You Must Kill Mel’s Baby to Proceed

Abstract

In video games, enemies are expendable beings, obstacles meant to provide some challenge by impeding the player’s path forward. The practice harkens back to the beginnings of the medium: four ghosts chase Pac-Man around a neon labyrinth, the Galaga bug-aliens slowly descend the screen toward the lone ship protecting Earth, and a Goomba stands between Mario and a power-up in World 1-1. While some of these enemies could be avoided, players were often incentivized to dispatch them by the score counter in the corner, with each fallen foe pushing the number higher. But video games are no longer confined to quarter-munching arcade cabinets and single-digit bitrates: they can immerse players in high-definition virtual worlds that run at 60 frames per second. Despite this technical complexity, games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty still treat death and violence as a lighthearted afterthought instead of a moral quandary pertaining to lived aspects of the human experience. In The Last of Us Part II, a third-person adventure game released on the PlayStation 4 by developer Naughty Dog, players must kill soldiers, fungal-infected zombies, whistling cultists, and at least one dog. The violence within the game is brutal: skulls crack, slashed necks gush blood, and legs kick wildly before slowing to a halt as a choked individual’s brain loses oxygen. Everything is meticulously animated and precisely programmed. In the world of The Last of Us, violence is treated with a hyperrealistic gravitas that demands no action be meaningless: everything has consequences. According to one of the game’s co-directors, Neil Druckmann, the title was created as a ‘statement about violent actions and the impact they have on the character that’s committing them and on the people close to them’ (cited in Totilo 2018).