The Last of Us and the Citizen Kane-ness Problem
Looking into video game journalists seeking validation
In retrospective it’s easy to see that The Last of Us was the so-called ‘Citizen Kane moment’ that video game journalists and critics were praying for many years in advance. Although, that moment didn’t gave them what they really wanted, which was a gaming masterpiece so amazing and mind-blowing that it finally convinced everyone else in the artistic community that video games were a worthy form of art, rather than just entertainment for children.
What ‘The Last of Us moment’ ended up being about was just a game release that every single journalist and reviewer wanked over with endless praise, which led to the journos convincing themselves that video games were finally worthy of being on the Louvre or something. This was interesting since there was nothing groundbreaking about The Last of Us outside of having production values on par with an HBO series, at least when it came to its cutscene quality, visual design and world building.
To be fair, that’s not so different from what Citizen Kane is for cinema today, although that movie did deserve a lot of the praise due to its cinematic innovations. Also, if someone released Citizen Kane today people would find it as good as any movie made after it. It’s not like Metropolis, which is a good film, but also very dated, and you can tell that from its cinematic techniques and language. This is not the case with Citizen Kane, which is only dated by it being a black and white film.
Back in 2007 Clint Hocking wrote a blog post about Bioshock that argued that “BioShock is not our Citizen Kane”, but that it signaled how close the video game industry was to that fated moment. It was a somewhat popular post, which you can tell from the fact that it helped popularize annoying terms like ‘ludonarrative dissonance’. I think that’s also why back in 2013 journos and critics were getting themselves ready for that moment, since that was the year that Bioshock Infinite came out, a game that was also golden showered with endless critical praise.
The problem with Bioshock Infinite as a Citizen Kaner is that it didn’t take itself seriously enough. The game had an weird artstyle that combined a Disney-like visuals with biblical motifs and American propaganda from the early 20th century. It was an unique aesthetic, but Elizabeth’s giant Disney princess eyes was not something you could show to a movie critic if you wanted to get praise and respect. Also, internet weirdo Matthewmatosis made a review of Bioshock Infinite that destroyed the reputation of Bioshock Infinite among very hardcore games, although his review also makes sure to filter any normal person in its first minutes.
Naughty Dog did something incredible with The Last of Us, which was taking every single narrative and cinematic technique used by Hollywood and prestige TV and applying it to its in-game cutscenes. This was obviously not the first time someone had tried this, but visionary director Neil Druckmann was simply the first one to do it convincingly. Although, he was standing on the shoulders of Amy Hennig, who got a lot of praise due to the cinematic flair of the Uncharted games, although those games were also dragged down by their Whedonesque dialogue and extreme racism.
This is not to say that The Last of Us is not a good game, because it’s really hard to argue otherwise, especially since its gameplay mechanics were based on other great games like Resident Evil 4 and Metal Gear Solid. Naughty Dog also combined action horror and stealth mechanics in order to create a gameplay loop that was really tense and satisfying to play, unlike Bioshock Infinite which was just an array of shooting galleries with some cool narrative twists thrown into the mix.
Bioshock Infinite was just aping action shooters like Half-Life 2 and Halo 3, so it wasn’t really impressive outside of having more sophisticated writing. But this was also the case with The Last of Us, which wasn’t really doing anything new, it was just doing it better, at least in terms of accessibility and direction quality.
Hideo Kojima was also highly influenced by Hollywood movies when he made the Metal Gear Solid series, but Kojima’s games were campy and ridiculous in a way that no “respectable art critic” would ever take seriously. It also didn’t help that his depiction of female characters was pretty bizarre and arguably extremely sexist.
Personally, I think the most praiseworthy aspect of The Last of Us games is found in their worldbuilding, which is very realistic and detailed in a way that’s more palpable than most movies and TV shows. Naughty Dog accomplished this through background details, in-game dialogue, and items that you can find in the game world. In other words, they accomplished such great worldbuilding by using techniques that are unique to video games, rather than through the overuse of cinematics, which is what got the most praise.
However, the real reason why Naughty Dog games use so many cutscenes is because of the long loading times of older consoles. For many years game developers have been using many techniques to try to hide loading screens and create a seamless experience, often in the form of elevators and long corridors. The most important trick used by the Uncharted games was to simply play cutscenes while new levels were loading. And I think that is really ironic, how a secondary element gets so much praise.
The real accomplishment of The Last of Us was in blending gameplay and cutscenes in very smooth fashion, not just in technical terms or in terms of visual fidelity, but also in terms of its writing and storytelling. I wouldn’t use a weird term like “ludonarrative dissonance”, but it was true that the Uncharted games suffered from a problem in which the cutscenes and gameplay contradicted each other, a problem I would call as bad writing. Either way, The Last of Us managed to fix this problem by having a violent anti-hero as its main character, which was a better fit for a brutal gameplay system in which you kill tons of people.
Citizen Kane was released more than eighty years ago and it’s still highly regarded by critics and film buffs. So, it’s worth questioning if a game like The Last of Us would be as highly regarded that far into the future, or if it will be forgotten as yet another overhyped consumer product, but it’s also worth questioning if that even matters. When people talk about film classics, artistic masterpieces, or a literary canon they are just talking about glorified recommendation lists. All those mighty words are just ways of saying that those products are still fun to watch, read, or play.
It’s possible to go one step further, and bring Walter Benjamin into the discussion to argue that film was never a traditional artform, and that the old concept of art was lost when mass production and distribution became the default method by which “art” is reproduced and consumed.
By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.
Under this framing video games would suffer a similar fate as film, and so their value would less in whether they can be considered as art, and more in how they help in radically transforming society and destroying its traditional values. Even more important, Walter Benjamin argued that the politicization of art is a mechanism by which communism tried to counter the threat of fascism. According to him, Fascism sought to introduce “aesthetics into political life”, which leads to endless war, since war was the only way to mobilize all industrial production and the working masses in a away that didn’t threatened the existing private property system.
Interestingly enough, games like Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock and The Last of Us have politicized the realm of video games. And yet, I would argue that political discourse around games is really poor, with critics and commentators only noticing the most obvious themes, such as gender and race, without doing an in-depth examination of the wide array of ideas explored. Either way, doing a closer examination of videos games, their themes and systems is much more worth doing than discussing whether a game deserves to win an award for Game of the Year or not.
