The Last of Us...too violent?

***Just realised I didn't post this, it is a little bit old now, but my thoughts remain the same. Except we have now finished it.***



I'm currently watching The Last of Us, and it is a brilliant game. It has a very engrossing survivalist horror plot, and the gameplay is mostly fluid and engaging. The characters evoke sympathy and are believable, and the game does some fairly brave things with them.

So what's wrong?

I am enjoying the game a lot, and it is one that I want to see through to completion (narrative completion). But there are some parts that I think are a bit too violent.

If you want to avoid any spoilers, then you should not read on! Play the game yourself and then come back, and let me know what you think.

This gap will save your eyes...

So firstly, the character you play does some particularly violent things when killing enemies. In video games, we are all very familiar with shooting people or perhaps whacking people with some kind of melee weapon. Because we are familiar with it, perhaps we are desensitised, and this could be the root of why I have an issue with some of the actions which are more than just straight forward shooting or whacking. I am not desensitised to it.

It has been suggested that the game is just being realistic, and we are not supposed to enjoy the killing, but indeed to be repulsed by it.

This would be a good idea; but you do far too much killing, and quite a lot of it is of the extra-violent variety that I have an issue with. If you only ever had to kill 5 people throughout the game in a particularly violent way, then maybe I could accept the strong violence as necessary to the experience of the game.

One argument as to why the violence may be perceived as particularly strong in The Last of Us is that you play a game (command the character to do certain actions), and therefore you are active in the violence; but that you watch a film, and you are passive. Being active in the violence can perhaps make it feel stronger. It is an interesting idea, but I am watching this game being played, and so I don't feel I could apply that theory here.

Another counter argument to this is that in this game, you do not always directly control what happens. Many times Joel has grabbed a person from behind, ready to smother/strangle them quietly, but suddenly this doesn't quite work, and instead Joel will push them to the ground and then stamp on their face. It does seem bizarre (even to me as I write this) that I would have an issue with one method of killing over another, but I do. The stamping on the face is firstly much more violent (how many times have we seen this before? - hence a lack of desensitization) and also it is not what was intended, therefore coming as a surprise and being more shocking than the original method.

When your character (you) does these things we accept that because the story has been set up to make him/her the hero, we are doing them for 'good'. We can kill as many people as we like/need to, but we are not in the wrong, they are for trying to kill us. We have learned this through film, TV and comic books. Our 'guy' is always the good guy, and if he/she does some questionable things then we treat it as collateral damage for the greater good.

YOU HAVE TO KILL...

I have an issue with the game mechanic which alerts us to who we need to shoot and who we can talk to. I understand that without it it would make the game very difficult, but it seems odd that we sometimes walk in a room and shoot, and sometimes we talk to other humans. In the real world how would we know this? When we get to your brother's hideout, he isn't visible at first. Why didn't you just kill those on guard (including your sister-in law- ooops)? And in other cases, how do we know that we haven't just killed a potential ally? (Perhaps this is more me trying to turn it into an RPG- and also you know how much I like the 100% completion goal; what is their back story?!) It feels a little like we shoot first, ask questions later and that actually we didn't care about the questions anyway. Killing people is the point of the game. How many can you kill? And if you wanted to try to play it completely stealthy and avoid killing, the game doesn't let you. YOU HAVE TO KILL.

I remember one moment where we are being pursued by a human character, looking for revenge. "You killed my buddy" he yells. Gosh, I didn't realise anyone had buddies in games, except the protagonists. You are just a faceless minion/henchman/guard/soldier/criminal, surely? Does this make us reflect on what we have done? We killed someone's buddy, possibly in cold blood, for no reason. Maybe for a brief moment; but then our attention turns quickly back to killing him too. It is an interesting addition by the developers though.

The body count in this game is so high, that it is hard to imagine that there is anyone left, what with the plague and this renegade wandering about. It is a little contradictory to the idea that we might be on a quest to save humanity from the plague when we have just killed so many men, some presumably uninfected. (An interesting aside here is that you do not kill any women, unless they have been infected and are therefore physically altered. All the humans you kill are male.)

And there's another point...

Secondly, you have some pretty violent things done to your character too. Usually the hero is infallible. His/her motives are unquestionable, and his skills and methods are the best (once you have gotten to grips with the controls). You are going to 'die' a hundred times, but it won't stick, because you are the best. You are the hero.

You might get shot and die. We are used to that. That's not a problem, it is regular fare in this kind of game. However there are some ways to die in this game that again, because of their rarity, are more violent. In particular I recall getting caught by one of the Clickers. It's not nice when this happens, he/she will bite you and it's gross. But this one time, the Clicker grabbed Joel's top and bottom jaw in each hand and pulled...

This was a total shock. It was also quite unnecessary. Surely the Clicker's modus operandi is to infect Joel too. A completely dead Joel will not spread the epidemic. It is interesting to think that the designers wrote this and and had the animators create it, for just this one moment (I haven't seen it again since, but we are not quite finished). Interesting or not, it goes onto the evidence pile for this game being too violent, or at least more violent that I expected or am used to. (As another aside, this Clicker demonstrated free will- perhaps the Last of Us 2 will feature his story).

I've written enough now...

So whether you agree with me that The Last of Us is too violent or not, I think it is clear that it certainly pushes the boundaries in terms of what is 'acceptable' and 'ordinary' in games. Whether the developers knew this and set out to do this, I don't know, but I feel that they have done something unusual here. It is good to do something different, we don't want games becoming too formulaic, and this gives me plenty to ponder over. It is interesting to think why certain elements of games are considered 'ordinary', and of course there is the media violence debate which is real and needs to be addressed whether you think video games contribute or not.