The Last of Us: A Study in Perspective(Part 1/4)
The Last of Us is one of the most beloved games of the last decade, and The Last of Us two is one of the most divisive, the backlash for part two and the praise for part one stem from the same basic place. Perspective. Circa 2013, gaming was a different landscape. “Gamergate” hadn't yet happened, and while there were, as there have always been, “girl gamers”, the gaming landscape, or at least the online gaming community was still exceedingly male centric(largely because women were often bullied out of gaming spaces). Some of the men who played the original last of us upon release, responded as they did because the game is masterful at putting us in Joel’s frame of mind, but for many of those men I’d argue they were almost too eager to understand Joel’s POV. Even now, 8 years later folks still try to justify Joel’s infamous hospital rampage at the end of the first game. For the record, it is my strong belief that the intent of the game designers, and the most artistically powerful read of the ending of the first game is that while playing it you are supposed to agree with Joel, but once you’ve given yourself time to disconnect from Joel’s headspace, you’re supposed to realize that those actions were wrong.
For many, it seems they never managed to complete step two, and to this day they are still connected to Joel’s headspace, which could explain why they were so angry at a certain moment in The Last of Us Part Two.
But I don’t think its just the lack of Joel that impacts them here, its that they haven’t disconnected from Joel’s POV yet, and The Last of Us Two asks players to connect and then disconnect from two wildly different POV’s within a single game(Ellie and Abby). These folks still see the world from Joel’s perspective, and perhaps they can understand Ellie, because Joel’s story was so interwoven with hers, but they absolutely refuse to give the game the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Abby, they refuse to disconnect from Ellie and Joel.
And to an extent, I get it. The entire series is built on this intense connection to characters, and yes, sometimes it kills off or maims characters that you play as, Joel’s death is not the first instance of a POV character dying in The Last of Us. I think people don’t remember the extent to which The Last of Us plays with perspective, and to the extent that they do, its Joel and Ellie, people always forget Sara. With this essay, I want to analyze the use of perspective switches as a game mechanic in The Last of Us, the broader application of perspective as a theme, and how The Last of Us two uses perspective in ways that its predecessor did not.
For the purposes of this essay, I think its important to recap parts of the story of these two games, in order to best showcase the way they use perspective. For my recap of The Last of Us, I will only be recapping the context preceding each perspective switch(I.E when the player character changes). Furthermore, for ease of reading I am splitting this essay into four sections. Section one detailing my basic thesis about the series, and discussing the opening of The Last of Us one. Section Two will focus on the rest of the last of us. Section 3 will focus on the The Last of Us 2 and Section 4 will focus on the series’ use of parallels, and will tie together the connective tissue between the two games.
When the Last of Us opens you find yourself playing as a preteen girl named Sara. You are asleep on the couch, on a seemingly normal night. Your father, Joel, comes home, waking you up in the process. The two of you have a joking conversation, you give him a watch then you fall asleep and he tucks you into bed upstairs. Later in the night you wake again. This time things are a bit more ominous. A phone call from your Uncle Tommy, makes you somewhat worried. The game introduces some very basic mechanics while having you walk around exploring the house. You learn from a TV set that something terrible is going on. It becomes clear to you that Joel is not home anymore and you grow increasingly worried, until he comes charging in through the backdoor. From there the zombie apocalypse is on. You are ushered into a car as you all try to escape. You, the player can turn your head to look around as Sarah, but you cannot control anything else at this time. The car crashes and Sarah hurts her leg. Infected begin to swarm towards you. Now you play as Joel as he tries to get his daughter to safety. He escapes the zombies but a scared soldier fires upon them both, killing Sarah in the process. The game then timeskips 20 years, with some brief bits of expository worldbuilding played over the credits.
The Significance of that opening
That opening is one of, if not the most, praised videogame opening of all time. I don’t think that praise is unwarranted, but I want to talk about why that opening works because the game building philosophies at play in that opening are the same that define both games and, in my opinion, make both works masterpieces.
For this portion of the essay please note that I am primarily defining perspective as a game mechanic; who you play as. Throughout this essay, I will use it in other ways, but I will explicitly establish that I am doing so before I do. These games are about perspective in nearly every sense of the word but that starts with the most simple. So let’s talk about perspective in relation to the player character.
In that opening, the first character you are able to play as is a little girl. It is this little girl’s eyes through which we see the collapse of society. While we arent told all that much about her, we see her establish a chemistry with her father, we know shes witty and a tad rebellious from this:
and we know that Sarah and Joel get along. We also know that she is compassionate from this line here.
So we’re playing as a frail, witty, compassionate young girl who loves her father as society collapses around her. We get to view the collapse of society through those traits of hers. We embody her, even if just for a short time. Then she gets hurt. The moment she gets hurt. The moment the frail pure and compassionate young girl is injured, our perspective switches to Joel. Joel who is none of those things, but who is dedicated to his daughter. If Sarah’s section represented idealism in the face of death, Joel represents realism. Forcing us into the perspective of the representation of realism and “Harsh truths” a second after the pure young girl is injured paints a compellingly bleak picture, but it also allows us to quickly find ourselves immersed in Joel’s POV despite not knowing much about him yet. We understood his daughter, at least on some level, and we understand that Sarah is Joel’s whole world. So seeing his world crippled(figuratively and literally) we can empathize with and connect to Joel as fast as the game needs us to.
And the game needs us to connect to Joel FAST. There are roughly four minutes between the time that you start playing as Joel and Sarah’s death. You have a rough understanding of who Joel is from things like the car ride conversation you overhear while playing as Sarah but for Sarah’s death to be as emotionally impactful as it is, the player needs to see through Joel’s eyes. So by using the perspective switch from Sarah to Joel they transfer a lot of her character development into him, and fundamentally connect the two characters deeply in the players consciousness. The game combines this by making Joel, who can clearly fend for himself, entirely helpless as he attempts to get Sarah to safety. He cannot carry a gun or fight back or anything of the sort because he has to support her weight, the weight of the old world. In all its innocence. It’s this idea that I think goes unnoticed, for all the talk of the way The Last of Us two juggles its POV shifts, I feel it has gone underdiscussed how the first game establishes it as a motif less than 20 minutes in. The entire series is defined by its ability to shift from beauty to horror, and from protagonist to antagonist at the drop of a hat. Nothing in this franchise is as set in stone as it appears to be. If the game had opened with the player playing as Joel, the game would be weaker in nearly every aspect for it. The choice to parallel the death of the old world with the death of an innocent child is brilliant. Furthermore, if Sara represents the innocence of the old world, Joel is metaphorically carrying the world on his shoulders as he tries to get her to safety, which given the events of the rest of the game draws a striking parallel. What I think is important to emphasize about the perspective switches in this opening, and throughout the first game, is how effective they are at conveying character in an incredibly short span of time, and this, I feel is only given heightened importance when one considers that that is very much NOT how the sequel uses its POV switches.
For more on The Last of Us one and its use of perspective, please tune in next week for Part 2 of this essay series, where we’ll be discussing the game at large, and at length, the infamous ending. Thanks for reading!
