The Reconstruction of Morality and the Evolution of Naturalism in The Last of Us

Naughty Dog’s 2013 Playstation 3 title The Last of Us provides a clear and compelling case that video games can stand as powerful, thematically rich, and complicated narratives expressing the turmoil and fragility of human culture in the same way as their literary and film counterparts do. The game’s story line and script were written by Neil Druckmann, Creative Director for Naughty Dog, and he also directed the game. Certainly, not every video game has as its goal a deeper thematic or symbolic purpose. Therefore, video games must be considered on their individual merits, rather than swept together under larger umbrella categories, such as role-playing games or first-person shooters (FPSs). That being said, The Last of Us asks players to turn a lens of introspection on themselves, challenging issues of morality and the construction of identity, sometimes darkly. In that sense, video games seeking to develop complex fictive worlds, such as The Last of Us, merit the same focus and analysis given to their more traditionally studied counterparts and should be examined from a narratological perspective, as opposed to a ludological perspective solely focused on the mechanics of game play and in-game goals. The Last of Us takes 20–25 hr on average to complete, meaning that its story arc, development of characters, and exploration of complex thematic and symbolic elements far exceed any film, and rival an entire first season of a standard, 1-hr American network show. The story, if written in prose, would reach novel length.

Moreover, video games by their very nature are necessarily participatory, placing the player in the role of one or more protagonists in the story. As such, they can be “read” the way one might a novel or a film script and analyzed in much the same fashion and therefore benefit from the same focuses on genres, forms, and terms applied to their counterparts as a basis for analysis. However, video games take this notion one step further. While they can arguably be “read,” an act referring to the analysis of the narratological elements of the game for symbolism, theme, character development, and the like, they must also be played, with participation a mandatory hallmark of the gaming experience. Whereas a reader participates by reading the story through, the gamer is more invested by having to physically move the narrative from one point to the next, with focus and purpose. The gamer, then, participates in the narratological elements by virtue of the game’s mechanics, requirements, and gameplay. The Last of Us, while moving players through a series of environments and locations, immerses them in an uncomfortable exploration of what it means to be human. This game is especially noteworthy for its complex treatment of the breakdown of human culture and the reconstruction of human morality in the aftermath of a global pandemic. Instead of placing these elements within the safer boundaries of a faraway future, The Last of Us begins in earnest with the spread of a deadly infection and eradication of a large portion of the human race in September 2013. After an opening sequence underscoring the terror of those first days, the game moves the action forward 20 years and into a landscape scarred and broken yet still recognizable. Against this backdrop of the end of human civilization and its dominance over the environment, the game juxtaposes several key thematic elements as working in conflict with one another, that is, the fungus versus the uninfected humans, civility versus cruelty, and the individual versus the group.

In The Last of Us, the player takes on the role of the main protagonist, Joel, for the majority of the game, but plays the role of Ellie for a portion of the section entitled Winter. The game follows the discovery that Ellie is immune to the Cordecyps infection—she has been bitten with no effect—and Joel’s initial agreement to smuggle the orphaned, 14-year-old Ellie to a medical facility run by a resistance group called the Fireflies. The Fireflies, unlike the dysfunctional remnants of the centralized government, believe, perhaps foolishly, that a cure for the infection is possible. As Joel bonds to Ellie, although she is a painful reminder of his own daughter who died on the eve of the outbreak in his hometown, he increasingly assumes a fatherly role. The game’s narrative then hinges on Joel’s decision to rescue Ellie from the Fireflies when he learns that they intend to dissect her living brain—thus sacrificing her life—for the possibility of a cure.

The game also focuses on the horrors of losing one’s mental faculties and control to the infection. Based on the examples of real infections given in the game, the Cordyceps fungus needs only about 12 hr at the most to take full control of its host and create a “runner,” an infected host whose physical body has not yet been transformed by the latter stages of infection. During the time as a runner, presumably, the human host slowly loses control of his or her faculties, with the earliest hours of the process being unfathomably horrifying. The nature of what it is to be human functions as a primary theme in the game’s narrative. This becomes juxtaposed against the larger question of what it means to be moral in a world where all previous structures imposed to govern morality—courts, jails, an organized central government, and even communities—have fallen away. Some of the human characters in the game, even though the narrative carefully avoids making anyone wholly perfect, try to adhere to a more beneficial sense of their moral codes. Others hunt survivors for sport. With this ever-present conflicted series of moral constructions, the narrative explores both the fungal infection and the larger construction of human identity as a result of its spreading. Sam, a boy close in age to Ellie, who with his brother Henry travels for a while with Ellie and Joel, discusses with her how the infection affects its host. This discussion occurs without Ellie, or the player, realizing that Sam has been bitten; he turns into a runner before the next morning. Sam wonders, “What if the people are still inside?” Ellie responds, “They might still look like people, but that person is not there anymore.” This applies to not only humans infected with the fungus but also any number of survivors who strike with cruelty at their changed world or drop all pretenses at morality because they can or adopt a moral code that allows for survival of the self, at the potential sacrifice of others. People, as a larger construct of communities with cultural backgrounds, histories, and more are no longer present.

