Hello, this is the first post of my blog where I'll be exploring some of my favourite games and hopefully sharing some interesting insights about how I see and understand their narrative content and design. This first blog post is actually a video I made with my brother, combining my love of theatre and games to explore The Last of Us Part Two from the viewpoint of legendary German theatre maker Bertolt Brecht. The full text of the video is transcribed below for anyone who would prefer to read rather than watch. Enjoy!
Hello hello, we are two brothers who like playing and talking about video games, and for some reason we’ve decided to turn some of those rambling conversations into something people can watch because well…. why not? For this first video we wanted to take a game we’ve both played recently, and do a bit of an analysis from our shared perspective of crippling student debt accumulated through overpriced post-graduate degrees, and working in a performing arts industry that is totally not on it’s knees and being dealt a final death blow by the pandemic. RIP Theatre. The game in question is The Last of Us Part 2, and the lads in question are Aristotle and Bertolt Brecht. Here we go.
Part 1 - The Aristotelian Unities
The year is 335 BC and an upstart philosopher by the name of Aristotle, you may have heard of him, has just published the Poetics. It’s probably the earliest (surviving) example of work about dramatic theory (no biggie), and in it Aristotle seeks to understand the structure and function of the great works of art of his time. He describes seven essential elements of drama: theme, chorus, spectacle yaddy yaddy yada, but the most important thing he describes is plot. Plot, Aristotle rules, is the pivotal part of any story, as plot is all about showing the consequence of action. For the Greeks, theatre has an incredibly important societal role. It’s mandated that all citizens of Greek society must attend the theatre when the great festivals are held, as they help teach the morals and values of the society. Plot is how that is conveyed; something happens because of the action a character takes, the audience sees and learns whether that action was a good or bad thing by the outcome of the plot.
Central to all this is unity. For an audience to understand the plot, and learn the moralistic message of the play, three unities must be in place. Unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action. So a story needs to all take place within a continuous time period, within a certain, or limited set of locations, and should follow the actions and outcomes of one principal main character. In tragedy, this character always has to start from a position of relative high status or happiness, and then descend into misery through a reversal of fortune of some kind. The final, important point that Aristotle makes through the description of unities and character is that often this is the work of fate. Think of sweet Oedipus, who in trying to defy the fate set out for him inadvertently ends up shagging his mum and killing his dad. The moral message is simple; trying to avoid your destiny will lead to ruin, and a watching audience would be encouraged to accept their lot in life.
Part 2 - Epic Theatre
Roll forward to 1930 and a young German playwright by the name of Bertolt Brecht is making waves in European theatreland. War is on the horizon, Germany is beginning to descend into fascism, and Brecht is trying to create a theatre that turns audiences from passive observers into active participants all striving to bring about a more fair and equal society. Brecht has had enough with Aristotle, he’s tearing up his work, and he’s taking a big old schizer over the conventions of drama that have ruled for nearly 2000 years. Brecht doesn’t want people watching drama to get caught up in the immersion. He’s raging about how the Aristotelian unities, all these nicely packaged, well-thought out and complete stories with their beginnings, middles, and ends, are turning people into fatalistic idiots who have no perception about how the world might change for the better. No more stories about the inevitability of doom, Brecht wants a theatre where people can see the moments of choice, and can envisage what an alternative, better future might look like.
So Brecht develops what he calls ‘alienation’, a series of techniques designed to remind the audience of the falsehood of everything, to make them feel detached from the psychological and emotional reality of the story, and instead be able to look remotely at the societal implications and thematics of the plot. To do this he, shock horror, has the actors talk directly to the audience, acknowledging their presence rather than building the so-called ‘fourth wall’. He says screw the unities, I want stories that jump from person to person, place to place, and happen all over time and history. He creates visual pictures that actively show the mechanical workings of theatre: open lighting, sights of people working backstage, or even no set at all, no visual aid to help the immersion into the setting. AND SPOILER ALERT, the madman even puts in prologues that spill the entire plot right at the beginning, a big old screw you to the ideas of suspense and dramatic revelation that drive Aristotelian works. And the point of all this alienation, thinks Brecht, is that the audience will no longer be sat there fully immersed in the story with no sense of agency in how the action is unfolding, but instead go ‘hey, idiot character, that was a dumbass decision you made there, here’s what you could’ve done different’. I mean, the man did have to flee Nazi Germany for fear of being executed due to the very anti-facist nature of his work, so you can kind of understand why he wanted to shake up the whole unities, fatalistic model of drama.
Part 3 - Video Games
Ok so we’ve got our Brecht, we’ve got our Aristotle, but what in the name of Our Patron Saint Waluigi does this have to do with video games, and particularly The Last of Us Part 2? Well, before we dig into the good stuff of Naughty Dog’s magnum opus, let’s consider game narratives more broadly. Story-driven, cinematic games, the type of which Naughty Dog is known for, are a relatively recent phenomenon. These types of adventure games began in earnest and rapidly expanded during the latter stages of the Xbox360 and PS3 era, think of Uncharted, Heavy Rain, Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, games like that, as technology was just beginning to handle such ambition, scope, and detail graphically. Before this emergence, the games that had the most detailed stories, where you could convincingly say narrative was at the forefront, all tended to be traditional RPGs. We’re talking Baldur’s Gate, Chrono Trigger, The Elder Scrolls, your Final Fantasies, all those legends of the genre that pioneered massive, non-linear, detailed stories in games. Coming back to Brecht, the RPG genre had something at its heart which made them decidedly Epic in the Brechtian sense: choice. These games were all about the player leading what they wanted to do: For example, you want that guy in your party go and get him, ooo bad luck that quest is going to get your party member killed, you want to ignore the main story and join the thieves guild you ignore the main story and go and join the thieves guild! The interactivity and choice means the player is always seeing the potentials of other futures, and doesn’t feel stuck or railroaded into a predetermined outcome. But then big cinematic story games come along, and WAM BAM THANK YOU MAM we’re back with Aristotle. No more choice really, much less agency, but supposedly way more more complex types of stories, with more nuance and depth, and way more immersion. Except, is this actually the case?
