I'm playing video games right now — Fortnite, with one of the boys. But lately I've been playing a lot more of The Last of Us, which is a game that came out in 2013 from the studio Naughty Dog, which had previously made the Uncharted series and Crash Bandicoot. Which is a lot of range for a studio. If you're not familiar with video games, the Uncharted series is a ludic take on Indiana Jones, and Crash Bandicoot is a fun, wacky platformer series helmed by a genetically-advanced marsupial.
Anyway, The Last of Us. It's about a guy, Joel, and a young girl, Ellie, who have been brought together because society collapsed — in their world, a mutated Cordyceps fungus has begun infecting humans and turning them into... things. They act like zombies, but they look like funguses, with the characteristic chalky, mushroomy growths. (Many species of Cordyceps are parasitic, which is presumably where they got the idea.) Ellie and Joel are on a mission to save humanity, because she was bitten by one of the Cordyceps-infected people and has somehow survived. She might be the cure.
I haven't finished the game yet, but the story is one of the best I've ever encountered in a video game. (Seriously! It's so good that HBO is turning it into a series.) The characters are lifelike — Ellie is an annoying teen, sometimes! — and the portrayals of grit and sublimated grief really work. You're taking a ride with some deeply traumatized people who nonetheless do what they must, as the saying goes, because they can.
It helps that the world of The Last of Us is beautifully rendered and thought out. (It masks thousands of hours of developer suffering.) You walk through ruined, abandoned cities, just the two of you; there are notes, diaries, and graffiti to read that all fills in what exactly happened to the places you're trekking through. The lifelike textures and lighting make the familiar stuff more eerie: it's possible to deduce how things got that way. You can see how society broke down, and how nobody could pick up the pieces, at least in most places. The quarantine zones feel realistic.
I've been staying inside for most of the hours in my day, leaving my apartment pretty much only to go to the grocery store for something I've forgotten. It's started to change my relationship to time, but mostly, it's changed what I think when I see other human beings doing other human things. When me and my girlfriend were walking to the (stocked!) grocery store near my house last night, I saw a man get out of a beat-up pickup truck, cough a few times, adjust his hat, and then walk into the store ahead of us. I shivered. Because a cough means something different now. I thought of Ellie and Joel and how, in the game, you're tasked mostly with sneaking around the zombies you encounter — because they're fast and strong, and while Joel is basically superhuman he does get overwhelmed, and when he dies so does she. I wanted to sneak through the crowded, narrow aisles, hiding from the maybe-infected.
Here in New York, we're only in the first stages of what's going to happen with the coronavirus. We don't know yet if our collective staying inside will be able to flatten the proverbial curve — will be able to slow the flow of the infected into the ICUs around the city. But things have palpably changed. People are suspicious. Society isn't breaking down, but its threads are fraying. Going outside means regarding everything and everyone with suspicion, and being regarded the same way, in turn. And it's fair: you can spread the coronavirus even before you know you're sick. We're not in the same universe as Ellie and Joel, but what's happening now is exactly what happened to them, because society collapses the same way every time. It never happens all at once.
Our story isn't over. Even if things do collapse we all still have to live through it; and if things get really bad, as they seem they might, I hope that they can bring us closer together instead of fraying things further. It is probably a futile hope. But at least hope is free.
The first scene of The Last of Us is one of the most affecting things I've ever seen in a game. Probably the most affecting. You play as Joel's daughter, Sarah, as the outbreak reaches them in Texas. The moment when the threads supporting them break is characteristically finely rendered: Sarah wakes up in the middle of the night and realizes her dad isn't there, and goes to look for him. She finds him panting in the study with a gun in his hand. He's telling her to leave the room when their neighbor crashes through the plate glass of the sliding door and charges him; he shoots the guy dead in front of her.
Later, as they're trying to flee with Joel's brother in Joel's truck, you can hear the ambient fear from the radio broadcast that plays in the background as the trio tries to leave town. They don't succeed, of course, and Sarah breathes her last in Joel's arms. Life goes on, of course. This is the first scene. But life only goes on because it must. There is always a moment when things irretrievably change.
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