Abstract
This chapter plays through the title screen and the game’s first level, the Prologue. The chapter explains what it means to play with apocalypse and interprets the game’s morality and music, the characters Joel and Sarah, and Joel’s relationship to the American family in the era of neoliberal insecurity culture. Finally, it argues that Joel’s failure as a father at the end of the Prologue prepares the player to use violence later in the game.
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Notes
- 1.
Emily Dickinson, “I Heard a Fly Buzz—when I died,” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 265.
- 2.
Druckmann has said that the Naughty Dog team read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2012). Neil Druckmann, interview by Ted Price, December 20, 2017, in The AIAS (Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences) Game Maker’s Notebook, podcast, https://interactive.libsyn.com/neil-druckmann.
- 3.
I use the terms “the player” and “Joel” interchangeably to mean “the player and/as Joel.” There will always be a tension between a player’s interpretations and Joel as a designed affordance. The playthrough is one possible synthesis. I also use “we/us” to designate the player and/as Joel. “We/us” is not an assertion of the sameness of author, player-subject, and reader, but rather an invitation to the reader to follow my particular player-subject’s itinerary through the game.
- 4.
H.G. Wells, “Preface to The Scientific Romances,” in Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, ed. Rob Latham (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 14.
- 5.
David Myers, “The Video Game Aesthetic: Play as Form,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, vol. 2, eds. Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 47.
- 6.
Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary, October 1965, 45.
- 7.
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2.
- 8.
Tom Mac Shea, “The Last of Us Review,” Gamespot, October 15, 2014, https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-last-of-us-review/1900-6409197/.
- 9.
Sontag, “Imagination of Disaster,” 45.
- 10.
Gustavo Santaolalla, “Gustavo Santaolalla and The Last of Us on Top Score,” interview by Emily Reese, Classical MPR, September 19, 2013, https://www.classicalmpr.org/story/2013/07/03/gustavo-santaolalla-the-last-of-us-on-top-score. Since Santaolalla was involved in the making of The Last of Us at an early stage and influenced Druckmann’s writing, he could be considered one of the game’s co-authors.
- 11.
Johnny Minkley, “The Last of Us Scored by Oscar-winner Gustavo Santaolalla,” Eurogamer, December 13, 2011, https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-13-the-last-of-us-scored-by-oscar-winner-gustavo-santaolalla.
- 12.
Chris Kerr, “Soundtrack review: The Last of Us,” Side One, December 8, 2014, https://www.webcitation.org/6YYT2Qeuo?url=http://www.sideone.co.uk/soundtrack-review-the-last-of-us/.
- 13.
Hana Hayes, “Joel’s Daughter Speaks Up: An Interview with the Last of Us’ Hana Hayes,” interview by Matt Oliver, Pixelvolt, June 26, 2013, http://pixelvolt.com/2013/06/26/joels-daughter-speaks-up-an-interview-with-the-last-of-us-hana-hayes/ (site discontinued).
- 14.
Nate Wells, Arne Meyer, and Eric Monacelli, The Art of The Last of Us (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2013), 33.
- 15.
Hayes, “Joel’s Daughter Speaks Up.”
- 16.
Troy Baker, Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, and Anthony Newman, “‘Your Watch is Broken.’—Summer Part 1,” interview by Christian Spicer, June 9, 2020, in The Official Last of Us Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-watch-is-broken-summer-part-1/id1514792212?i=1000477283148.
- 17.
Alison J. Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (New York: Oxford, 2015), 4.
- 18.
Playstation, Grounded: The Making of The Last of Us, YouTube, Feb 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH5MgEbBOps.
- 19.
The contrast between Joel’s masculinity and that of voice and motion capture actor Troy Baker is instructive. Whereas Naughty Dog initially considered Baker too young and “pretty” to play Joel, Druckmann and lead game designer Jacob Minkoff changed their mind when they heard Baker’s voice, which contained the “grit” and implicit aggression that they associated with Joel. See the Grounded documentary.
- 20.
Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, Art of The Last of Us, 10.
- 21.
Cooper, Family Values, 23.
- 22.
