Oh no, I broke the blood oath and wrote about ‘ludonarrative dissonance’
The Last of Us Part 2 is the culmination of this decade of big-budget games interrogating dissonance. Naughty Dog, the creators of Uncharted, have finally bridged the gap between story and action, dragging the story kicking and screaming and gurgling on its own blood to align with what you actually do in their games: kill people. The result is surreal, an expensive narrative experiment depicting what would actually happen if a real human being behaved like a video game character.
Ellie can’t change. She can’t change because AAA games can’t change. Let’s say Ellie learns her lesson, that violence begets violence. That to save the world and herself, she must put down the gun. What would she even do? Literally, what would a AAA game even allow for her to do? AAA game design is built and marketed around killing.