ON: The Last of Us

The Golden Age

The Last of Us is a video game.

Nothing on the surface of this game seems remarkable.

1 -- The story of the game is post-apocalyptic, there are infected people who act like zombies, so, you know, its like every other thing everywhere.

2 -- The game mechanics are old-fashioned.

a This is a stubbornly single person experience, (unlike the biggest games in the world like Call Of Duty and Battlefield, which are designed to be played with other players).

b And yet it is unlike the popular single player open-world experiences like Skyrim, in that it is basically linear; the "levels" of the game are chronological.

c The game is heavy with cutscenes.  Despite the advances in game design, in most games, watching game characters "act" scenes is disconcerting, immersion breaking.  Most great game developers today use clever environmental narrative, rather than cinematic technique, to avoid exposing their characters as lifeless replicants.

3 -- The Last of Us can only be played on the Playstation 3, a wheezing seven year old hardware in the final months before its replacement, (the shiny rocketship that is the PS4) , turns the PS3 into Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2.  With this new hardware months away, gamers are drooling over the new generation and all the promise that comes with it; this makes The Last of Us a lame duck in both the timing of release on a dying machine, and that it has released in the summer, the dead season for games.  Only in a year when the next generation of hardware will release in the fall, does a company like Sony release a game like The Last of Us in June.

4 -- But for the pedigree of Naughty Dog, (the company that has made this game), the tangibles of The Last of Us look forgettable: a summer release with old fashioned mechanics, a hackneyed premise, on an obsolete machine that should come and go quickly, without fanfare.

5 -- And yet, The Last of Us might be the greatest video game ever made.

a The early reviews of The Last of Us have struggled to compare it to other games; it has more often been compared across media, to the literature of Cormac McCarthy, and, of all things, Citizen Kane.

b A fascinating essay in the New York Times dissects the male/female power relationships of The Last of Us, which seems unnecessary when one considers that male power fantasy is the foundation of so much of gaming, but then this is The Last of Us, and even the mainstream, (non-gaming) press, are treating it like something other than what it is, (or rather, what it is supposed to be), to even bother discussing these issues within the prospect of a video game, sets it apart.

c The Last of Us is beautiful.  Naughty Dog makes the game design of all but the top developers, look silly.  But then, it makes the films and television of the genre, be it Walking Dead, or The Book Of Eli, look a bit silly.  It is rare to explore the world of this game, and have the immersion broken, every dull little detail is there of a world post-catastrophe: the empty places you walk through retain the evidence of evacuation picked clean by two decades of survivors -- a train station bookstore's shelves are still lined with books, but the cafe has only wrappers of old world snacks littered on the floor; a suburban home has been ransacked dozens of times, save for a man's note left for his wife, telling her where to find him.

d The Last of Us is violent.  More violent than any R rated movie.  But unlike most video games, the violence is is meant as horrible, not exciting.  As the player, you feel the weight of the atrocities you commit -- it might be the first Hobbesian video game, where every terrifying moment makes you feel how nasty, brutal, and short life would be when society has fallen apart.  Many critics have argued as to whether The Last of Us is actually "fun"; what "fun" in games even means is the new debate, solely because of this thing, The Last of Us.  It is terrifying.  It is exhausting in a way that becomes cathartic, when every bad thing you do feels not like you are some powerful God of War, (as in most games), but rather an all too human thug, lucky to survive for just another few minutes.  It is certainly an NC-17 level of violence, but it is no celebration of violence.  This is an adult game with an adult experience, this isn't comic book power, The Last of Us always reminds you of your fundamental powerlessness.  It's the fucking Playstation King Lear. 

e And even as frightening as the violent sections of the game are, there are these strange interludes between, when you do very little but to walk through the worlds of the game, listening to the lovely, (and very real), dialogue of the main characters, that The Last of Us reaches a level of sublimity unknown to all but a few video games, and nearly as rare in cinema.  It reminded me at times of the quieter moments of the best Kurosawa films.  No, I know, but I'm serious -- yeah, it's a PS3 zombie game.

f I've sat on writing about this for a few weeks, the story of the game kind of haunting me the whole time.  It accomplishes what game theorists have argued is the possible future of video games as a storytelling form: to integrate game mechanics with narrative so seamlessly, that the viewer's identification with the character is deeper than what cinematic narrative can achieve alone.  Because you feel the shake in the character's hands, the weariness of his walk.

g But then, the cinematics of The Last of Us, (which make up about ninety minutes of the game), are better acted than most movies --

  

h I have been purposefully vague about the story, because frankly, I would hope someone reading this would be able to experience the game knowing nothing that is to come.  I can't recall a piece of genre fiction that sets up with all the familiar tropes, and then completely upends them.  The thing called The Last of Us is special, a masterpiece, it is both a deconstruction of the post-apocalypse genre, and of video game violence.  And at the same time, it is a beautiful story, trading honestly on the themes of family, human love, and human suffering.  

Rather than show shiny new war games, and fancy tech, Sony should sell the PS4 on the fact that seven years into the PS3 lifecycle, something like the Last of Us was possible.  I am completely convinced that the popular fiction of video games is about to pass the movies; maybe, just maybe, this will be like living through the cinema of the thirties and forties -- perhaps a golden age is upon us.  Play the game, you'll forgive my hyperbole.