Half way through The Last Of Us: Part II the story seems to reach its climax when it takes
a risky turn.
For ten or so hours, you’ve played as Ellie, one of the main characters from the previous
game. She is seeking revenge against this character, Abby, who brutally murdered her
sort of adopted father, Joel.
As Ellie, you track Abby back to Seattle where she is part of a militant group called the
Wolves. And for three days you go on a warpath through the city in an attempt to find her.
It’s set up exactly like a traditional revenge story, with Ellie hunting down everyone responsible
for Joel’s death while growing increasingly obsessive, erratic and bloodthirsty.
But then Abby catches you at your hideout and has the upper hand when… the game smash
cuts to black, rewinds the clock, and the asks you to play the next ten hours from the
villain’s perspective leading up to this showdown.
yeah…
This is… a very contentious decision isn’t it? It’s not for everyone. But in this video,
I want to talk about why the switch worked for me and what I got out of this experience.
Part One: Play, Don’t Show
The most commonly repeated piece of writing advice is “show, don’t tell.”
You can’t tell your audience how to feel, you have to show them how to feel so that
they actually experience those emotions themselves.
This game has an example of the difference because it does both for the same scene. At
the beginning of the game, we are told about the events of a dance that happened the previous
night.
Ellie and Dina kissed for the first time. A bigot harassed them. Joel intervened on
Ellie’s behalf. And then Ellie got mad at Joel for doing so.CLIP: Ellie and Jesse talking
about this.
When you first hear this, you take in the information but you don’t feel the emotion
of that scene. But then later, in one of the game’s many flashbacks, you get to see this
scene in full. We don’t learn much of anything new by seeing the scene — the beats are
all the same — but this time we really feel the emotion.
We can’t just be told that Ellie is mad at Joel. We need to be shown.
(This is also why you can’t just read the leaked spoilers for a story and decide whether
or not it is good without actually experiencing the game yourself).
Or when it comes to that villain character you want to humanize, the story can’t just
tell me I should feel bad for them. I need to be shown a reason to care.
But showing scenes from the villains perspective isn’t just what we’re talking about here.
In an interactive medium, the game designers have a much more powerful weapon at their
disposal than just showing us this character’s story.
By making us control Abby, it forces us to see the world from her perspective. Earlier,
when I was talking about the Ellie sections of the game, I was using the word “you,”
because whoever you’re playing as in a video game, you feel as if you are them.
And Naughty Dog does this because…
Part Two: Naughty Dog wants to f*** with you
I found myself humming the song that played at the dance long after the game ended. It
immediately brought me back to that bittersweet nostalgic feeling that that scene evokes.
Then I found out that the song is a cover Little Sadie by Crooked Still. Little Sadie
is a folk song about a man, or in this version, a woman, who matter of factly tells us she
killed the woman she’s with, tries to escape, gets caught and is thrown in jail.
We don’t really know why the singer wanted to kill Sadie, and she doesn’t appear to
have any remorse about it either. But the heavy subject matter contrasts with the upbeat
melody and the bright feeling of the story at that moment. The violence that is about
to happen is seeping into the scene.
But that’s exactly this game’s MO.
It wants to f*** with you. It wants to make you feel contradictory emotions as often as
possible.
Mostly it does this by putting the player at odds with the character. The last game
did this too, but only at the end. In this game, we’re constantly re-examining how
we feel about Ellie. We like her from the previous game, but now she’s on a quest
for revenge that is way over the top. We understand her anger, but she’s avenging someone who
singlehandedly did more damage to this world than anyone possibly could have.
NORA: “Think about what he did.”
Literally every death that happens as a result of the infection after the first game is Joel’s
fault, and every single person in the world has cause to see him punished. Abby just has
extra, personal reasons to hate him.
On some level, we want to avenge Joel, because the first game made us feel attached to him
too, but on another, we feel like he’s not someone that should be avenged. But at least
Ellie doesn’t know all that bad stuff about him, so we understand where she’s—
Oh wait. She knows? She knew the whole time?
This is what I mean when I say that Naughty Dog wants to mess with you. The first Last
of Us game had a much easier task. All that game had to do was get you invested in Joel
and Ellie’s relationship to work.
The Last Of Us Part II doesn’t just want you to be invested, but conflicted about your
investment.
Part Three: Cultivating Empathy
So that brings us to Abby, a character whose story feels like it was constructed on a bet.
Like, hey, we’re Naughty Dog. We’re one of the most successful game studios in the
world. Everyone seems to like our stories, so let’s challenge ourselves and do the
most difficult thing possible.
Let’s get the players to loathe a character. Let’s feed their rage for ten hours of gameplay.
And then let’s turn everything on its head, force the players to play as that character,
and use every trick in the book to make them actually come to empathize with them. And
not only that, but we’ll write it in a way that if they don’t empathize with her at
least a bit, then they’re the ones who are being hypocrites! Because she’ll have become
more morally defensible than any of the characters the audience likes.
What do I mean by “every trick in the book?”
Well the first trick is itself the name of a book: Save The Cat, which is a book I have
a lot of reservations about because it advocates for writing formulas, but is also famous for
the “save the cat” idea, which is an early scene in a movie where the main character
does something unambiguously good or at least impressive to get the audience on their side.
In Abby’s first flashback, she saves a Zebra. See she’s not so bad! The save the cat type
of scene can sometimes be a little cheap, but it is effective.
The designers also give her a relatable and empathetic motivation. She loses everything
because of Joel. Not just her father, but the idea of a better world, all the idealism
of the Fireflies as an organization, and is forced to find safety elsewhere, leading her
to become a ruthless soldier in a pointless guerrilla war.
