Abstract
The introduction establishes the book’s theoretical and historical frameworks. It presents the concept of “standard metagame” and explains that the book is an intervention in the standard metagame’s bargain with hegemonic masculinity. The introduction then historically situates The Last of Us at the intersection of the casual gaming era and the neoliberal negation of society, which has catalyzed far right revolts. Finally, the introduction proposes to interpret The Last of Us as an ensemble of contradictions and ideological inoculations.
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Notes
- 1.
Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, and Troy Baker, “Last of Us 2 Spoilercast w/ Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker—Gamescast Ep. 26,” interview by Greg Miller, YouTube, June 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6rRfK-V2jY.
- 2.
Neil Druckmann, Twitter post, July 5, 2020, 8:15 pm, https://twitter.com/Neil_Druckmann/status/1279841603843051520.
- 3.
Andrew Klavan, “The Last Of Us 2 Is A Crazy SJW Mess,” YouTube, July 3, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w13cvbMotrs.
- 4.
Neil Druckmann, Twitter post. It should be noted that nothing in the game’s narrative suggests that Abby is transgender.
- 5.
Neil Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto 2013 Keynote: Neil Druckmann, Creative Director & Writer, Naughty Dog,” YouTube, October 2, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le6qIz7MjSk&t=0s.
- 6.
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Liam Mitchell, Ludopolitics: Videogames Against Control (Washington: Zero Books, 2018).
- 7.
Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees, “Masculinity and Gaming: Mediated Masculinities in Play,” in Masculinities in Play, eds. Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 7, 4. While there are many useful studies of gender and videogames, Taylor and Voorhees note that the specific study of masculinity and videogames is “by comparison, underdeveloped and fairly ad hoc” (4). Other entryways into the literature include Derek A. Burrill, Die Tryin’: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Megan Condis, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018); Melissa Kagan, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch,” Game Studies 18, no. 2 (2018), http://gamestudies.org/1802/articles/kagen; Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), chap. 11; Marcus Maloney, Steven Roberts, and Timothy Graham, Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community (New York: Palgrave, 2019); Soraya Murray, “The Last of Us: Masculinity,” in How to Play Videogames, eds. Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina B. Huntemann (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 101–109.
- 8.
Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 9, 11.
- 9.
Boluk and Lemieux, 36, 281; See also M. D. Schmalzer, “Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit,” Game Studies 20, no. 3 (2003), http://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/schmalzer.
- 10.
Boluk and Lemieux, Metagaming, 8.
- 11.
R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity: Formulation, Reformulation, and Amplification (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
- 12.
Connell, chap. 8. Connell notes that while there is a split between dominance and technical expertise as versions of hegemonic masculinity, the two “coexist as gendered practices, sometimes in opposition and sometimes meshing” (194). A similarly dialectical tension exists between hegemonic masculinity and geek masculinity. Although geek masculinity arose in opposition to hegemonic masculine ideals of physical strength and athleticism, it shares hegemonic masculine ideals of competition and technical mastery. In its toxic form, geek masculinity polices core videogame culture to exclude women and other nontraditional gamers. See Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, eds., Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (New York: Palgrave, 2017); T.L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
- 13.
The entire Tropes vs Women in Video Games series can be found on the Feminist Frequency website: https://feministfrequency.com/series/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/.
- 14.
Boluk and Lemieux, Metagaming, 281.
- 15.
Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, “Common-Sense Neoliberalism,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 55 (Winter 2013): 8–9.
- 16.
Amanda C. Cote, Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games (New York: New York University Press, 2020).
- 17.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford, 2005). It doesn’t follow that the state simply withers away under neoliberalism. Since market freedom requires large expenditures on military and police to discipline neoliberalized populations, segments of the state grow under neoliberalism.
- 18.
Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
- 19.
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 27.
- 20.
Brown, 45. Brown claims that the far right revolt is an unintended consequence of neoliberalism. For a critique, see Arun Kundnani, “The Racial Constitution of Neoliberalism,” Race & Class 63, no. 1 (2021): 51–69.
- 21.
Condis, Gaming Masculinity, chap. 4.
- 22.
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 54–55.
- 23.
But see Chris Suellentrop, “In the Same Boat, but Not Equals,” New York Times, June 14, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/arts/video-games/in-the-video-game-the-last-of-us-survival-favors-the-man.html. Druckmann and Straley’s reactions to gender critiques of The Last of Us were defensive. While Druckmann celebrated Sarkeesian’s critique of tropes against women in other games, this very critique allegedly became simplistic and failed to account for nuance when others applied it to his game: “the criticism has to become more sophisticated. We have to dissect these subtleties, instead of just pointing to these tropes and saying, ‘Well, you have a woman dying, so you have a game where the death of a woman fuel’s this man’s story.’ The discussion has to go deeper than that.” Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, “The Definitive Interview with the Creators of Sony’s The Last of Us (Part One),” interview by Dean Takahas, VentureBeat, August 5, 2013, https://venturebeat.com/2013/08/05/the-last-of-us-interview-part-one/.
- 24.
Cote, Gaming Sexism, 51–52.
- 25.
The transcript of Druckmann’s presentation can be found on Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency website: https://feministfrequency.com/video/the-2014-game-developers-choice-ambassador-award/.
- 26.
Neil Druckmann, “The Last of Us Dev Says AAA Can Learn from Indies,” interview with Brendan Sinclair, gamesindustry.biz, September 13, 2013, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-09-13-the-last-of-us-dev-says-aaa-can-learn-from-indies.
- 27.
Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto.”
- 28.
Andrew Webster, “The Power of Failure: Making ‘The Last of Us,’” The Verge, September 19, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/19/4744008/making-the-last-of-us-ps3.
- 29.
Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto.”
- 30.
Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 169.
- 31.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 198, my italics.
- 32.
See Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: Free Press, 2016).
- 33.
Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 115, 119.
- 34.
On the “dadification” of games and gaming culture, see Mattie Brice, “The Dadification of Video Games Is Real,” Mattie Brice (blog), August 15, 2013, http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-dadification-of-video-games-is-real/; Sarah Stang, “Controlling Fathers and Devoted Daughters: Paternal Authority in BioShock 2 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” First Person Scholar, December 7, 2016, http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/controlling-fathers-and-devoted-daughters/.
- 35.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 84.
- 36.
On hybrid masculinities and how they incorporate and neutralize alternatives to hegemonic masculinity, see Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe, “Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 3 (2014): 246–258; Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, 82–85, 137–38.
- 37.
I would like to thank Sarah Stulz for this idea.
- 38.
James Newman, Videogames, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), chaps. 5 and 6.
- 39.
Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
- 40.
Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Kindle.
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Ramirez, J.J. (2022). Introduction: Spoiler Alert. In: Rules of the Father in The Last of Us. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_1
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