These elements, the narratological features, are an inherent part of the game’s story line. As part of his larger focus on the potential for games to have ethical value, Miguel Sicart (2009) argues, “Games are activities in which agents engage with a system designed to encourage the achievement of certain goals with predetermined means” (p. 193). Certainly, these ludological features are a requirement of game completion and thus must be performed by the gamer. In most segments of The Last of Us, these goals consist of avoiding, subduing, or killing enemies or solving environmental puzzles, such as reaching the top floor of a building after the elevator crashes into the flooded basement. Yet even during these moments of structural gameplay, meaning those segments where the gamer is following preset rules to move through an area, the narrative weight of the game remains. For example, as Ellie and Joel navigate through an area, their conversation focuses on their lives, their fears, and their thoughts about their situation. The gamer does not use the controller to initiate the majority of these conversations. While a gamer could arguably mute the sound or ignore the dialogue, the conversations are so inherent to the gameplay experience that a gamer who discounts the majority of the game’s content is really a nonparticipant who is not playing the game as intended. In addition, many of the game’s cutscenes, video segments that do not involve the active participation of the gamer, are woven into the game’s mechanics and main plotline. Although the especially impatient gamer could skip or refuse to be engaged by not watching the cutscenes, it would be perilous to argue that the game loses impact as a study of ethics and morality—both within the story and the gamer’s self-examination—simply because a small percentage of players refuse to play the game as it was intended. The game’s examination of the construction of morality develops because the player must explore the narrative as a component of completing the mechanics of the gameplay to reach the end of the game. Given this, it becomes imperative to consider what the game’s narrative asserts with regard to what it means to be human and how little it might take for people to shift or lose a sense of moral purpose.

Main protagonist Joel exists in a postapocalyptic world that is at once broken, close enough in time to yearn for the preinfection idyll of life, and not yet certain in its ultimate reconstruction of human community. He proves an interesting choice as a protagonist because he is not a young man. At the start of the game proper, after the prologue, Joel appears to be in his mid-40s or older. His daughter, Sarah, is 12 the night the infection breaks out and she is killed. He is also a unique choice because he is a mourning father, even some 20 years later. As he and Sarah attempt to escape the chaos of the infected, the dead, and the dying, they come across a soldier, as the military is already moving in to “contain” the problem. The soldier, under orders from his superiors, opens fire on both characters, mortally wounding Sarah. Joel remains scarred and broken, both literally and figuratively, and therefore acts as a symbolic representation of the breakdown of society, much more so than a stereotypical young action-figure hero-style protagonist would have.

The loss of his daughter haunts the story and Joel, as her death represents a breaking away from order, civility, and the relative comforts of the law. In their moment of crisis, Joel trusts that he and Sarah will be safe with law enforcement. In the prologue, emphasis is placed on the light of the full moon illuminating the horrors unfolding. This is juxtaposed against the light from the soldier’s gun scope as he fires on Joel and Sarah. What Cordyceps fails to do in terms of decimating human numbers, humans will do themselves.

Examining the fictive world of The Last of Us through the structural hallmarks of naturalistic fiction underscores its complexity. Certainly, one of the difficulties with the concept of naturalism is its existence across two disciplines, literature and philosophy, in two entirely different forms. Generally speaking, these two explorations have similarities in name only, and it is the literary conception of naturalism that is most relevant to the structure of the game and will be presented in relation to the game’s narratological elements here. An initial analysis of the game’s thematic elements by comparing them against the structural hallmarks of naturalistic fiction provides one means for understanding humanity’s role as a diminished species. The reason for considering the game’s narrative against the traits of a literary genre is this: The humanities, as a larger discipline, benefit most from the ability to draw from different genres, forms, and lenses of critical theory, rather than pigeon-hole texts into strict definitions and boundaries. This includes embracing an expanded definition of “text” with regard to what is “literary.” Narratives like The Last of Us prove just as interesting in those areas that fall in line with expected definitions as in those that move definitions forward.

Charles Walcutt (1956) defines naturalism as that which “reflects at once our faith in science and our doubts about the modern ‘scientific’ world” (p. 3). Although he writes about naturalism during the 1950s, and looks backward through literary history, his work is still essential to a study of naturalism. His ideas remain relevant in that they point to a need to reopen an examination of more modern literary, film, and video game offerings using naturalism as a jumping-off point, especially given the recent expanding interest in environmental fiction. A perusal of literary criticism about naturalism reveals that it is now considered a dead genre—one that ignited the literary world for a relatively brief time, from the latter part of the 19th century into the first part of the 20th century, with its peak during World War I. The writings of authors Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, among others, are emblematic of naturalism. Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire,” published in 1908, serves as a solid example of the movement. In that story, the protagonist, depersonalized as simply “the man,” underestimates the bitter cold of the Yukon winter and perishes as a result. The man knows the facts of the Yukon winter and its temperatures, but “it did not lead him to consider his weaknesses as a creature affected by temperature. Nor did he think about man’s general weakness, able to live only within narrow limits of heat and cold” (p. 65). The naturalistic protagonist here, the man, underestimates nature and it breaks him. Nature is not portrayed as cruel or vindictive, it just is. The man cannot survive, he cannot adapt, and he cannot win.

Naturalism, an offshoot of realism, the literary movement seeking to show life as it is really lived, takes this focus on verisimilitude and places it against the backdrop of human beings who cannot overcome their natural environments or even themselves. Naturalism is the genre of the failed and frustrated hero, the hero who may be undone by circumstances rather than conquering them. It is also the genre of nature as a dominant and encompassing force, subjecting human beings to its whims and rules. Naturalism also tends to consider the role of one person within a larger community. All of these iterations of naturalism manifest in The Last of Us.

