Siyu Zhou is a doctoral student at the College of Liberal Arts of Nankai University
First, the interpretation of "reasonableness": the emotional logic shared by players
Since the release of "The Last of US: Part II" (hereinafter referred to as "Tlou2"), its plot and narrative have caused dissatisfaction among many players (see the end of the game's plot), and player evaluations have shown a clear polarization. Players from different positions are happy to share their interpretations of the plot on various public platforms. The reinterpretation of the game's plot has always been an important activity for the player community. From an ethical point of view, the player's interpretation of the plot of a game can be divided into three different tendencies: legitimacy, rationality and reasonableness, which involve the legal, conceptual and emotional levels, respectively.
For example, in the Resident Evil series of games, the player's interpretation of the game's plot focuses on its "legitimacy". Such as the development and decline of the umbrella company, the real identity of the male protagonist Ethan in "Resident Evil 7", and the background of the "Alliance" organization. The Resident Evil series of games is based on legal logic, which tells the story of extermination of humanity in extremely rational language, with conflicts of interest between organizations or individuals as the main contradictions. The interpretation of "legitimacy" focuses on the level of the practical rules of society, and the player's interpretation is mainly based on reasoning and speculation.
The "Red Dead Redemption" series gamers' interpretation of the game's plot is mostly focused on its "rationality". When discussing the game's plot, players often quote the historical background of the United States at that time, telling the conflict between the logic of modern social capital and the moral logic of primitive communities under the drastic changes in American society in the early 19th century. The Red Dead Redemption series of games is based on conceptual logic, and the clash of ideas as the main conflict of the narrative gives players more room for discussion. The "rationality" interpretation focuses on the rational level of the concept, and the player's interpretation is mainly abstract and analytical, and the specific individual or group is regarded as a symbol of a certain concept.
In the Tlou2 controversy, players from both camps, although tit-for-tat, interpret the game based on "reasonableness". Players pay attention to the character's personal experience and emotional journey, and make a detailed investigation of the language, actions, expressions, etc. of the characters in the game text, so as to explain whether the character's behavior is reasonable or not, and prove their point of view. "Reasonableness" interpretation focuses on the emotional level, the way the player interprets is mainly to play and substitute, whether I can understand the behavior and emotions of the character from the personal level has become the key to the player's "reasonableness" interpretation.
Obviously, how the player interprets the game text depends on the game's construction tendencies, and Tlou2 is a game built on the basis of emotional logic. However, Tlou2 differs from the other two games in that it leaves no room for the other two levels– the legal level and the conceptual level – and embodies an extreme "emotional paranoia" (the concept of "emotional paranoia" comes from Zhou Zhiqiang. The New Nostalgic Aesthetics of Youth Films[J].Nanjing Social Sciences, 2015(04):121-126."Emotional paranoia" proposed in an article). The concept-based "Red Dead Redemption" also expresses the complex feelings between people, and the "Resident Evil" with legal theory as the key also has a conflict of ideas between scientific rationality and humanitarianism. But in Tlou2, the problems of jurisprudence and ideas disappear completely, and all contradictions and ways to resolve contradictions are based on emotions. Therefore, in terms of "legitimacy" and "reasonableness", "Tlou2" does not give the player any room for interpretation, and the extreme emotional logic makes the game abandon everything and pursue only the most intense emotional explosion. It is the game's "emotional paranoia" that causes players on both sides to lose the possibility of speaking themselves in language other than emotion.
This "emotional paranoia" manifests itself in the death of the character in Tlou2.
The "non-existent" virus: character death and specific emotional objects
"Tlou2" is a "zombie survival" theme video game, but in the whole story of "Tlou2", the virus (called "fungus" in the game) becomes a "non-existent" thing, it does not affect the overall story or any specific plot, and becomes a part of the pure service for "gameplay diversity".
The division between the "Infected" and the Human Enemy Cluster in the game is very clear, and where the two are mixed, there are only low-level infected people who are not too much of a threat, and they can even be used to eliminate human enemies. In the "infected" area marked by the spread of fungal spores and without any human enemies, there will be difficult high-level "infected people". Once you step into the "Infected" gathering area, the player will enter a state of tension against the enemy: the dim picture, the roar of the near and far, and the difficult enemies all bring great pressure to the player. But here's one thing not to worry about – you'll never get any emotional shock here, because no character will die in the "Infected" cluster.
In the death of the character in Tlou2, the virus is completely gone.
A total of 9 characters die throughout the Tlou2 process (only the main human characters with names who have interacted with the player are counted. Enemies killed by players, minor characters without names, animal characters, etc. are not counted), as a video game set in "zombie survival", there is not a single character in "tlou2" whose death is related to the virus, each dead character has a "responsible person" who directly causes their death, and at the same time, the player plays Ebby and Ellie, who respectively become the bearers of the emotional impact of the death of these characters.
