Could the Last of Us bring out the Best of Us?
In an age of culture wars we need new kinds of empathy machines. Could games like The Last Of Us Part II provide a cheat code? Warning: long digressions before we get to the zombies…
Imagine you read a stranger’s comment on Twitter or Facebook that annoyed you so much you wanted to reply.
Perhaps it was from someone spreading an outlandish conspiracy theory about 5G or falsely claiming refugees were all given luxury homes.
The moment you started to type a response a frame appeared on the side of the screen, casually informing you of some details you and this stranger had in common. You might both have a daughter the same age, a grandparent from the same town, or donated to the same charities, or supported the same football club, or wished they would bring back the same TV series. It could be a detail that was even more obscure.
Such information might not deter you from replying, but could it change the tone of your response? Might it make the other person seem a bit more human?
That was my idea for a simple “empathy machine”. It was a concept I semi-jokingly suggested to friends in the pub a few years ago that could be a plug-in for social media sites. Its goal would be to harness AI and the scary amounts of data that tech giants store on us to make online discussions more civil and constructive. As a bonus it could also help check if the person you were replying to was real.
There are many reasons, however, why it would likely be a terrible idea, including that it would be a data privacy nightmare. But I’ve remained interested in how we can defuse the worsening online culture wars in the US and Europe.
One theory that was popular about five years ago with newspapers including The New York Times was that we would all benefit if we got out of our biased “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” to see what others read in theirs. That was the thinking behind online tools such as FlipFeed and Escape Your Bubble which were designed to show “woke” democrat supporters what Trump fans would see on their social media, and vice-versa.
But such well-intentioned systems actually seem to fail as empathy machines. My recollection of trying them — and then being bombarded with hot-takes from Breitbart and Fox News — was it made me feel much less sympathetic to those with opposing views. I was often left thinking: “What kind of hate-filled, gullible **** would believe that??”
While those right-wing social feeds made events like Trump’s election less surprising, they did not make me feel more empathetic. In his excellent book The People vs Tech, Jamie Bartlett writes:
“The internet doesn’t only create small tribes: it also gives easy access to enemy tribes. I see opposing views to mine online all the time; they rarely change my mind, and more often simply confirm my belief that I am the only sane person in a sea of internet idiots”.
Art as empathy machine
So how do we create empathy between opposing strangers?
Well, art has been pretty good at it for centuries. Novels, films, plays and poems have all helped to put us into shoes of people with lives unlike our own. Some of the best examples have even helped us feel empathy for characters on both sides of a conflict, whether it is drug dealers and police in The Wire, Greeks and Trojans in the Illiad or apes and humans in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes.
I naively thought I’d invented the concept of “empathy machines” but it was actually a phrase first used by the movie critic Roger Ebert to describe films.
But there is one, newer art form I find especially fascinating for its potential as an empathy machine: computer games. While a good film or novel places you in another person’s shoes, in games you usually get to choose where they walk, and other key decisions.
One great example is the terrific Papers, Please in which you play a passport control official in a fictional totalitarian country. The game is impressive for its elegant simplicity: a series of people (shown in blocky, old-school 8-bit graphics) appear at your counter, and your only action is to check their documents and decide whether to approve or reject them. Your life at home between your shifts is summed up just as short bits of text.
But very quickly small decisions become freighted with consequence. You learn that your child is sick and needs medicine, and when you look at your balance you realise you may end up a few dollars short. The soldiers in the guard post are offering you $5 for each suspicious visitor you report to them to question. Do you start treating minor mistakes with less leniency?
The game is, in my view, far more powerful than a novel could be in making you understand how good people can become corrupted because it forces you to make the choices yourself.
I’m obviously not the only one to spot the power of computer games to be empathy machines. The first computer game bonus feature to be nominated for an Oscar was “Colette”, a documentary about a 90-year-old member of the French resistance made to accompany the WW2 game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. The director of the game Peter Hirschmann also referenced Ebert’s empathy macines but said compuer games were empathy machines “times 1000”.
“You’re involved by the very nature of it being interactive,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “The empathy that builds is so powerful that when you tell stories when people are in that empathetic zone, it hits all the more powerfully.”
Getting to The Last of Us at last
Clearly you will feel sympathy for a character if they becomes a stand-in for you because their choices and yours are the same. But the game series that made me want to write this does something noticably different.
I knew I was going to love the first The Last Of Us game when it came out in 2013 because I’d thoroughly enjoyed both the gameplay and cinematic storytelling of its developers’ previous Uncharted series.
What I hadn’t expected was how much certain moments in a Playstation game about a post-apocalyptic world full of zombie-like “infected” would stick in my memory for years afterwards, and make me wonder about the characters’ decisions.
One particular scene kept coming back to me (***and, be warned, spoilers for both games follow**). Towards the end of the first Last of Us game, your character Joel succeeds in his mission to take a young girl called Ellie, who is immune to the outbreak, to a group who hope her immunity can help them create a vaccine to save mankind. But then one of the group’s leader’s breaks the dreadful news to Joel: the operation to do this will kill Ellie.