The term “naturalism” is not without its modern critics who question everything from its impact to its existence as a separate form from realism. Yet such debates prove short sighted, especially against the emerging canon of environmental literature, which is not unlike the naturalist writings to which its roots can arguably be traced. Authors such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, each extolling the power and beauty of the natural world and the magnificence of the solitude it affords, share this temporal space, while writing of humanity and nature in sharp contrast to their counterparts. However, more recent environmental authors, such as Edward Abbey (1968) in his memoir Desert Solitaire, describe a relationship with the landscape that is at one moment peaceful, at another, adversarial. Many of Abbey’s reflections in Desert Solitaire are evocative of the earlier naturalist writers and echo the example from To Build a Fire presented earlier. He reflects upon the unforgiving desert of Utah, writing, “There are rumors that when dying of the thirst you can save your soul and body by extracting water from the barrel cactus….The labor and exasperation will make you sweat, will cost you dearly. When you reach this point you are doomed” (p. 117). Just as the man in To Build a Fire underestimated his natural environment and perished, so too might those who venture into the harshness of the desert, believing that survival is easy, assured, and close at hand.

The Cordyceps fungus, as it manifests in The Last of Us, upends conceptions of nature as a benign entity in desperate need of salvation, perhaps with an occasional hint of dark humor. The fungal infection is, in the most literal sense, anthropomorphized, given that human victims play host. Yet whereas some veins of environmental writing speak to a great reckoning to be paid for humanity’s abuse of natural resources and the earth, the game never presents Cordyceps as a punishment. More simply, in the conflict between the human and natural worlds, the natural world wins handily as it reclaims not only humanity but human society as well. Even some 20 years later, humans cannot control the fungus, cure it, or prevent its continued spread. The only hope seems to be that the evolutionary scales may tip over time in humanity’s favor via people, like Ellie, developing or being born with immunity to infection.

The Last of Us studies natural law as leveraged against all of humanity, what Charles Walcutt (1956) deems “panoramic” naturalism (p. 21). Yet the game’s narrative evolves the concept of naturalistic writing beyond its older parameters, bridging the original with newer forms of environmental writing. Specifically, naturalism normally features protagonists who are out of control, completely subjected to the whims of the natural world. In The Last of Us, while Joel does have a marked propensity for violence when he feels it is warranted, he is not otherwise wholly without control. His choices are instead marked by strategy and logic. The game presents a world of limited control and agency gained through small choices, some of them to terrible ends. For example, after Joel’s smuggling partner and possible lover, Tess, is infected, she chooses to end her life in a shoot-out with government forces, thereby buying Joel and Ellie time for an escape. Tess’s demise is certain, the method within her control. Joel’s choice to ultimately save Ellie from the Fireflies, which will be discussed in greater depth, is a relatively small choice—one man saving one teenager for whom he has become a surrogate father. Yet his choice reverberates, potentially across all of humanity. Although the protagonist of the strict naturalistic form often fails, Joel succeeds in his aims. The tension lies in how individual gamers react to that choice. Julia Driver (2008) speaks of morality and the issue of blame with an analogy that asks readers to consider someone burning down his or her own house out of provable carelessness. In that scenario, Driver argues, people will blame the person, not factors like oxygen fueling the fire, as the source of the disaster (p. 428). So too might some gamers blame Joel directly for saving Ellie, an act that might remove the possibility of a cure, as opposed to seeing the other complications, such as 20 years of failed attempts to gain a cure, as reasons justifying his actions. The Last of Us, then, asks to be considered as an evolved definition of naturalism that reflects both the larger tensions in the story and the technological ability, via a brilliantly rendered game, to present them. In its exploration of the construction of morality, the narrative also contains traces of Emile Zola, specifically with regard to “rejecting absolute standards of morality and free will” (Lehan, 1995, p. 47). The natural landscape and the question of moral choice illustrate the fragile nature of human communities and the illusions that anyone may hold, without wavering, to maintain any code of moral conduct.

The evolution of the Cordyceps fungus, which jumps species and secures its survival by efficiently infecting a majority of the world’s human population, ties in with the theories of Charles Darwin, most especially regarding its “pitiless waste of individuals and even of whole species” (Walcutt, 1956, p. 8). The shadow Darwin casts over both naturalism and the narrative themes of the game requires examination. Darwin’s theories “implied consequences so wrenching that individual acceptance varied dizzyingly” (Budd, 1995, p. 29) at the time he first published his observations. Specifically concerning different characters and factions presented in the game, some fight, even against 20 years of evidence to the contrary, to “defeat” the Cordyceps fungus and reestablish human control over nature. Others, including Joel, take it as a foregone conclusion that the world cannot be remade and that the Cordyceps infection will be a constant threat unless human beings develop immunity over time. More generally, the human species is evolving transformed by Cordyceps without any sense of malice or evil. Instead, the simple fact is that Cordyceps is better and stronger, defying all human attempts to develop a cure or vaccination against it. The Last of Us further problematizes the pandemic infection by couching it within the realm of possibility, demonstrating how a simple mutation of the Cordyceps fungus, one small step by which it secures its own future, changes everything.