This character death setting is very unique in games with the theme of "zombie survival". For example, the "Resident Evil" series of games with a wide audience in China, the "Walking Dead" series of games with the plot as the main selling point as the "Last Survivor" series, and the action games "Zombie Siege" series and "Fading Light" that pay more attention to the gameplay than the plot, it can be said that as long as any character dies in a "zombie survival" theme game, then there must be, and even say that most of the deaths are directly caused by viruses: or directly killed by "zombies" - body death, or infected with viruses, Become a member of the "zombies" wandering in the game world - spiritual death.
In other zombie survival genre games, viruses not only become the direct cause of character death, but are often used as the basis for ethical conflict plots. For example, at the end of The Walking Dead: Season 1, the little girl Kleiman shoots Lee with the gun Lee gave herself in order to prevent Lee from becoming a zombie; in "Resident Evil 2 Remake", a father refuses to give up his infected daughter, ignores Leon's warning and carries her back indoors, where she is finally killed. In the course of the game, the player experiences a conflict between emotion and jurisprudence, between personal emotional experience and an unsolvable viral problem.
But in Tlou2, the game has a specific "person in charge" for all character deaths, so that a work in which everything can be explained by viruses, but no character's death is responsible for the virus. The conflict between emotion and jurisprudence in the traditional "zombie survival" theme game has become a conflict between emotion and emotion in "Tlou 2". At the beginning of the game, Joel's death is used as the fuse, with Ebby as the specific emotional object, constructing an emotional level of conflict, and then all the characters die, constituting an emotional conflict, and the player takes turns to play the "bearer" of the emotional trauma of each other. At this time, the "responsible person" of the character's death becomes an emotional outlet for the player and becomes a specific emotional object.
In the story of "Tlou2", the virus becomes the "point de caption" in the sense of Lacan, which is the key to integrating all the stories together, but the conflict of the game is precisely based on its "non-existence", only the virus does not exist, only the trauma of the character's death is implemented on the specific emotional object, the contradiction has the possibility of being resolved, and the game plot has a fundamental driving force.
The "person responsible" as a specific emotional object provides the player with a false way of solving the problem - as long as the specific emotional object is eliminated, the conflict between emotion and emotion is resolved. By replacing the contradiction between emotion and jurisprudence with the contradiction between emotion and emotion, Tlou2 is no longer plagued by an unsolvable virus, but instead "decentralizes" the problem to the emotional level, transforming the irreconcilable conflict between emotion and jurisprudence into an emotional story that seems to be able to do everything by eliminating an object.
"Active violence" and "death bystanders": The narrative strategy of "emotional explosion" and its failure
It's easy to see in opposition players' interpretations of their positions that the main reason for Tlou2's dissatisfaction is not Joel's death or Ellie's revenge. In video games, the death of the protagonist is not uncommon, and the revenge story of choosing to forgive is also endless. In the online debate between the two groups of players, the order of the narrative, the forced corresponding character elements, and the forcing the player to substitute for the enemy have become the main objects of discussion, in other words, the dissatisfaction of the opposition players with "Tlou2" is mainly not the storyline, but the narrative strategy.
In the narrative of Tlou2, the foreshadowing and cushioning are deliberately erased. After Joel is tortured by Abby with a golf club in the first chapter, the next "Ellie Chapter" for more than ten consecutive hours is Ellie's revenge journey, and finally when Ellie finally meets with Abby, the game opens "Abby Chapter" and tells Ebby's past at the beginning. In the first four chapters of the game, the player has been in a state of emotional stagnation, do not understand Ebby's motives and purposes, the game through the interspersed narration of Ellie and Joel's memories deepen the player's nostalgia for Joel and dissatisfaction with Ebby, when this dissatisfaction intensifies, at the beginning of the fifth chapter " revealed" the entire story of the reason - Ebby killed Joel because Joel once killed her father.
In short, Tlou2 adheres to an "emotional explosion" strategy from beginning to end, that is, let the player "do" something while the emotion is in a state of emotional stagnation, and then tell the player what emotionally unacceptable consequences are caused by this "doing", and "detonate" the player's emotions with this shock, so that the player can be deeply shocked by the game.
This narrative strategy of "emotional explosion" is clearly expressed in the narrative action of the death of the character in "Ellie".
There are 6 character deaths in the first part of The Last Of Us, and the deaths of these characters are all presented in the animation cutscenes, that is, these deaths are "played" for the player to see, which is a kind of "passive violence". In the "Ellie Chapter" of "Tlou2", the death of the character requires the player to press the square key of the controller to operate, that is, asking the player to kill the character "with his own hands", which is a kind of "active violence" for the player.
