The Last of Us, is a zombie post-apocalyptic video game made by Naughty Dog, a first-party video game developer based in Santa Monica, California. in 2013. It was the most critically acclaimed video game with 239 awards and has the highest continuous ratings from the most credible sources. It has 10/10 from IGN Entertainment, 9/10 from GameSpot, and 95% would recommend for Metacritic. So how is Naughty Dog achieving all these amazing rating from all these sources. There are actually arguments about how The Last of Us is so successful. Some say that the reason it was so popular and successful was because of the graphics and the storyline, while others argue that it is the connections and emotions the players feel with/as the characters in the game. I believe the reason for the game being so successful and rated so highly is because of Naughty Dog’s “system” they follow to make the game suck the player in, that is very effective at manipulating the emotions of the player and manipulate the decisions of the player with by making the player form really strong relationships with the characters in the game.
To start out, The Last of Us is a third-person action/adventure game that is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the infected (zombie) epidemic has taken place with people getting infected with this virus called ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The virus that grows on/in the brain that results in people becoming more violent and aggressive over a short time period until they eventually turn into mindless half-alive carcasses. While on the other end people are struggling to merely survive without the assistance of a sufficient government, since the government is not very involved with the public at this point in time. And throughout the whole game the focus is on the two main protagonists Joel and Ellie.
Joel is a man in his mid 30s who lived in Texas with his 12-year-old daughter, Sarah, who he lost during the beginning stages of the outbreak of the infection at the beginning of the game. About 15 years after the outbreak of the infection Joel had become a cold, emotionless man, he preferred to stay out of politics and focus just on simply staying alive any way he could. Which was basically mostly means making money at many means for guns for protection, ammo, food, clothes, etc. And in the beginning of the game Joel was a black-market dealer within the quarantine zones of Boston, selling drugs and weapons of all sorts. Until he was proposed with an offer from a leader named Marline of the revolutionary militia group, The Fireflies, that were revolting against military oppression in quarantine zones in hopes of eventually restoring the U.S. government.
Ellie is a 14-year-old girl that was born after the infection/virus had already collapsed modern civilization as we know it. She was raised in walls of the quarantine zones in perpetual fear, which sparked her obsession with relics and items from past culture, such as books (more specifically comic books) and music. She has experienced nothing but strict rules and unbelievable training under America’s government-run military schools and lived as an orphan, until she was taken under the wing of Marline, the leader of the Fireflies. Ellie lived with Marline for about a year until Marline proposed an offer to Joel to escort/smuggle her safely to the capitol of Fireflies, because there is something very special about Ellie, she is immune to the virus.
The majority of the game is the story of Joel and Ellie on their journey to the capitol of the Fireflies, which is filled with drama, dilemmas, and emotion. In the development of the game it was designed with many factors that would contribute to emotionally manipulate the player. From things like the depth of the designs of the characters, the cinematics, and thought put into the placement and use of every little artifact to play with the psychology of the player.
By far one of the things that Naughty Dog has exceed, especially at the time with was released, was the depth and the way the characters were designed a specific way to perceived specific ways. They designed the NPCs and characters so well that it makes us feel real emotions and make us as the players sometimes feel like we have a real relationship with them. Jamie Madigan, a psychologist and the author of the book Getting Gamers, had a great example of this, he said exactly what Naughty Dog wanted him to feel about Ellie, “By the end of that game I cared about what happened to her, hated seeing her endangered, and wanted to see things turn out well for her. All this despite the fact that she didn’t even know I existed, much less give a flip about me.” So I believe that Naughty Dog was able to achieve this was by following and imitating several characteristics of media figures to facilitate a stronger parasocial relationship. In a 2011 review of literature on parasocial relationships was published in the Journal of Communication and it summarized many characteristics of parasocial relationships. The main four was first addressing the audience directly, second was using nonverbal communication to acknowledge the viewer (ex. facing the camera), thirdly how good looking the person is on camera, and finally the ability of the viewer to see things from the perspective of the media figure’s (character in the game) point of view. By having these features in the characters in the game Naughty Dog used them to make a stronger emotional connections to the players and use it as a part of their system to emotionally manipulate their players.
So, let’s take a look at how Ellie follows these characteristics. The first characteristic was nonverbal communication towards the viewer or in other words “address the character to create a relationship”1, and in the game, she talks to us through Joel. To the extent that players embody or role-play as Joel, so it feels direct to the player. Some examples of this within the game would be
“How often Ellie seems to react specifically to things that the player has agency over, from conversing with Joel when he inspects items in the world, to exclamations when Joel kills someone, to the player’s prompting Ellie to solve some environmental obstacle when Joel is moved into position”1.