The Cordyceps infection already exists in the real world, just not in human beings. The Last of Us combines a number of the features of different Cordyceps fungal invasions and combines them into one terrifying fungus. The real-world strains of Cordyceps have some differing characteristics. As Kyle Hill explains, “Out of the 400 species in the [Cordecyps] genus, all of these parasites make their homes inside the bodies of others—mostly in insects but some even in other fungi” (n.p.). That is not to say that all of the Cordyceps fungi cause a zombie-like fate in their unfortunate victims. A few of the species are harvested and utilized for human medicines. Yet those species of Cordyceps that do infect and take over living hosts do so with brutal finality. One species, which focuses on using ants as hosts, does actually take over the ants’ brains, creating zombies of sorts, under the control of the fungus. Writing specifically of the infection in ants, Scientist E. S. Nnakumusana (1987) observes that the fungus “invaded the tissue just behind the eye, attacked the brain, and the fat body was completely destroyed” (p. 1). His detached clinical observations describing the pathology belie this skilful takeover of a host’s body. Another strain, which targets tarantulas, releases spores throughout the spider’s dying body that burst up and out of the host in an eerily beautiful profusion of colorful, finger-like mushrooms.

The disease in the game combines the hijacking of the brain with the transformation of the body. The infected humans progress through three stages. In the first stage, the characters, called runners, are still recognizably human but under the control of the fungus. Their instincts are to hunt down and infect other hosts. In the second stage, the “clickers” have undergone a complete transformation. While they are still nominally human in basic form, their heads are now twisted by the fungus, which has exploded, vividly colored and blossomlike, beyond the initial point of infection in the brain. Clickers are blinded as a result and use the adaptation of mouth clicking as a type of sonar. In the final stage, the “bloater” is hugely distorted and sprouts fungal plates all over the body. Again, with these last two forms, the focus is on infecting new hosts, irrespective of whether the clickers or bloaters survive the process of infecting. The game draws more inspiration from science than just the name of the fungus. Although humans may waste a valuable resource, Cordyceps in the game does not because “once a clicker completes its cycle, the fungus forces the human into a dark and secluded corner. It is where the human finally dies. Bleeding back into the environment, spores effuse from the corpse to infect again” (n.p.) (Hill, 2013). This creates a lethal nemesis for humanity, that is, the fungus does not need a host to survive nor to survive long term, and it does not require one infected host to infect another directly via a bite. The fungus is perfectly capable of transmitting itself via spores, making the environment a potential source of infection. However, unlike a traditional undead story, the infected, once they reach the clicker stage, do not continuously and aggressively hunt new victims. Some of the clickers appear dormant until roused by sound. Unlike its zombie counterpart, the Cordecyps fungus possesses infinite patience and therefore a greater chance for long-term survival. Although a horde of zombies might be depicted as charging en masse, at which point they might easily be mowed down by gunfire or other means, the cordecyps fungus bides its time, waiting for humans to stumble upon it.

Regarding the beginnings of the naturalist movement, when the first revolutions in scientific discovery brought forth a sea change in the way humans viewed themselves and their hitherto unquestioned place of dominance in the world, Charles Walcutt (1956) notes, “When the Nature which was assumed to be a symbol and version of God and of man’s spirit grew under scientific analysis into a force which first controlled man’s will and presently made it seem an illusion, then it became alien and terrifying; and man’s nature too revealed, upon further exploration, depths that were repellent rather than godlike” (p. 12). The recent technological and scientific revolutions are no less powerful in their ability to upend the ways humans view the world and subject it to their will. Advances in science, such that the very code of DNA has been categorized and understood, coupled with the infiltration of technology into nearly every aspect of life in recent years have allowed for a resurgence of this previous sense of infallibility, the sense of the absolute certainty of human dominance that existed before the first scientific revolutions began to question that place. What would it take for humans to once again feel that repulsion, that sense of feeling exposed as being less, perhaps even unworthy of any place of prominence in the natural order of the world?

The Last of Us juxtaposes the reconfiguration of human morality against decaying American urban and suburban backdrops. Everywhere that Joel and Ellie travel, a marked difference exists between the relative calm of the natural world, which has reclaimed both the vast cities and urban sprawl of human culture, and the creaking, unstable, and rusted remnants of all of humanity’s progress. The pair initially moves west, traveling from Boston to Salt Lake City before returning to Jackson County. Along the way, they encounter symbolic hallmarks of American progress, such as the University of Colorado and a hospital in Salt Lake City. All are ruined, the survivors scattered, dead, or infected. As Oli Welsh (2013) notes, “It’s the classic journey into the west, the pioneers tale—but turned on its head, because this anti-Western isn’t about the birth of a nation. It’s about the death of one” (n.p.). Welsh’s point is supported further by the inclusion of an American colonial history museum, most likely a mimetic reimagining of Boston’s Commonwealth Museum. The record of American history lies broken and forgotten on its infection-infested floors. However, much America has died as a culture and an ideal, the remains of the cities through which Joel and Ellie travel thrive with new life. The natural world—plants, animals, birds, and the like—exists unfettered, and the cities are eerily beautiful in their new, verdant form. The buildings are potentially lethal now, as many are barely standing. This speaks to how little hold humans have over their environment, as within two decades, hundreds of years of progress are easily swallowed. This is not nature “red in tooth and claw,” as envisaged by Alfred Lord Tennyson, but nature capable of beating humans at their own game. In one darkly humorous sequence, monkeys formerly used as test subjects at the University of Colorado now dominate the campus. In one the game’s most peaceful and beautiful moments, Joel and Ellie come across a herd of giraffes in Salt Lake City, long free of the confines of the zoo and thriving. By contrast, to their continued detriment, human survivors have not found a way to cope. Their fences, trip wires, and the like prove ineffective against the infection, failing every time. Every survivor enclave visited by Joel and Ellie is overrun or infiltrated by the infection. Many survivors choose to isolate themselves further from the natural world, instead of trying to understand it, by hiding in decayed buildings and quarantine zones. Ellie admits to having never walked through the woods.