Ok, let’s finally dig into The Last of Us Part 2. HUGE SPOILER ALERT HERE, we’re gonna spoil the whole damn thing so if you haven’t played the game yet and you don’t want it spoiled you really should stop here. Still here? Right, so you know the bit in the basement of the hospital where Ellie has Nora cornered? You know the bit, the push square to cave someone’s head in with a crowbar bit? Yeah, that fun little moment. Both of us almost stopped playing the game right then and there. A big old can of nope. And we’re guessing it wasn’t only us who sat there, dejectedly staring at Ellie’s rage-filled face, for a good five minutes hoping that another option would miraculously appear. You know why? Because of this little bitch [insert picture of Aristotle]. The first half of this game is covered in the stench of Aristotle. We’ve got a tragic hero who’s fatal flaw (read, Ellie’s inability to forgive Joel for stripping her of the choice about whether she lives or dies for a greater good in The Last of Us part 1) reduces them to a state of misery from a starting position of prosperity (read, the idyllic life of safety and peace that Ellie and Dina have at the beginning of the game). We’ve got a fatalistic plot that adheres to the unities of time, place, and action. And we’ve got a shallow moralistic message about cycles of violence and being damned to repeat the mistakes of our forefathers. Aristotle here is causing a real problem, because for us, this moment breaks the immersion of the cinematic quality of the game. There is an inherent conflict between the interactivity of video games, and the predetermined nature of the story trying to be told. By pushing square to brutally torture then murder someone, we, the players, are being made to feel complicit in this action, as if we’re an active participant. But in reality, we have no control over this happening, this isn’t our choice, and in our case we don’t want Ellie to do this. We’re nothing more than a passive observer, watching on with horror as the self-driving car we’re sitting in ploughs into a group of pedestrians. This is deeply frustrating, this conflict between agency and narrative, because it completely breaks the immersion in the story, and makes you as a player feel helpless and powerless. We both consider ourselves quite optimistic, hopeful people, so to be sat playing a game that is beating you around the head going, nothing will ever change, violence will be here forever, everything sucks the world sucks and you suck, felt kind of shitty. We were both so close to putting down the controller and stopping playing at that point, but we stuck with it, mostly just to see what the final denouement of the game would be. And boy, are we glad we did.
Part 4 - Epic Revelations
To come straight out with it, neither of us saw the twist in the game coming. After that low of murdering Nora, there wasn’t much we thought could red eem the game. And then, AND THEN! When you first started playing as Abby it was like oh, ok, this is interesting, expecting it to be a 30 minute sidebit that did no more than give her a shallow motivation for why she killed Joel. But that slow dawning realisation that you’re going to replay the whole 3 days from her perspective, that was an incredible moment, and also what makes this game a masterpiece, a MASTERPIECE I TELLS YA! Without this switch up in perspective, this game would be everything I described before, a shallow, fatalistic, depressing tale of violence and transgression. But instead we get something altogether more hopeful, optimistic, and downright brilliant because of a move straight out of the playbook of you guessed it, YA BOY BRECHT.
The decision to invert the perspective for the second half of the game is everything Brecht could want from a piece of epic theatre. It fucks with time, it fucks with who the main character is, it fucks with all of your expectations of how this story is going to be told, and it blows away the limits on how the game can be read. Suddenly it doesn’t feel like an on-rails, nihilistic action game anymore. By switching the perspective to Abby, the player is invited to imagine at every point how things could have been different. You retread all the important moments of choice where Ellie pursues darkness, and see where Abby instead decides to choose hope. Through Lev and their beautiful blossoming friendship you see how none of this is fate, that there is always a way to defy the path set out for you. It’s such bold storytelling and so exciting purely because it shows that even in huge, cinematic story games, the narrative doesn’t need to be beholden to 2000 year old ideas of what plot entails. You get all that glorious immersion that comes from games where player choice (in the traditional, RPG sense) is removed, but you still get to see all the possibilities and potentials within that story for a brighter, better future. If there’s one takeaway that I hope the games industry learns from this game, it’s that exciting narrative choices can breed innovation and a player-base that wants to contribute to making the world a better place. It’s no secret that there has been a lot of controversy across the game sector the past 10 or so years. Whether it’s abuse of female staff, union-busting bosses, the implementation of NFTs (fuck NFTs), or whatever else, there is a lot to feel pessimistic about in gaming. But if we can make games that have a hopeful edge, that do something with their narratives that forces us to look from a new perspective, to engage in choice, to think about the hopeful, then maybe we’ll be in a better place sometime soon. No one piece of art can change the world, but more art like The Last of Us Part 2 could help us break from the malaise and imagine a brighter future. Thanks for watching.