The Last of Us Part II
12/7/20

Thank you to Sam, Esam, Nathan, and Maddie for inspiring many ideas in this essay. And thank you for listening patiently to my endless ramblings about how much the Metacritic user reviews for this game suck.

There is no such thing as apolitical art. Art is contextualized by experience and perception. One of art’s main functions is to communicate these experiences and perceptions between individuals as a kind of externalized empathy. Art is a conversation between author and audience, but it is also a conversation between past, present, and future, as new contexts emerge and history is re-understood in light of these new frameworks. How we interact with art can reveal our understanding of others and the world we inhabit.

The Last of Us Part II, and the discussion surrounding The Last of Us Part II, demonstrate the contemporary understanding of the function of interactive media and how that understanding is indicative of a desire for video games to resist “politicization.” The game’s narrative leverages the audience’s expectations of interactive media to examine and challenge the conventions of the art form.

One of these conventions relates to the concept of “freedom” in interactive media. How much freedom is enough freedom in a video game? Sometimes players can roam the entirety of a virtual world, imposing their will with god-like supremacy. Other times players must make small choices to guide the game in more subtle ways. Regardless, it would be wrong to assume that gamers desire more freedom for its own sake. For example, there is little outrage about Grand Theft Auto’s limited options for pursuing a career in accounting. There is no option in Call of Duty to not be deployed into battle. There are no user reviews slamming Bioshock for not being able to give Ayn Rand a wedgie (though you may see one from me in the near future). To participate in interactive media is to buy into a system with predetermined rules, complete and unchanging. These parameters must be accepted. The limitations are inherent characteristics of the media, where a game can be defined by what you can’t do as much as what you can do.

Therefore, the critique of TLOU2 not providing the player with an option to affect the game in a meaningful way has less to do with freedom in video games (“games should allow you to impact the story”) and more about the narrative content (“I didn’t want the story to happen this way, I wish I could change it”). At their most core level, video games allow the player to gain control of virtual systems, and regardless of how limited those systems are, the feeling of control is contingent on the player being able to make choices that they themselves would make in real life. Or at the very least, choices that they would make given the circumstances. TLOU2 violates the unspoken assumption that the player’s choices will be reflected in the trajectory of the story.

Take for instance the theater encounter between Ellie and Abby. Many players expressed frustration that the game would not roll credits after they allowed the AI Ellie to kill the player controlled Abby, ending the story on a triumphant note after a long journey as Ellie to avenge Joel’s death. Instead, the player is forced to pursue Ellie with the implication that the player will be responsible for killing her as Abby. The illusion of player control is broken because the desires of the player are simply not an option for the game to progress.

Breaking the assumptions of the player in this way necessarily elevates the art form of interactive media beyond its implicit purpose of simulating the fantasies of the player. The media regains control from its audience, creating an emotionally impactful dissonance between desired outcome and reality. It is here that the TLOU2 exposes the fundamental mechanisms of video games, that they are ultimately control systems purchased into by the player to carry out their desires in context. Revealing these mechanisms through the narrative heightens the emotional impact of the story, where the framing of TLOU2 is itself a means to subvert the player’s expectations. This creates a new kind of feedback, one that is determined not by the in-game choices of the player, but by the conventional structure of video games influencing the player to make assumptions that are rebuked in favor of humanizing the characters within the game by granting them agency.

This agency manifests during the final fight between Ellie and Abby. The player, this time controlling Ellie, defeats Abby in brutal hand to hand combat. But just as before, the player cannot kill Abby, and a cutscene rolls showing Ellie coming to terms with Joel’s death and letting Abby go. In this critical moment, the player cannot choose the outcome for themselves. Instead, Ellie makes her own choice independent of the player’s input. It’s not entirely clear why Ellie chooses to spare Abby. Perhaps she understood that killing Abby could not bring Joel back. Or maybe she empathizes with Lev, who would be forced to fend for himself with Abby gone. Regardless, she spared Abby’s life strictly on her own terms. Though the player can control her movements, they cannot control her will. In the final moments of TLOU2, the player must reconcile with their true desires: do they feel good seeing Abby go, or not? The gap between the will of the player and the outcome of Ellie’s actions demonstrates the power of interactive media to create complex experiences that incorporate the assumptions of the audience as a narrative device.