Dovetailing with the game’s fascinating new iterations of naturalism is its exploration of human morality. The Last of Us is, in many ways, an American story. The entirety of the story takes place across several states, with recognizable geography and landmarks, adding a sense of reality to the narrative. It is certainly a mimetic landscape, given that it is at once recognizable and destroyed, that place, any place, and no place. However, the game extrapolates the issue of morality in a way that finally takes it beyond the borders of any one nation. The prologue scenes, taking place in Joel’s hometown somewhere in the suburbs or on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, shatter the illusion between small town life and the urban landscape. Initially, Joel and his brother Tommy believe that the infection is “just…in the city.” They believe that small town life, with its illusions of safety and of a higher sense of morality, will be untouchable by something as horrific as Cordyceps. It is only in the urban areas, those places overly crowded and prone to crime and other moral failings, that chaos on such a magnitude can occur. However, the game shatters the conceit of small-town safety as a preferred mode of modern American life and challenges the nostalgic longing for “simpler” times. Indeed, the first infected human encountered in the game is Joel’s neighbor Jimmy Cooper, who crashes, bloody and maddened, through Joel’s sliding glass backdoor. Cooper wears a suit, an emblem of the sameness between the urban and the rural, the concrete-laden cities, and the outwardly genteel suburbs. Human society conflates into one entity and finds itself lacking in both the challenge of the infection and the ability to hold together.

As Joel and Ellie travel through abandoned neighborhoods across the country, they find many of the houses bear law enforcement marks identical to those placed on the houses flooded during Hurricane Katrina, with symbols indicating survivors, date checked, and the number of dead. Aside from a few relics—a picture in a frame, a journal written by an anxious teen during the evacuations—nothing remains of the people who were once there. Morality exists as a fragile thread across American society specifically and human society more generally. But not a morality tinged with religion, self-righteousness, or deeply philosophical thought. As a player encounters increasingly more survivors during the game, he or she sees morality couched in clearer and more provocative terms, leveled in many ways to the simple matter of whether a character acts only in self-interest, acts with compassion, or acts with senseless brutality.

Survival exists as the sole concern for those remaining uninfected. As such, the mechanisms for survival manifest through restructuring morality and controlling resources. As Louis Budd (1995) posits, “Life is a chancy process rather than a path toward redemption” (p. 29). The closest the game comes toward showing the possibility of a successful survivor community lies with Joel’s brother Tommy and his group’s community in Jackson County, Wyoming. They symbolically and literally make use of their natural environment by trying to work with it, as when they restart a hydroelectric dam as a source of power. This burgeoning group of survivors, some “20 families strong” as described by Tommy, holds no illusions about reclaiming a lost world. Tommy reflects this attitude in his thoughts about the infection, which he says is “part of the world we live in.” He and the members of his community avoid further antagonism with the natural environment and one another and seek to construct a safe and decent community. By contrast, some of the other factions at odds with one another, their state made worse by the threats of the natural landscape, seek not redemption, but an existence measured in hours, days, weeks, or perhaps months. The game explores constructions of morality as measured not only against Joel but also against several main antagonist groups the player encounters at various points in the narrative.

The first antagonist group is the federal government, badly fractured and existing as a series of “quarantine zones,” which are essentially armed camps in the rusted and broken ruins of the largest American cities. Joel lives in Boston’s quarantine zone at the start of the game proper. These camps and the soldiers guarding them claim to offer some safety, but this comes at the sacrifice of most personal freedoms. There is little food, conscripted labor, and daily curfews. Citizens of the camp are assigned labor details and can be compelled to work “outside,” the name given to the areas beyond the quarantine zones that seethe with infection. Refusal might result in the withholding of ration cards, imprisonment, or execution. Even the sense of safety against the infection proves fleeting, as several people are summarily executed where they stand after testing positive for infection. The government offers no sense of purpose, no guidance, and no guiding sense of morality. It has also routinely abandoned survivors when quarantine zones became overrun by the infected. A telling example of this comes when Joel finds a student’s diary at the University of Colorado detailing how the students trapped there had been left without assistance or hope of rescue for 9 months after the initial outbreak. Presumably, given the evidence, none of the students survived.

Next of note in the game are the hunters, a catch-all descriptor given to dangerous gangs of survivors who hole up in the wreckages of the big cities, such as Pittsburgh, outside the quarantine zones. They gain additional resources by luring and trapping outsiders who are deemed “tourists” and are robbed and killed. Joel and Ellie are ambushed and nearly killed trying to cross through Pittsburgh, then followed relentlessly until they finally escape the city. The hunters are not easily defined as wholly evil due to their loyalty to one another and their anger when one of them is killed. Their origins also complicate their current status as roving and violent gangs. Artifacts and graffiti left behind in Pittsburgh speak to a pitched battle between the government forces, which withheld resources and eventually abandoned the quarantine zone and the survivors left there—resistance fighters like the hunters—who initially sought only enough food and shelter to accommodate everyone. Without a larger sense of moral purpose and without any reason to construct one, the once good-intentioned hunters, who might have protested against the government’s hoarding of food, devolve.

