Quinns,

So remember over the weekend we went to the Nine Worlds Geekfest in London, and went to a panel about zombies and our cultural fascination with pandemics? The speakers rang all the right bells — talking about the human desire to know "would I be ready" for a survival scenario, disease as "the great equalizer," and even the reasons zombies work in games (a human form that is alienated, othered, without treading into more problematic class and race fears).

They mentioned The Last of Us as an important addition to our canon on these themes. I see why you're having a hard time seeing where it goes beyond that besides just generally being flawless — despite, as you saliently note, the strange contrast with a game about the aching, hard-won joy of survival asking you to kill a lot of people with nailbombs and so forth.

You're right that the advancement is narrative more than it is mechanical — my own critique of the game, of course, was titled "The Last of Us Is the Least We Should Ask of Video Games." I find it interesting that most of the work I've read about the game hinges on discussing the agency of the women characters. Is it an empowering feminist story, or are we watching the women reduced to objects within the agency of men yet again?

To me that almost doesn't matter, because the game's ending is really inventive. The game makes us see how Joel's warped paternal instinct and the needs of his damaged emotional infrastructure lead him to take Ellie's agency away, even at the potential cost of a cure for the world. We're seeing a story that criticizes the male power fantasy very directly, makes us see the nuance and consequence of Joel's (our?) desire to be a fatherly hero.

That's a flipping fascinating theme, a fascinating way to end the story. You can be cynical and say finishing the game with an open-ended question like that simply leaves room for the business-sensible sequel, but it's the first time that, to me, ending a game on an open question — Does Ellie believe Joel? What will it do to her if she knows the truth? — feels like more than that. A bold decision, a commentary.

The zombie fantasy is a fundamentally selfish thing. Everyone who imagines surviving apocalyptic disease likes to think about how they'll get to shine once the socioeconomic playing field is so sharply leveled. In this game, the desire for heroism itself is revealed to be problematic, selfish. It's about "you" getting something you can't manage to attain in a healthy world: Total control over the gross little corner you've carved out.

By comparison the plot of RE4 (we don't call it "Resi" in the states) is ... seriously, I can barely remember it. The end was an absurd mansion and ritualists murmuring in Spanish "die, die, die." You fought a giant mechanical Napoleon Bonaparte-alike. At various junctures you were assigning the president's daughter to hide in a dumpster. Or climb ladders and crawl under tables in a plaid skirt. Jeez.

To love RE4 is to be someone who can be mindblown and eminently sustained by pulling a perfect trigger again and again and again. An old boyfriend of mine ended up playing just hours upon hours of Mercenaries mode. It was numbing just to watch for so long. The Last of Us succeeded in at least suggesting there could be something to say about the human condition in all of that. Commentary on the human condition in a video game? Without butt shots? Damn.

"We abstractly have a lot to say about it as critics, and I feel impressed, but there is no fire in me lit to crown it in any way."

This is sort of why I tend to resent the primacy of supreme mechanics and "gameplay" over other means of evaluating how a game works as an experience. Granted, you did much more actual playing through The Last of Us than I did; I crumple like a bit of foil in the face of that much combat stress. I don't thrive on the adrenaline, the anxiety, of having a savage clacking dread immediately trying to mount and overwhelm my body. That's the stuff of my nightmares.

But the mechanical stuff I do remember was that which reinforced the narrative: Running early on, as Joel, child in arms, feeling the sacred weight in how his body moved. I loved the actual physical inputs then as they imprinted on me what Joel is supposed to "feel like" for the rest of it all. Again, I'd never felt that in a game before. I don't think that's an invention we can significantly dismiss.

At the same time, these letters have taken us much longer than our usual correspondence does. We've had a lot of Life Stuff going on, the sort I'd take a couple grafs to illustrate to our editor if I didn't know how badly he hates excuses. But Life Stuff hasn't hung us up quite so badly before.

For some reason I think our caring for this game isn't there. We abstractly have a lot to say about it as critics, and I feel impressed, but there is no fire in me lit to crown it in any way. Celebrating a game fervently sort of suggests you want more like that, and I'm finding there's a difference between "I want more of that!" and "There should be, y'know, for other people, more like that."

You wanted to write about Animal Crossing instead, another game we've kind of burned out on and no longer really pick up. I already said what I had to say, too. Are both games, maybe, a visitation upon survival? Fantasies that you could control the world if it was yours to shape?

Are all games about that?

– L