Forty hit and I lost the ability to sleep in on days off.
Between 3 and 4AM I have my first wake-up; sometime in the 5s I wake, berate
and cajole myself to go back to sleep; sometimes I am successful and can make
it all the way to 6:30, but most often I give up at 6 and quit my bed.
When the necessary bodily evacuations are made, coffee is
brewed, and the kitchen is tidied I find myself in a quiet house, able to
engage in whatever pursuit I wish. For the past year this has been playing
video games, the last of which was The Last of Us.
The Part 2 in the
title above shows that I have previously written on well-done, story-driven
video games. Here again Naughty Dog studios got me in the proverbial feels.
I suspected it would. While I deliberately avoid learning
anything about a game’s story before playing it, preferring to “play blind” as
it were, somehow I had heard that The Last of Us had some sad moments.
The clerk at GameStop when I bought my copy commented, “Oh man. Anybody that
can get through the first twenty minutes without crying has got no soul.”
But being aware and prepared took none of the power of the
game away, and when Sarah died there I was, crying in a quiet morning living
room. And though those were the only tears engendered from me by the game, the
way each major section of the game ends with an emotional plot point—Tess’ last
stand; Sam’s fate and Henry’s reaction; Joel calling Ellie “baby-girl”—hit me
hard; to the climax, with Joel’s essential betrayal of the human race by saving
Ellie, which was essentially a human response—a father’s human response.
I played the game through three times in succession, first
on Hard, then Survivor and Survivor + modes, plus two playthroughs of Ellie’s
backstory Left Behind, earning all of the single player trophies in
both. That left only the most difficult Grounded and Grounded+ Modes left, but
I figured that I would want to revisit the game sometime in the future, and
would play them then. So I browsed through our game collection, and decided to
move on to The Legend of Zelda – Skyward Sword.
Having grown up with the Zelda series since getting the
original for my NES when I was eleven, I had been looking forward to Skyward
Sword for years. I played for a few days, but didn’t seem to be warming to
the game. My son, a Zelda fan in his own right, asked me how I was enjoying the
game: I said it was alright so far; I complained that the motion controls were
frustrating; I’m sure when I’ve played for a bit more I’ll like it better. A
few weeks in I accept that transitioning from The Last of Us to Skyward
Sword has affected my enjoyment of the latter, and a lot of that has to do
with me being a father.
Last of Us is set up so that the player is charmed by
Ellie, the one individual immune to the outbreak, falling in love with her
character well before Joel can. But from the opening sequence we understand why
Joel is so reluctant to love: his apocalypse begins with the death of his
daughter—losing what was most important at the outset. In his post-apocalyptic
world, twenty years later, death is too commonplace, and Joel’s philosophy of
survival leaves no room for emotion; feeling love to Joel is antithetical to
survival. But then Joel is stuck escorting a girl across country, a girl near
his daughter’s age when she was killed; a feisty, delightfully foulmouthed girl
that revels in bad puns that, despite her own loss of loved ones can still see
the benefit of finding joy in her life.
Here Naughty Dog has done a brilliant bit of storytelling,
first by having us start the game playing as Sarah, letting us be confused and
scared with her as she experiences the beginning of the outbreak; then by
having us play as Ellie after Joel is wounded. As Ellie we hunt, are trapped,
don’t know who to trust, and eventually have to do some harrowing things in
order to protect Joel and survive. No one likes dying in a video game, and
Joel’s deaths are often brutal, but the first time playing as Ellie and she
died, an infected ripping into her neck, a “No!” burst out of me. As a player,
even though I was playing as her, I had taken on the Joel role of protector;
and because I loved her character, a love enhanced by my being a loving father
to my children, including a daughter Ellie’s age, I took each of her game
deaths hard. There was a shame to it, not playing well enough to keep her
unharmed; but then at the same time when I did play well all the men we had to
kill to survive were doing her psychological harm, culminating in the vicious
final fight with David—who the best of what he was going to do to Ellie if he
prevailed in the fight was cut her up to eat. Here at an impasse in their
struggle, with both wounded and unconscious in a burning building the narrative
returns to you playing as Joel. So that here, in a game that rewarded slow
exploration and stealth, where taking the time to be thorough in your search
for the necessary materials of survival was essential, and any battle you
rushed into only quickened your death scene, your impetus is to get to Ellie as
quickly as possible. To prevail you have to force yourself to suppress this
urge to run and gun, to rush forward, while the character Joel catches up to
the feelings you have had for some time already, realizing that despite all his
efforts to remain cold and distant he has become a father to Ellie; finally
reaching her—not saving her life, for in a last character switch we play Ellie
in her last struggle against David—but saving her from the frenzy of what she
had to do to survive the fight, and Joel calls her “baby-girl,” the term he had
used with his daughter Sarah.
From set-pieces such as this to Skyward Sword, with
its bright colors; from scavenging for items that would ensure your survival to
hunting for bugs and rupees; from morally ambiguous supporting characters
making life-or-death decisions to NPCs with exaggerated movements and
expressions who whine about their boring jobs, broken chandeliers, not being
able to attend a competition; from the frustration of sneaking by a clicker
without them hearing you and attacking to the frustration of moving a stack of
pumpkins to a storage area. Things I would never have minded, or might have
been charmed and felt nostalgic about before seem frivolous when compared to
the experience of protecting Ellie. Being a father I could relate to Joel,
considering what I would do in the face of such circumstances: how far would I
go? Would an uncrossable line exist when it came to keeping one of my children
safe? Playing as Link I can only relate to my younger self: which is a fine
thing to do in the right circumstances; but going from the dark of Last of
Us to the light of Skyward Sword was too jarring a contrast for me
to adjust to.
Often when playing I would think of my children, especially my
daughter who is Ellie’s age. Would they prove as feisty and resourceful as
Ellie? Would they be able to retain their humanity in the face of death and the
dealing of death? Would I have the will to continue surviving if I lost any one
of them?
And this gets to the heart of the effect of good stories on
receptive audiences, and how video games are an exceptional vehicle for such
storytelling. A video game can be as powerful as a book, film, or television
show, but unique because you are a part of the story when you are experiencing
it. It would affect me while I played, and keep me engaged in the story and
characters when not playing.
I’m sure given a few weeks I’ll be fully engaged in Skyward
Sword; I’ll have gotten used to the motion controls, the characters will
begin to seem amusing to me, and I will finish the game having enjoyed it. Then
I will play a few of the other unplayed games in our collection. But then I will
have the urge to return to The Last of Us to play Grounded Mode, where
in the first twenty minutes there will be a good chance I will cry.