The next faction, encountered during the game’s “Winter” chapter, consists of an enclave of survivors led by the charismatic David. The Winter section is the game’s bleakest and the one that brings out all the characters’ most primal and animalistic tendencies. The game’s dynamics are further shifted because the player alternates between playing Ellie, wrenchingly as vulnerable as she is alone, and Joel, who suffered a grotesque injury when impaled on a piece of rebar at the end of the “Fall” chapter and is now slow and cumbersome to maneuver. This switching between characters provides another example of how the game transcends the mechanics of playing, affording a deeper connection between gamer and game. David is arguably the game’s worst villain, more so than even the Fireflies who plan to kill Ellie. The scenes with David quickly turn harrowing as he is revealed to be both a cannibal and a sexual predator. He acts as a quintessential child molester might. He begins by befriending Ellie, acting as a benign and concerned father figure when Ellie agrees to trade part of a deer she kills for antibiotics. She drops her guard enough to eventually be captured by him and his cohorts. Once imprisoned, Ellie sees David’s true nature when, as he reaches through the bars of her make-shift cell, he promises to try to help her because she is “special.” Ellie’s crest-fallen expression shows her understanding of David’s intent.

As this is unfolding, Joel uses any method at his disposal, including torturing two of David’s men, to learn Ellie’s location. However, his moral code remains consistent throughout the game, even when he is most tested. He fights for his self-interest, which also includes Ellie’s, but never kills an innocent survivor. Joel and Ellie reunite in the burning remains of a restaurant. When Joel finds her, Ellie has managed to overcome David and is hacking at him, mercilessly, with a machete long after he is dead. While the player cannot view David’s increasingly mutilated corpse, he or she hears each of the metallic and meaty blows and sees the resulting sprays of blood. When Joel realizes what she is doing, he stops her. She has already killed a few times, out of necessity, during the game. Joel prevents her from evolving into a person who could kill out of fury. David was apparently unsuccessful in raping Ellie, but, she sobs, “He tried to….” Because the game intercuts to this scene between Ellie and Joel, much might have transpired in the interim. David’s actions represent the lowest manifestations of humanity. He kills indiscriminately for food and preys sexually on the most vulnerable of the survivors.

Despite the stomach-turning idea of their cannibalism and that many members seem to know of David’s penchant for younger girls, the group is not wholly evil but is at best terribly misguided about the preeminent mechanisms for survival. The player overhears several of them, quietly and privately, questioning David’s fitness for leadership. The group is not a community composed of characters like the hunters who are depicted as being violent without cause and also without families. David’s community contains women and children, just like the Jackson County community. Yet even though not all members are corrupt or inherently evil, they fail as a community. This failure circles back to a lack of consistent morality, given that some in the group presumably allow David to molest whomever he chooses and the group’s lack of integration into the natural environment. Instead of attempting to grow food or raise livestock, they turn to cannibalism and murder. Joel finds an inventory listing the amount of human “meat” the group has captured each month. Sometimes, it is in the thousands of pounds. They murder other survivors as a source of food, and they would assert, as David does when Ellie learns they are cannibals, “You kill to survive, so do we.” As much as the game underscores the lack of viability in the remaining human communities, it does so via an exploration of the self-defeating moral systems these groups put into practice.

The Fireflies purport themselves to be a resistance group, but it is never fully clear what, exactly, they are fighting against and why. The game reveals the background of the Fireflies using what are termed in-game as artifacts, such as notes, newspaper headlines, graffiti, and the like. Early in the outbreak, perhaps a few years in, the Fireflies appear to have been fighting the federal government and its imposition of martial law and quarantine zones around the country. However, 20 years later, they have more than lost that battle. The Fireflies have been all but hunted down, as represented by the Fireflies Joel encounters in Boston’s quarantine zone, the game’s first main setting. Their other principal purpose is a search for a vaccine against Cordyceps, which even their own documentation proves utterly futile. They have not fared any better against the infected humans, having been attacked at their main medical research facility at the University of Colorado and forced to retreat to a hospital in Salt Lake City. They resemble their namesake for their bright shine of promise, but it is a light easily extinguished. Marlene, a primary leader of the group and the one who convinces Joel to take Ellie to the Fireflies’s research lab, claims the moral high ground throughout, both in her resistance to the government and in her choices regarding Ellie.

The Fireflies’s ultimate stance, then, lies in their willingness to sacrifice a person with immunity—someone whose immunity may ensure the survival of the human race, should that trait be passed to the next generation—for the possibility of saving themselves. They speak always in terms of a vaccine. While a vaccine would be invaluable, they remain utterly unsuccessful at developing one. Modern science in the real world has not produced effective vaccinations against fungal infections, currently existing vaccinations are only in clinical trial phases, and the game does not present a world with drastic scientific advances. Therefore, the endeavor appears fruitless. Moreover, the Cordyceps infection actively claims new victims, with approximately 60% of the human population already succumbed. Therefore, logic would dictate that Ellie’s value lies in keeping her alive and seeing whether she can pass along immunity as a genetic trait, not in vivisecting her.

Artifacts related to the Fireflies’s research hint at a chronic lack of moral and ethical judgment. Marlene’s journal pages reveal that she feels little conflict about sacrificing Ellie. She writes, “Apparently, there’s no way to extricate the parasite without eliminating the host. Fancy way of saying we gotta kill the fucking kid. And now they’re asking for my go ahead. The tests just keep getting harder and harder, don’t they? I’m so tired. I’m exhausted and I just want this to end…so be it. Oh I miss you Anna (Ellie’s mother). Your daughter will be with you soon.” The choice seems to create little internal conflict, and she quickly resolves to give the go-ahead. If anything, Marlene attempts to mitigate her own moral guilt by not having Joel executed immediately upon their retrieval of Ellie, something her fellow Fireflies push for. Marlene’s hesitance comes from her wanting to leave Joel alive because he understands how hard the choice is. Yet she misses the point and fails to conceive of the reality—that Joel will not go along with her choice and justify it for her. Marlene’s attitude is additionally distressing, given that Ellie thinks of the older woman as a friend and trusts her completely. A research note left behind by one of the Fireflies adds further complication regarding Ellie. It reads, “All the sacrifices of those men and women, or worse, will not be in vain.” While the words might refer to all the Fireflies or all the people who have died, the words also have a darker implication. Given that a researcher reflects this way, the words suggest that many more immune humans have been found over the years and have been dissected or otherwise experimented on as “sacrifices.”