She also often says thing or offers of advice that is not towards anyone particular that could be constructed as a way to indirectly hint for the player’s benefit. But at any rate, Ellie responds way more directly than any other TV character could.
Secondly, Ellie is -use this term broadly- attractive. She was obviously not meant to be sexually attractive to any other characters in the game or anyone playing the game. But her character design was clearly designed in such that she is clearly not to be hideous.
Thirdly, the most powerful item in Ellie’s parasocial relationship is how easy she designed to relate with her and her relationship with Joel. “Ellie creates a situation that many players can identify with: protecting a child, then stressing out as she gets more and more in danger in the course of growing up. We can easily think of emotions, drives, and mental states to project onto her given her situation, even though they aren’t made explicit”.1 In short, Ellie and her situation(s) make it very easy for us, the players, to fill in the gaps of her character to understand her point of view on topics and the reason for her actions.
According to the Journal of Communication, Ellie hits most (3/4) of the characteristics of a parasocial relationship. She is physically attractive (broadly), socially attractive, and task attractive.2 And by having these characteristics the designers were able to use her attractiveness as a person to get the player to emotionally connect to her and form a strong relationship with her as the game goes on, that I believe to be used as one of the ways Naughty Dog messes with the players emotions and actions later on in the game.
I believe that Naughty Dog developed The Last of Us to use the experiences and hard times that Joel and Ellie go/ have gone through together to build a stronger relationship between the player and the characters relationships. So, then the tightened relationship could later be used to manipulate the players emotions and actions in the story. One of the things that was often in the back of Joel’s mind throughout the story is how he saw and felt about Ellie. Like how in the beginning he wanted nothing to do with her but as they both went through all the events/conflicts together on their way to the Fireflies, he began to see her more like his past daughter, Sarah.
An example when Naughty Dog would use this tactic to mess with the player would be about 1/3 into the story when Joel and Ellie arrive at Joel’s good friend Tommy’s. Tommy is a man the same age as Joel, but after the breakout he went back to the city after the people were evacuated and made the whole entire (small) city into an extremely safe place, with traps everywhere to keep himself safe from the infected. So, by this point in the game Joel and Ellie have gone through a lot; the death of a member of their group (which left it to just be both of them), multiple close to death experiences, drama/conflict between other people and the government, etc. Which according to the Australia Research Council would say that those experiences would bring people (player as Joel to have relationship with Ellie) closer together. That said, “Painful and bad experiences are social and emotional glue”, and their research has “highlighting (-ed) that people not only feel closer to others but are willing to risk their own outcomes to benefit the group”.
So, at this point in the story Joel and Ellie have a pretty good relationship, but do not express it as strong as the relationship really is. So, while Ellie is in another room, she overhears Joel talking to Tommy about passing her over to Tommy to escort her the rest of the way to Fireflies. Which results upsetting Ellie and ends up with her running away from Joel and Tommy and ends up in a large log cabin just outside Tommy’s closed off city where Joel and Tommy find her not too long after. It is the cinematic once Joel finds Ellie in the house is where it sparks the start of the transition to show the tension and strength of Joel and Ellie’s relationship. So, in the cinematic Ellie (upset with Joel) tells Joel that she knew that he wanted to pass her over and that she now knows about Sarah and is sorry about what happened to her, then right after goes on to say, “Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me. Everyone – fucking except for you! So don’t tell me I would be safer with somebody else, because the truth is I would just be more scared”. Then Joel goes on to say (in anger of her bringing up Sarah), “You’re right…you’re not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain’t your dad. And we are going our separate ways”. Which segways into when they are all unhappy with each other on the way back to Tommy’s city, until Joel tells Ellie that he has changed his mind and wants to bring Ellie himself to the Fireflies, rather than have Tommy do it. Joel changed his mind because he realized how much his presence meant to Ellie. And sure, he wants to be selfish and keep himself isolated from Ellie as much as he can, but because Ellie reminds him Sarah, but also in a sense, this is the very exact reason he does the complete opposite. He opens himself up to Ellie because this is his only chance for him to have some inkling of how it would have been with Sarah had if she survived. In addition, he knows Sarah would have wanted him to stay with Ellie. This scene is so important because it’s when Ellie and Joel finally make the decision to get closer to one another, strengthening their bond that will last through the end of the game.
