L'Uomo: interview with Neil Druckmann

[This interview contains spoilers – Ed. Note]

Seven years ago, the PlayStation video game The Last of Us did many important, ground-breaking things at once. First off, thanks to its amazing writing, direction and characters, it ended up winning more than 200 awards. Because of its unprecedented maturity, it led many to rethink the role video games could play in pop culture, giving rise to countless debates as to whether video games had, in fact, “surpassed cinema”. It gave its publishing house, Naughty Dog, another massive hit after the Uncharted series, selling 18 million copies. And recently – just a few months before the equally impactful sequel, The Last of Us Part II, was released – it was optioned for development by HBO, with Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin set to adapt the game into a TV series, together with its astoundingly talented game director, Neil Druckmann.

While the first The Last of Us took a lot of risks both in terms of the maturity of its storytelling and in terms of some morally challenging choices that were placed in front of the gamer, The Last of Us Part II takes both ideas and really runs with them. It’s a game that talks seriously about the cycle of violence while forcing you to rethink your relationship towards “good” and “evil” characters. NPCs that fall to your really kind of off-puttingly violent blows have names. Main characters are killed brutally. Halfway through the game, you start controlling what had, up to then, been the “villain”, Abby, and then slowly start to understand the reason for her actions, in a powerful narrative switch that is already a defining moment in the history of video games.

This ambition towards moral relativism, along with some LGBTQ-friendly themes, has led TLOUP2 to become a battlefield in the culture war, with a “review-bombing” of almost 125,000 user reviews on Metacritic, divided almost equally between those who voted 10 and those who voted 0 – and many of those votes were politically motivated. It is certainly, as Druckmann has said himself, an unprecedented show of passion – in both directions. In any case, The Last of Us Part II has been universally acclaimed as another masterpiece from Druckmann and Naughty Dog, one that exceeds the first chapter in its ambition to get us to really reflect on violence, on revenge, on storytelling and the act of gaming.

When you were writing this game, were you thinking of other video games or more about “passive” mediums like TV and cinema?
I think the kind of video game writing we do has a lot of overlap with classic, passive mediums. Where the changes start happening is with the tools we have to manipulate the player, emotionally. For example, in playing as two perspectives, when you’re playing as Abby, and you move around, and you get into combat, and you see how she acts, that creates a rush and most of all, an exhilaration when you survive. There is something about that connection to a character that is very unique to video games. Movies can put you in a different POV, but when you’re actively playing the story, it’s more complex. It evokes interesting dilemmas for the player, when you feel like you want to win, and you feel for your character, but also the other character you played as earlier, so you don’t really know what outcome you want. I think it creates something that is completely unique to games, and that was definitely something we were thinking about when creating this.

At the end of Part I, you play as Joel, and you have to kill innocent doctors and nurses to save Ellie. This is the moment that really sets the scene for the Abby character and her revenge quest in the sequel, because Joel kills her father and her friends. In that moment you’re facing the classic moral dilemma – “Do you save the one you love, or do you save the world?” But in this case, the difference between being a passive spectator or an active part of the narrative means that you have to actually press a button to kill a nurse in order to save the girl you love. And that makes all the difference. 
Yes, absolutely.

And it seems to me that you took that moment and really exploded it for Part II. The idea that what you are doing, as a character, might be “wrong”.
There were a few things in Part I that really resonate with us as game makers and to our players. The first was when you first switch from playing as Joel to Ellie, and we saw how players changed the way they played, almost automatically, because they “were” Ellie. And the second thing that stuck with us was how, towards the end of the game, Joel makes more and more morally ambiguous choices. In the first 80 per cent of the game, all the players are “aligned” with Joel, because he’s saving an innocent kid, and taking her to a lab where they can “save the world”.

(Continues)

Opening picture: a screenshot from The Last of Us Part II. “The Last of Us” is a trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC.

Read the full interview in the October issue of L'Uomo, on newsstands

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