The narrative inevitably returns to center on Joel and the choices he makes throughout the story. In The Last of Us, as opposed to titles like BioShock or Telltale Games’s The Walking Dead, the narrative plays out along a set trajectory, meaning that an individual player does not make any story-altering choices for Joel. The player’s main options are to kill most enemies, render them unconscious, or sneak past them. None of these acts impact the story. However, this choice in gameplay style represents an ethical choice that the player makes. Miguel Sicart (2009) asserts, “We need to understand the active role of players as ethical agents in the configuration of the ethical experience of gameplay” (p. 194), as an argument against the dismissal of all video games as being inherently incapable of exploring issues of ethics and morality, either within the game or the player’s own, and able to provide only the mechanical gameplay experience of meeting goals and objectives. The Last of Us includes sections in which killing is the only option as well as those in which the gamer can opt to avoid bloodshed. This scenario, not unique to The Last of Us, explores what Don Gotterbarn (2010) describes as an ethical issue surrounding video games because the gamer “can, and is sometimes encouraged, to perform actions that are morally proscribed in the real world” (p. 369). The larger issue of ethics and video games moves beyond the scope of this work. However, The Last of Us allows the gamer to adapt his or her play style in many places to personal preference and those choices are problematized. Killing every enemy combatant in an area, clearing it rather than sneaking through, is not a cut and dried choice. Clearing an area of enemies to eliminate all threats, from a ludological perspective, renders exploring that area for artifacts, resources, and additional information much simpler. From a narratological perspective, the gamer might rightfully assume that any enemy left can, and will, attempt to kill the player.

Thus, the choices of individual gamers prove interesting from both a ludological perspective—how the gamer plays—and a moral one—why the gamer makes particular choices. However, The Last of Us is essentially the story of Joel and Ellie. My own gaming experience illustrates this distinction. In Dead Island (2011) and Dead Island: Riptide (2013), both FPS zombie games, I felt little investment in the very thin story lines, that is, the player is immune; escape the island. Rather, my investment in the game was primarily centered on the creative and gory killing of zombies and secondarily focused on the rewards earned by side quests to help other survivors. Although the game Dark Souls II (2014) has an interesting mythology and story, these too failed to capture my interest because of the intense focus required in learning the mechanics necessary to play the game. By contrast, I felt a heavy emotional investment in The Last of Us. In some sections, the game functions as a third-person shooter, requiring the player to master gameplay mechanics. I often chose to clear areas of all enemies but not always for the same reason. Sometimes, I wanted to explore an area without constantly sneaking around. Other times, I was angry about being ambushed by hunters, or David’s henchman, and felt morally justified in killing them. The game also asks the player to watch the story of Joel and Ellie unfold. By the end of the game, I had played and viewed the world through both characters. A full exploration of the gaming environment yields more depth through artifacts left by both survivors and antagonists, such as Marlene. The game consistently asks until its closing moment that the player consider the meaning of “morality” and shows how that definition proves slippery and ephemeral. Although my experiences and reactions may not be universal to all gamers, they likely represent the norm. Gamers respond to the game at hand, whether it lends itself to zombie killing, mastering gameplay controls, or a deeper contemplation of its story.

In The Last of Us, the player does not make decisions for Joel, but rather bears witness to his decisions, and whether the player agrees or disagrees, he or she must play through those choices as an active participant. Gilbert Harman’s (2012) thoughts about the construction of morality prove relevant here. He argues, “It is a mistake to define moral standards as those standards violations of which warrants nontrivial guilt feelings or to define one’s individual moral standards as those for which one is susceptible to guilt for violating” (p. 21). Yet such theories rely on a recognizable world such as we are accustomed to seeing today and expect to see tomorrow. Not a world that disappears nearly overnight. Thus, Joel does not construct his own personal code of morality and moral agency against any sense of guilt. He saves Ellie, perhaps at the expense of every other person, without remorse. Early in the game, Tess asserts to him, “We are shitty people,” to which he replies, “We are survivors.” For Joel, enduring one more day and saving the life of one person hold more merit than saving humankind.

Yet Joel’s actions cannot be classified as wholly selfish. The Last of Us consistently contends that community equates to danger and that the human race may not be worthy of saving. It seems worthy only of a second chance, over a number of years of hardship and slow evolution, if resistance like Ellie’s begins to predominate. Joel saves Ellie for himself, so he can have a second opportunity at fatherhood. However, Ellie’s character develops over the many hours of the game. She is thoughtful, courageous, and presents leadership qualities this transformed world will need. She is willing to give up agency over her own body by subjecting it to the Fireflies’s tests, her original understanding of what they intend for her. Neil Druckmann’s change of mind regarding the presentation to players of Joel’s rescue of Ellie from the Fireflies underscores the moral ambiguity surrounding his choice. Druckmann notes in an interview with Game Informer that this rescue, starting when Joel bursts into the operating theater, takes Ellie, and evades capture and ending with him first gravely wounding Marlene, then killing her with a bullet to the head, was initially not playable. It was a long cutscene. Druckmann later opted to make this sequence playable in parts, forcing the player, who has bonded to both Joel and Ellie, to guide Joel through his desperate flight through the hospital, with a drugged and vulnerable Ellie in his arms.