Gretchen Livingston, “The Rise of Single Fathers,” Pew Research Center, July 2, 2013, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers/; Wendy Wang and Kim Parker, “Record Share of Americans Have Never Been Married,” Pew Research Center, September 24, 2014, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/09/24/record-share-of-americans-have-never-married/; Gretchen Livingston, “Fewer than Half of U.S. Kids Today Live in a ‘Traditional’ Family,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, December 22, 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/22/less-than-half-of-u-s-kids-today-live-in-a-traditional-family/; Wendy Wang, “The Link Between a College Education and a Lasting Marriage,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, December 4, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/04/education-and-marriage/; Kim Parker and Renee Stepler, “As U.S. Marriage Rate Hovers at 50%, Education Gap in Marital Status Widens,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, September 14, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marriage-rate-hovers-at-50-education-gap-in-marital-status-widens/; Amanda Barroso, “More than Half of Americans Say Marriage is Important But not Essential to Leading a Fulfilling Life,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, February 14, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/more-than-half-of-americans-say-marriage-is-important-but-not-essential-to-leading-a-fulfilling-life/.
- 23.
Pugh, Tumbleweed Society, 8. See also Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (New York: Nation Books, 2013). Connell also notes that the connection between hegemonic masculinity and breadwinning “will come under pressure when it becomes impossible for men to win the bread.” Connell, Masculinities, 90.
- 24.
Pugh, 100.
- 25.
Pugh, 104. On caring fatherhood in postwar America, see Lawrence R. Samuel, American Fatherhood: A Cultural History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
- 26.
“In hegemonic masculinity, fathers do not have the capacity or the skill or the need to care for children, especially for babies and infants, while the relationship between female parents and young children is seen as crucial. Nurturant and care-giving behavior is simply not manly.” Mike Donaldson, “What is Hegemonic Masculinity?”, Theory and Society 22, no. 5 (1993): 650.
- 27.
A note in the kitchen instructing Sarah to order food is telling: if Joel is often away at work, who usually feeds Sarah? Who keeps Joel and Sarah’s house so tidy? The note implies that Joel outsources some of this labor. He thus parallels male game developers, many of whom can withstand the extremely long hours of “crunch time” only by outsourcing domestic and care responsibilities to paid care workers. On the composition of the videogame workforce, see Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 61–90.
- 28.
On procedural adaptation in horror videogames, see Matthew J. Weise, “How the Zombie Changed Videogames,” in Zombies are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead, eds. Christopher M. Moreman and Cory J. Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 151–68.
- 29.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). I develop this theme at length in Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022).
- 30.
Gerry Canavan, “‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” Extrapolation 51, no. 3 (2010): 445.
- 31.
Druckmann, AIAS interview.
- 32.
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32.
- 33.
On militarized masculinity, see Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, Digital Play, chap. 11.
- 34.
Bertrand Lucat, “Playing with Patriarchy: Fatherhood in BioShock: Infinite, The Last of Us, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” DiGRA ‘17—Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference, 5, http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/144_DIGRA2017_FP_Lucat_Playing_with_Patricarchy.pdf.
- 35.
Michael Thomsen, “The Dreams in Which I’m Dying,” The Paris Review, August 29, 2014, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/29/the-dreams-in-which-im-dying/.
- 36.
Feminist Frequency, “#2 Women in Refrigerators (Tropes vs. Women),” YouTube, April 7, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DInYaHVSLr8.
- 37.
Neil Druckmann, interview by Rob LeFebvre, Creative Screenwriting, August 6, 2013, https://creativescreenwriting.com/the-last-of-us/.
- 38.
Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, chap. 2, Kindle.
- 39.
Shaw, chap. 2.
- 40.
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (New York: Routledge, 1980), 124.
- 41.
Jonathan Frome, “Melodrama and the Psychology of Tears,” Projections 8, no. 1 (2014): 28.
- 42.
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
- 43.
Matt Knutson, “Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Chrononormativity in Gaming,” Game Studies 18, no. 3 (2018), http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/knutson.
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Ramirez, J.J. (2022). Prologue: Father Fails. 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_2
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