In the game flow, the "active violence" executed by the player is the most important part of the gameplay, "Tlou2" added a melee avoidance system that was not in the previous game, encouraging players to engage in close combat in the case of insufficient resources, and highlighting the aesthetics and pleasure of "active violence". However, unlike this, the "active violence" in the animation cutscenes is not the player's own choice, but the operation necessary for the game to continue, if the player does not press the square button, the game will remain on this screen and will not continue to advance. At the same time, in all the animated cutscenes about the death of the characters, the camera never uses the subjective perspective of the murderer, but instead looks at the entire death process from a spectator perspective, that is, the murderer and the slain appear in the shot at the same time or successively. Here, the player pulls himself out of the entire game narrative while executing the character, and there is a clear rift between the narrative action of the game and the performance scene: on the one hand, the game requires the player to kill the character "with his own hands", on the other hand, the player is set as a spectator in the scene, and through this button operation that the player "takes for granted" changes the player from a "responsible person" to a "death bystander".
The narrative action of "active violence" in the "Ellie" animation cutscene attempts to bring the player into the "responsible person", and then in "Abby" creates an emotional explosion effect by reshaping the dead character. In "Ellie's chapter", the player's emotional stagnation - completely unaware of the cause and effect of the matter, the emotion has no place to sustenance - some things that are "forced" to be completed in the state become the fuse of the emotional explosion in the "Ebby chapter".
However, "active violence" also shapes the player's identity as a "death bystander". The narrative action of pressing the block key does not make the player take the initiative to bear the guilt of killing the character, on the contrary, the player who has long been familiar with the "rules" of video games clearly understands that the key behavior is only necessary for the game, and if the key is not buttoned, the game cannot progress. The player does not become a subject of guilt under "active violence", but simply presses the block button as a tool for the game to progress. The "initiative" of the narrative action and the "bystander feeling" of the camera in the narrative scene evoke a conflict, and this conflict itself is hidden in the paradox of the narrative action.
As a result, the narrative strategy of the game's "emotional explosion" completely fails here. When the corpse of the character killed by his own "own hands" in the previous "Ellie chapter" in the "Ebby chapter" is not a strong sense of guilt, because the death of the character is not his own choice, and the player does not fully stand with this death horror when performing the killing action, which is just something that has to be done under the control of the game. The player becomes what Hannah Arendt calls "the one who presses the button," becoming a spectator dragged out of death.
On the one hand, substitution, on the other hand, control, the game tries to erase the uneven feelings brought by the game through the "emotional explosion", but this narrative strategy leaves many paradoxes that cannot be justified. The contradiction between substitution and control erupts where the game tries to detonate emotions, and the false initiative of "active violence" is revealed, a strategy that fails to cause the player's emotional shock, fails to make the player "realize his mistakes", but makes the player regard the game itself as the ultimate point of emotional trauma.
Fourth, the phantom ending and the water scene as the "remaining"
If the first part of "The Last Survivor" is a story in which emotions finally triumph over jurisprudence, then "Tlou 2" is a story of emotions colliding with emotions. The tone of the former is that there is some helplessness in the warmth, while the latter is full of contradictions and conflicts, it abandons the confrontation between emotion and jurisprudence, reduces all contradictions to the contradiction between emotion and emotion, and tries to solve this contradiction through emotion itself.
In other words, "Tlou2" is full of determination to resolve contradictions, but when it uses emotion as the key to resolving contradictions, it only highlights the contradictions. Because in the conflict between emotion and emotion, when each emotional object is equally "excusable", the game's determination to resolve the contradiction encounters obstacles. When the game can no longer explain itself, can no longer close all emotional conflicts with emotion, the "remainder" scene as a work is presented - the dark tone of deep blue, the monosyllabic guitar melody, and Ellie sitting alone in the water after letting go of Ebby. The so-called "surplus" refers to what the work expresses that it cannot explain on its own. Similarly, the problem posed by Tlou2 is that it cannot be explained by itself, and the scene remains here as a manifestation of contradiction. It is not an expression of Ellie's pain and confusion after letting Ellie go of Eby, as it has nothing to do with whether Ellie has revenge or not. Even if the specific emotional object is solved, the contradiction will still not be resolved, because the game simply replaces the contradiction between emotion and jurisprudence with the contradiction between emotion and emotion, thus providing an illusion that the contradiction can be resolved. And when the ghost of this symbolic contradictory scene emerges, the emotional outlet provided by the game is completely shattered, and Tlou2's determination to resolve the contradiction moves towards an existential nihilism.
