Television Is Better Without Video Games
“Fudge,” I remember saying, only I didn’t say fudge, I said fuck, a word for adults. I was playing The Last of Us, a narrative video game for adults about a zombie apocalypse, and I had just died for what seemed like the thousandth time in the first room with a “clicker,” the game lore’s name for a medium-difficulty enemy. These “infected”—it’s classier not to call them zombies, and this is a classy zombie-combat game, one with a story—had become misshapen thanks to a cordyceps brain infection, which devoured mankind almost overnight. The clicker was ghastlier than others, because it had lived long enough for the infection to fully engulf its formerly human face, fungal fibers enrobing it, teeth jutting out like barbs. An older infected is a more resilient one. In a video game, that translates to a more difficult baddie to beat. It would be too boring to tell you all the things I had tried, but none of them had yet worked. Fuck this fucking game.
As frustrated as I felt, I was also confused. I couldn’t shake the sense that the combat was getting in the way of the story, acting as filler, just there to give me something to do in between metered doses of narrative. By now, a lot had already happened in the game’s plot. A younger version of my character, Joel, had tried to escape the infection on outbreak day, but his daughter, Sarah, had not survived. This loss, mated with the