In his final confrontation with Marlene, Joel makes one of two moral choices. Marlene first tries to convince Joel to “do the right thing” and give up Ellie. She reasons, ruthlessly, that Ellie is likely to end up raped or murdered if left alive, so why not just kill her now, when she may be of use. He wounds Marlene with a bullet to her torso but then pauses to consider. She begs for her life, a plea that Joel counters with “You’ll just come after her” before killing Marlene. Of all the killings Joel has carried out in the game, this is the most personal. Despite some players objecting to his choice, Joel is not wrong about the Fireflies. There is every indication that Marlene, if left alive, would mount incessant and violent efforts to find Joel and Ellie. Given that she knew and was once close to his brother Tommy, if she could track down Tommy in Jackson County, she would have a good chance at finding Ellie and also putting everyone in that community at risk of death. Ellie would never have a life of peace and would remain a fugitive for the foreseeable future. Therein lies the impossible but moral choice that must be made.

The game concludes with a final exchange between Ellie and Joel, marking his final moral choice, as they overlook the safety and community of Jackson County’s small, burgeoning survivor’s community. Their exchange is left open to interpretation but also strongly indicates that both Ellie and Joel are complicit in living with Joel’s choice to save her. As they flee the Fireflies’s hospital by car, a groggy Ellie asks what has happened. Joel tells her that the Fireflies’s experiments did not work but also that “there’s a whole lot more like you,” people with immunity, so she is free of obligation to the Fireflies. He gives her back personal and moral agency. Ellie now demands, seemingly already knowing the answer, “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true,” and Joel swears. Ellie studies him closely and responds, “Okay.” Neil Druckmann asserts of the ending, “I thought it would be interesting to take that simple word, but the way she (voice actress Ashley Johnston) would play it would have such a different subtext, and people could interpret it in different ways” (“Art of Endings,” p. 37). Whether Ellie does or does not believe Joel, she appears to understand why he made his choice. They are family. They protect their own but do not kill maliciously. They try to work with the world as it is, not how they may wish it to be. It is that smallest construction of human community on which the future rests. This sequence, like Marlene’s death, was not without its controversy between those gamers who agreed and disagreed with this apparent complicity. That very act of debating, again, underscores the value of the game as a fictive exploration of human morality.

Video game scholars debate the issue of ethics and morality in video games from all sides. At one end are those who believe that video games are fundamentally incapable of exploring moral issues, and on the other end are those who see video games as a powerful narratological tool able to explore complex subjects. For example, on the more negative end of the spectrum, Graeme Kirkpatrick (2011) writes of the “deep ambivalence of form” (p. 16) of video games. However, the major problem of many existing critiques of video games and their meaning as a multimillion dollar industry popular with gamers across a wide demographic lies in the temptation to combine video games under broad categories rather than assessing each game, as with film or literature, on its individual merits. Games like The Last of Us use the fictive environment, in this case the post–Cordecyps landscape, to explore morality along its spectrum, from acts of obvious evil to decisions squarely in the gray. John Murphy and José Zagal (2011) explore the issue of morality in gaming by defining a subset of ethics termed the ethics of care. They argue, “The ethics of care differ from traditional moral theory in that there is a greater focus on personal, partial and emotional experience. At the heart of the ethics of care is the assertion that rational thought and decision-making is not the only valid moral motivation” (p. 71). They also assert that this mode developed from a feminist perspective designed to counter a more masculine set of ethics focused on ideals such as “duty, bargaining…and calculation of costs and benefits” (p. 70). The Last of Us distinguishes itself not only for its more complicated exploration of morality through this lens of care but also by placing a male protagonist in the position to make decisions regarding a teenager out of his paternal love for her. This is what ultimately drives Joel to save Ellie, kill Marlene, and seek at least the veneer of a normal life for them.

The only glimpse of hope the game provides into a stable and supportive place for the construction of community lies at the game’s end, in Jackson County. Joel’s brother Tommy previously extolled the virtues of this enclave, a place where children can enjoy movie night and a semblance of normal life reasserts itself. Yet even here, with the promise of this haven, it remains only that, a promise. Jackson County is self-sufficient, a place where survivors are returning to agriculture to endure. This is in stark contrast to the quarantine zones, where people are half-starved yet have no sense of how to grow the simplest foodstuffs. The game never takes players inside this community—it is only glimpsed from above as Joel and Ellie descend into the valley where it lies. Darker possibilities also prevail, specifically, what might become of Ellie if her immunity becomes known. Tommy already knows about it and may well have taken others, perhaps his wife, into his confidence. Joel’s actions in Salt Lake City could easily be discovered should any surviving Fireflies make their way by chance to Jackson County. Further still, Ellie’s bite is not easily hidden, prominent as it is on her forearm and kept from view only because she wears long-sleeved shirts. One can easily imagine a scenario in which she is careless, someone catches a glimpse of her bite, and she is revealed as immune. From there, it might well play out as it did with the Fireflies—a group of desperate people willing to dissect her merely for the possibility of a cure or vaccine. It is a future beyond the boundaries of the game and its fictive exploration of morality, one that eschews easy answers and the comfort that human beings will always make the right and moral choice.