Another factor that could be large part of Naughty Dog’s “system” could be the visual and audio effects during the game as well as during the cinematics, that build up tensions and other emotions inside the player. According to The College of Brockport,
“the visual can supply our senses with the colorful and the extravagant pictures, it is essentially nothing without the accompanying audio, music especially, to give the picture its feeling and emotion. The magnificence of the film comes from the way sound the picture and sound play off of each other to make an emotional, invigorating experience for the viewer. The fact is that, just as sound completes the effect of the picture, picture completes the effect of the sound”.
So, let’s go back to talking about the scene when Joel and Tommy found Ellie in the log cabin. First, Joel walks into the dusty dim room where Ellie is and there were the very light/quiet sounds of the cracking of house along with a fine sound of the trees blowing in the wind outside the window. Once Joel and Ellie start to converse and start to argue with each other, those background sounds start to diminish into the sounds of their voices. Then the camera changes and focuses on Ellie’s face just behind Joel’s shoulder, showing the emotion she is expressing to him while she is saying how she feels safe with him. But while she is expressing that, the camera is changing inbetween them to show Joel’s emotions and his aggressive responses to Ellie as well as Ellie’s emotions and reactions to what Joel says. But once Ellie finishes getting her point thought and Joel starts to respond, a hazy sound/music starts to become discernable, right after to induce the feeling of conflict and tension. This kind of play with the scenery/setting and audio work very well at creating the wanted emotion for the player to experience at this part of the game.
By far the part of the story that uses all the (built up) attributes of Naughty Dog’s “system” to manipulate the players emotions and decisions is the final scene. It is when Joel and Ellie arrive at the base of the Fireflies, which is at the hospital where Joel ends up being knocked out by one of the Firefly soldiers not too far away from the hospital. Once he wakes up, he welcomed by Marlene who thanks Joel for escorting Ellie and tells him that Ellie is being prepared for surgery, so the doctors could make a vaccine. But one thing came to Joel’s mind after Marlene told him Ellie was being prepped for surgery, the virus grows/forms all over the brain. Joel realizes what this means, and he grows hot with anger. He defies Marlene, threatens her, but she simply orders the guard to escort him on his way out. But
he manages to kill the soldier and sneak his way to the operating room. It’s here where every player’s heart stops. Ellie is unconcise on the operating table, with a few surgeons surrounding her. The player doesn’t know if Ellie has already been operated on, if she’s already dead or if she’s about to die. Then everything goes silent while Joel is watching Ellie on the operating table. No one wants to shoot the surgeon, but the influence from the game (emotionally) forces the player to make the decision to murder the surgeons without a second thought. Then Joel proceeds to pick up Ellie’s body and runs through the hospital all the way out to parking garage. On the way down to the parking garage, all the player can hear are the sirens, Joel’s fast heartbeat, and Joel’s emotional words towards Ellie and how he loves and cares about her. Entering the garage Joel is faced by Marlene with a pistol, begging Joel to reconsider taking Ellie because she would save man kind (even though, earlier in the game the player learns that 6 others have gone through the surgery who died and didn’t get a vaccine that worked from them). At this point, Joel doesn’t care. It’s here where the player learns that Joel doesn’t care about saving the world or restoring mankind. If saving the world means losing Ellie, he’d rather let the world wither away at the hands of the infected, because all Joel has is Ellie. Ellie, indeed, is Joel’s whole world. And so, with that Joel shoots Marlene, places Ellie in the back of a car, and drives off to Tommy’s, praying the entire ride that Ellie wakes up (which she does). And during all events in the garage, the subconscious audio was dark and dim sounding, until it went silent when Joel shot Marlene. Then while in the car, it sounded peaceful like the stress and anxiety had decreased a lot, then sounded joyful once Ellie ended up waking up.
The only way to really understand the power of Naughty Dog’s “system” is playing the game yourself. There are many games I have completed and played all the way through, but none of them have ever pulled at my heart-strings or played with my emotions as much as this game ever has. It felt like I was pulled into the game, that I was actually talking to Ellie through Joel. That I felt the same way and had the same emotions as Joel almost throughout the whole story from how he felt about Ellie to why he made specific decisions (when I had no choice). The developers know how to pull you in and make you want to keep playing, I can’t wait to experience the emotional rollercoaster again in The Last of Us: Part II.