It’s a classic philosophical dilemma, a version of the trolley problem: should one person be killed to save many?
And the surprising thing is that here, unlike in many games, you are not given any choice. Joel immediately decides to bust Ellie out and goes on a rampage through the facility, under your control. I was feeling uneasy as I shot my way through armed members of the group. But I grew deeply uncomfortable when I controlled Joel as he burst into the surgery.
There a surgeon stood — holding a scalpel, yes, but wearing hospital scrubs instead of body armour, and standing a few steps away from Ellie.
I hoped to scare him away instead of attacking him. I tried threatening him with my gun. I spent several minutes moving around the room, searching for an angle where I could herd him away because I really, really did not want to shoot the doctor, even though I’d happily shot or bludgeoned hundreds of soldiers, militia members and zombie-like creatures during the course of the game without blinking. I paused the game and tried again before finally accepting that the game would not let me progress from the room until Joel killed him. So I shot the doctor.
I thought about that moment from time to time for years afterwards. My immediate, instant reaction had been a negative one: “Why wasn’t I given a choice?” I had become used to games that allowed me to make moral decisions on a spectrum such as the beautiful Dishonored games, which are about assassins but allow you to complete them without killing anyone. Some critics disliked The Last Of Us and its sequel for exactly this lack of story choice, one writing “The game doesn’t need me here, it just wants me to dance like a monkey”.
But on reflection, I realised the point about that moment, and others in The Last Of Us, was that it wasn’t my choice. It was Joel’s. His backstory, especially the death of his own daughter Sarah, made it entirely understandable that he would do anything to protect Ellie. Of course he would have killed the doctor. It is not a decision I hope I would have made, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood why Joel did.
This gap between what a player and the characters might choose was a deliberate choice by the game’s creator Neil Druckmann. “They are not morally aligned with you,” he told the Empire podcast.
Playing both sides
The follow-up released in 2020 — The Last of Us Part 2 — took that conflicted feeling and made it the very heart of the entire game.
In an even bolder move, the game flips perspective halfway through, placing you in the shoes of a character you likely have perceived as a villain. You then find yourself replaying certain moments from a different perspective, knowing — with creeping dread — some of what will come. An unremarkable guard dog that you killed in passing earlier in the game reappears when you play a flashback level as a faithful pet, for whom your new character would throw tennis balls.
You play as both sides and see why each regards the other as monsters. And the overwhelming feeling this creates is wanting both sides to stop fighting and just properly talk to each other.
The actor who played Ellie, Ashley Johnson, said she had felt exactly this when she tried playing the game herself, especially in scenes battling her character’s nemesis. “I kept saying ‘No, No I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to fight this person any more’.’” she told a podcast. “I’ve never felt that in a video game.”
In an addition act of boldness for a major mainstream video game, it appears specifically designed to make players feel empathy towards LGBTQ characters. Not only is the lead character they play lesbian, but they spend many missions playing alongside a young trans man, Levi, and learn gradually about his experiences and the rejection he has faced by his family and community.
Writing in The Washington Post, Julie Muncy noted there had been a mixed reaction from other members of the trans community, with some feeling that “what characters like Lev offer to predominantly cisgender audiences is a chance to feel some emotionally satisfying empathy that conveniently lets them avoid reflecting on the complexity of trans experiences or the way they might treat trans people in their personal lives.” But she herself stressed that she had found positivity in the character. “Lev speaks to me because in the quieter moments of the game, in the time you linger with him, he feels real,” she wrote.
When I played The Last of Us Part II, its emphasis on empathy felt deliberate. But I had not realised at the time how very deliberate it was.
Its creator and co-writer Neil Druckmann is Israeli and grew up in the West Bank before his family moved to the US. The second game’s themes are, he openly acknowledges, inspired by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Eagle-eyed players may even note that the walls to keep the “infected” and enemies out of the game’s post-apocalyptic Seattle bear a very deliberate resemblance to those on the West Bank.
While Druckmann explains that incidents in Ramallah and hostage exchanges for captured Israeli soldiers were his initial inspiration for the game’s theme of revenge, he wanted it to spread a much more universal message about empathy.
“The whole thing with this game is how do you think about the other side. How do I put myself in their shoes and understand their point of view,” he told the game’s official podcast.
To my surprise, he then said it was very specifically, political arguments on Twitter and that he hoped could be defused. The exact same issue I’d been thinking about with the “empathy machine”.
He hoped the game might make people consider their arguments on social media and be more ready to say “I disagree with it, but I get the other side”.
“It would be the greatest compliment if someone told me that was what they took away from the game,” he said.
On that, mission accomplished.
Whether games like this can actually be truly effective as empathy machines is going to require more research. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve found a useful cheat code.