We see what her coping mechanisms are. To deal with her trauma, she has physically transformed
herself, becoming as strong as possible so that she can avenge her father, a great parallel
to Ellie, whose body withers as her quest takes its tole on her.
Abby also has a relatable fear. She’s afraid of heights. And at a critical moment in the
story, she has to face that fear and overcome it, again getting the audience on her side.
I called these things “tricks,” but really they’re all solid techniques that cultivate
empathy for a character.
If you have a character who does good deeds sometimes, has clear fears, weaknesses, and
traumas, chances are the audience is going to connect with them.
Most importantly though is that the game designers give Abby a completely impossible desire.
She has all of these conflicting emotions for Owen, who she’s definitely in love with,
but who she rejected because she’s still not over her father’s death, which he was
present for, making him a constant reminder of it. But then when she gets her revenge
and is ready to move on with her life, getting together with him is impossible because OH
NO he’s with someone else AND she’s pregnant. This girl can’t catch a break can she?
Abby: “I haven’t always done the right thing —“
Mel: “You’re a piece of shit.”
Awwww…
Step-by-step, the game builds empathy for Abby, taking her from the simply drawn villain
of the prologue, to a multi-dimensional dynamic character that you can actually root for in
the back half of the game.
If this character was presented to us using all of these techniques BEFORE we saw her
kill Joel, I’m pretty sure it’d be less controversial for me to claim that she garner’s
the player’s empathy.
BUT! She was introduced killing Joel. So there’s this massive hurdle stopping people from caring
about the character.
And that really gets into why this game is so interesting to me, because it’s entirely
about perspective.
Part Four: I Hate That Sniper
There’s this sequence in the Abby section of the game where you’re pined down with
a sniper.
You can’t try to shoot the sniper, or you just take damage, so you have to run between
cover and crawl through the mud to get close to him.
It’s an encounter type that you’ve played a thousand times. You know why it’s here.
Your inability to fight back makes you quickly resent your opponent, motivating you to defeat
them. Every time he hurts you, you get angrier.
But then you get to him, and it’s Tommy. Joel’s brother. One of Ellie’s friends
and a character you as the player probably like.
It’s great emotional whiplash. It’s trying to make you self-aware of how easily your
emotions can be manipulated by narrative framing. Because the designers framed this scene with
Abby as the protagonist, we hated Tommy for a moment.
And I’m not using the word “manipulate” in a derogatory sense because stories are
inherently manipulative. That is what they are trying to do.
That scene forces us to experience in microcosm what the game as a whole is trying to make
us feel as a whole.
Both of the main characters are in the Kill-The-Sniper mindset for most of the game. Just blind rage
against their enemies. They have entrenched world views where there are good guys on one
side and bad guys on the other.
Ellie sees the Wolves as entirely evil, which, in her mind, justifies her extreme violence
against all of them. When Dina questions this line of thinking by pointing out that the
wolves have shown mercy, Ellie shuts her down.
Dina: They let you and Tommy live. Ellie: It doesn’t matter. They f***ed up.
Similarly, Abby sees the Seraphites, the religious cult that her faction has been at war with
for years, as entirely at fault.
Another secondary character questions this belief early on in the story, and just like
Ellie, Abby initially shoots her down.
CLIP:
It’s always the Seraphites fault that the wolves have to annihilate them.
ISAAC: Annihilate them.
But the arc of Abby’s story is basically the arc that Joel went on in the first game,
someone who the world has beat down into amoral monster who eventually restores their own
humanity by caring for a child in need.
By helping Lev, she comes to acknowledge the humanity in her enemies, renounce her previous
loyalties and try to lead a more noble life.
In playing as her for ten plus hours, the game asks the player to basically go on the
same transformative arc with how they view Abby.
Part Five: The Collision
All of this, all 20 plus hors of it, is really there to build up to one big payoff. The showdown
at the theatre.
A violent confrontation between a group of characters where we know everything about
them, but they know nothing about each other. Each has been well characterized and has built
enough empathy with the audience that we don’t know who we’re actually rooting for. More
than anything, what we actually want is for both of the characters to stop fighting.
When I am Abby fighting Ellie, I don’t want to press the buttons that keep the fight going,
but the game forces me to. When I am Ellie fighting Abby, I feel the same way.
The story has shown both characters in such detail, that it puts the player’s emotions
in turmoil.
Then Abby threatens to kill Dina, but then Lev intervenes. And all of that work building
the bond between those two characters pays off here, as he’s the only one that could
make Abby change her mind here and stop the violence.
Okay, now I do also want to acknowledge that there are parts of the game that work against
what I feel the story is trying to do.
Because in order to accept any of this, you do sorta of have to accept the jarring shifts
between the gameplay and the narrative. The story is concerned with how violence tears
us apart, but the gameplay lets us have fun with a bow and arrow that shoots dynamite.
You kill an absurd number of people with absolutely no remorse on your way to fighting Abby, but
then the story kicks in and suddenly this death is one too many.
This wasn’t as big of an issue in the previous game where everything, except the final chapter,
had the larger justification of saving the world. Here, the desires are more personal,
so the fact that Ellie is just okay with killing hundreds to avenge one person distances us
from her more than it did previously.
I mean, that distance is supposed to be there to an extent. We are supposed to disagree
with what Ellie wants, as I’ve been talking about. But the gameplay takes this to absurd
extremes.
This game might single-handedly be responsible for reviving the use of the phrase ludo-narrative
dissonance.
But taken as a whole, I think it’s possible to acknowledge that contradiction without
throwing away what the narrative is doing successfully.
In particular, Abby’s half of the game uses the basic techniques for cultivating empathy
and the unique tools of video game storytelling to get the player to go on the same arc of
change as the character, and if you’re able to reconsider your emotions while you play,
there reward is worth it.
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