The scene where Ellie sits in the water is the true ending of Tlou2, a wound left over from a time when it can't be consummated on its own. But after this scene, the game adds a phantom ending to herself: Ellie returns to the farmhouse where she lived with Tina, picks up Joel's guitar, and recalls the last conversation with Joel, in which Ellie says she will "try to forgive" Joel's behavior, and then she puts joel's guitar down, and finally freezes the scene where Ellie walks out of the farmhouse. The game ends here, and when the player returns to the title screen, the original picture changes from a boat in the water in a dark blue tone to a shore boat in the atmosphere of the rising sun, and in the distance is the new camp of fireflies that Ebby is looking for. The phantom ending allows the game to close itself, to resolve the contradictions it raises at the beginning, and to erase the conflict of the story. But this ending is always false, it tries to bridge, but it can no longer bridge the exposed problems, so this ending becomes a kind of "mechanical séance" idealistic illusion. Abby can spare Ellie, who killed her lover and friend, in a call from Loe, Ellie can give up her determination to kill Abby in a momentary recollection of Joel, and when this game that emphasizes personal emotional conflicts from beginning to end, but with the determination to resolve the conflict, reaches the end and finds herself unable to complete this mission, "tolerance" becomes a moral illusion that dissolves all contradictions. The game moves towards the sunny rising sun, but the player is stranded in the cold waters with Ellie.
"Tlou2" constructs itself with an extreme "emotional paranoia", where legal logic and conceptual logic disappear to make way for emotional logic. The specific emotional object setting and the narrative logic of the "emotional explosion" stipulate the plot conflict, fix the narrative rhythm, and turn itself into an emotional story of "only emotion", shaping the player as an emotional animal that is always ready to be shocked by intense emotions.
When attachment to emotional logic goes to extremes, when emotion can no longer be an outlet for the fierce conflict that the game provokes, the game itself is sublimated— because it tells a story that it cannot explain itself. It is through extreme paranoia about emotion that the game shows the absurdity of "emotional paranoia", and in this intense emotional pursuit, Tlou2 deconstructs itself.
Attached: Synopsis of the game
The Last of Us series is a role-playing video game based on the theme of "zombie survival", the first part of the game tells the story of the male protagonist Joel's daughter who died when the virus first broke out, and twenty years later Joel was commissioned by the "Firefly" organization to send the little girl Ellie, who can be immune to the virus, to the hospital under the management of "Firefly" to develop a vaccine. Joel and Ellie have gone through many hardships and their feelings have deepened. After arriving at the hospital, the leader of Firefly tells Joel that Ellie will die if she wants to extract the immune body. Joel refuses fruitlessly and is imprisoned by Firefly, who then breaks through, kills the doctor who performed the operation and the leader of Firefly, and takes Ellie with him. When Ellie, who was anesthetized during the operation, wakes up, Joel doesn't tell her the truth, but says that her immunity doesn't help make vaccines, so Firefly lets them go. Players primarily manipulate Joel during the game, and Ellie can be manipulated briefly in the second half.
The story and narrative of Tlou2 is more complex, with the addition of a new character, Eby, who can be manipulated, and players alternately manipulate Ellie and Eby to experience the game. The game as a whole is divided into nine chapters, the first chapter in which the player takes turns manipulating Ellie and Eby, and Ellie is partially about Ellie and Joel's peaceful life in the human gathering area of Jackson. The Ebby part tells that Abby leads the team to "Jackson" to find a person, and meets Joel and the others in a critical moment, escaping from the infected with the help of Joel and the others. At the end of the chapter, Abby kills Joel, and the player experiences the plot from Ellie's point of view. After killing Joel, Abby lets Ellie go; Chapters 2 through 4 are chapters in which the player manipulates Ellie, referred to as "Ellie", which tells about Ellie's journey of revenge, the bond with her friends, and her memories of Joel; Chapters 5 through 7 are chapters in which the player manipulates Eibe, referred to as "Abby", which tells the story of why Eby killed Joel, her bond with her comrades, her sympathy for the two children of the opposing camp, and finally the confrontation with the original organization to protect the child. "Ellie" and "Ebbe" are about the different events that Ellie and Ebby experienced in the same time period, Chapter 7 At the end, Eby wins the confrontation with Ellie, and Eby chooses to let Ellie go again; in Chapter 8, "Santa Barbara", the player manipulates Ellie to embark on a second journey of revenge, and at the end of the chapter, Ellie gives up killing Eibe and lets her go; Chapter 9 "The Farmhouse" tells the story of Ellie's return to the farmhouse where she lived with her lover, remembering and Joel's past, and finally leaving the farmhouse.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yan Zhang