s response to the end of the game was visceral and immediate: “Joel violated Ellie in a way that all the David’s of the world never could.”  And he did – he violated her trust.  But all the nonsense about dooming humanity seems a stretch to me.  The Firefly’s don’t exactly exude competence.  You mean to tell me that they’re going to figure out a vaccine after removing Ellie’s brain?  I’m pretty sure that’s not how Jonas Salk cured Polio.

Braaaaaaiiiiiiinssss….

I don’t think it’s a particularly ethical position to stake out either.  One of the more basic questions you wrestle with in an intro ethics class is whether it’s appropriate and moral to sacrifice one innocent person to save 100 people.  Seems like most people come down on the side of that not being OK.  I know I do.  And Ellie never explicitly gave consent to become the Firefly sacrifice.  Yes, she was depressed, but we don’t normally consider depressed people killing themselves a good thing.

Our Jazz

Video games are my generation’s jazz; it’s an entirely new art form we created where none existed before.  And Naughty Dog just wrote Kind Of Blue.  This is, hands down, the best game to come out in over a decade and is an absolute must play.