The assumption that video games will represent the will of the player impacts the second critical idea that I want to address: “teaching” in art. Though all art is political by necessity, not all art feels like it’s “trying to teach you something.” Those who decry “politics” in art have an acute sense for this phenomenon, where art transitions from existing “non-politically” to existing “politically.” This distinction is closely related to the dichotomy of art that “teaches” and “does not teach.” The idea that TLOU2 aims to teach a message to the player stems from the solipsistic assumption that the player is in control of the outcomes of the game and the fates of its characters. The player imagines themselves to be possessing and animating the character on screen, who serves as a digital puppet that acts on behalf of the player puppeteer. We have already demonstrated that this is not the case for TLOU2, but without the understanding that the characters in the game should be conceptualized as complete and separate entities from the player, the consequences of the characters’ actions feel like indictments of the player’s choices.

Critics of TLOU2 cite ludonarrative dissonance as the reason for TLOU2’s incoherent “message,” where the player (as Ellie) must brutally murder dozens of people to get to Abby, only to have Ellie choose to spare Abby’s life in a cutscene. Ellie’s refusal to kill Abby is interpreted as a judgement on the efficacy of the player enacting violence as a means to obtain justice. Because video games are understood to simulate the desires of the player, the dissonance between the action required of the player (murdering NPCs to get to Abby) and the action taken by characters in cutscenes (Ellie sparing Abby’s life) appears to be incongruent. But if TLOU2 is taken as a vehicle to explore the experiences of its characters rather than a simulation of the player’s desires, this dissonance becomes a representation of the complexities of humanity as opposed to a condemnation of the player’s choices. Essentially, the game has a moralizing stance only when the player assumes a reciprocal relationship between themselves and TLOU2: the player sees themselves as a part of the game, and the game understands the player to be a part of it in return. Disregarding the player, Ellie choses to spare Abby’s life on her own terms, restoring her humanity and agency in the process.

Ultimately, TLOU2 demonstrates new possibilities in the realm of narrative interactive media. Though TLOU2 does not embody the true liberatory potential of character agency in video games (far from it), key criticisms of the game reveal the expectations of players who engage with the medium. These expectations can be incorporated into stories to create a more impactful experience, and ultimately expand video games as an art form. As video games become more lifelike in their presentation (graphics, sound, VR, etc.), the ability to simulate the desires of the player will continuously improve. But video games will also be better equipped to simulate the experiences of others, and TLOU2 is a reminder that there are valid alternatives to the assumed egoism of the narrative video game framework. These alternatives are ostensibly “political” in comparison to video games which reflect and reinforce the cultural hegemony, where providing the player with “more freedom” does not allow them to escape the finite bounds of the virtual system nor the finite bounds of acceptable thought and action. This freedom is merely the right to self determination within a closed system, a system which precludes many from achieving humanization. Art that humanizes the disenfranchised will always be seen as political, versus the non-political act of systemic oppression which is normalized through media that adheres to culturally hegemonic structures. TLOU2 contains a small but important component in the process of humanization: yielding agency to its characters. The player’s desire for the “freedom” to prescriptively correct the characters’ actions and the player’s belief that the game’s purpose is to educate them denies the full realization of the characters as human.

The discussion surrounding these criticisms in TLOU2 illustrates a resistance to the “politicization” of video games as a whole. More specifically, this resistance aims to deny the agency of characters in interactive media to prevent the humanization of those who struggle for autonomy. TLOU2 is an example of an effective use of agency in video game storytelling, encouraging players to reflect and empathize with the characters they “control.” Hopefully, The Last of Us Part II is indicative of a movement in narrative video games to humanize characters and tell stories that are not strictly beholden to the will of the player.