But
I am a bit sick of seeing them all the time.
"Infected",
"Walkers", “Weepers”, and whatever other buzz-word you
want to throw at them might help differentiate the undead-kind from
the virus-kind, but the basic premise is the same: people go crazy,
bleed a lot, and eat others once they've been bitten.
The
moaning and groaning flesh-eaters are an easy way to introduce canon
fodder into any medium, because they are pretty malleable. Their
actions don't require a lot of thought, and they can be scary as
hell, or hilarious, depending on your take.
However,
despite being around for a long time, a certain zombie craze
definitely took hold of pop culture awhile back, and its splintered
nails are still digging in.
With
zombies infiltrating everything from Red Dead Redemption to the Call of Duty series, I think it is time we
thought about giving them a rest for awhile. You know, like lens
flares!
 |
| Cinematographers must have nightmares about this sort of thing. (Image: Gameinformer) |
So,
it was with disillusionment that I discovered "infected"
(zombies that can run!) are a big part of The Last of Us. I
was a little irked, but the game looked fantastic despite this.
In
playing the game, however, I realised there is life in the undead
yet, as long as we move them away from the spotlight.
The
Last of Us isn't about the infected. Really, it isn't even about
the disease and it certainly isn't about what caused it. Instead, the
game carries the theme that is skirted by almost all zombie stories,
and focused on by a few.
The
game begs the classic question of speculative fiction: "What
would we do?"
What
would we do if the world fell apart tomorrow? If there was an actual
threat of a zombie-like virus and it ravaged the world, how would
humanity cope? Not in the immediate, but 20 years later? That is the
question The Last of Us poses.
I
sometimes hear people mention that the "science" in science
fiction is incidental, and that the genre is really all about the
people. That is half right, but I think that what good science
fiction is really about is how the "science" affects the
people. The way the robots in Isaac Asimov's stories work isn't
important – what is important is that humanity created laws, and
how both robots and people react to them.
This
is much like how The Last of Us has approached the idea of the
infected.
The
irritating element for me in a lot of speculative fiction is the
presence of an absolute evil. Behind every alien invasion or plague
is a big baddie, rubbing their hands together and laughing manically.
Misguided? No. Survivalist? No. Just “evil”.
Without
giving too much away, this – at least to me – isn't really an
element the game is concerned with. Sure, there are bad guys and
girls in the game. One of them is being set on fire by a Molotov
cocktail, and another is the player throwing it.
Antagonists
and protagonists exist within the game, but to call any of the forces
at play "evil" and any of them "good" is a bit of
a generalisation, and does a disservice to the intricacy of the
game's plot, and the meaning behind it.
Instead,
Naughty Dog has mused on how people from all walks of life and
backgrounds would act in this situation. How would society rebuild
itself? How would hierarchies come into place, and what would be
necessary to survive?
The
human enemies might be out to do some despicable things to Joel, but
they aren't faceless goons, and there were definitely some characters
in the game who I despised. But like the player, they are out for
survival. Both sides will shoot, blow up, stab or strangle the other
for the preservation of their kind, as is evident as soon as the
player stops and listens to their enemies chat with one another.
What
really struck me was how human the enemies were. As I lurked in the
shadows, waiting to catch an enemy alone and stab him in the throat,
I listened to their conversations. The enemies would chat about how
hard life is, how they look out for one another, and sometimes just
about watching movies. If one went off to investigate a noise,
another would go find him if he'd gone quiet.
These
are people thrown into an ungodly situation, and trying to find their
way. Sometimes, that path is building up cabins and finding food.
Sometimes that is putting a bullet between someone else's eyes in
order to stop them from doing the same to your friend. People react
in extreme ways to extreme situations. Some do good things and some
do very, very bad things.
The
Last of Us is a fantastic zombie/infected game, because it goes
beyond that. Like The Walking Dead and a number of other
films, comics, games and whatever-else featuring the lurching
brain-eaters, it is moving beyond placing the focus on them.
The
Last of Us demonstrates one of
the more promising directions the genre can go by utilising zombies
as a device, not a crutch. I didn't learn a lot about flesh-eaters
when I played this game, but I learnt a lot about people.
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