Saturday Morning Gaming: On Sonder

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines “Sonder” as:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

I (finally) got around to experiencing The Last of Us Part II and there are a number of things that it did very well along with a handful of somewhat incoherent moral messages that are all tied to a railroaded story. Personally, I think that the addition of a couple of choices at the end would have helped the game be what its most ardent defenders said it was… but I suppose we’ll get to that.

There are going to be *FULL* spoilers for the games. Including the endings. If you want to experience the games for yourself, you can pick up Part I and Part II

If you’re not familiar with the Last of Us series, know that it’s a Zombie Apocalypse universe. In the first game, you play Joel, a traumatized killing machine. He lost his daughter at the very beginning of the zombie apocalypse when the government was still intact and, years and years later, is charged with bringing a young girl who appears to be immune to the zombification process to a handful of medical professionals who will use her immunity to make a drug that will, ideally, help everybody become immune. Along the journey, we learn about him and about the girl (Ellie, it turns out) and Joel starts to like her and she starts to like Joel and we, the players, start to like them. We help them get through zombie territory and the groups of unzombified humans who excel at surviving in a little fiefdom that manages to survive in a zombie apocalypse (some of them are civilized but the majority are monstrous). This journey involves killing a lot of zombies and, holy cow, a *LOT* of humans.

Eventually, Joel gets Ellie to the doctors where he finds out that the process to get to the root of her immunity is one that she won’t survive. Joel finds out about this and says that another one of his daughters isn’t going to die. He goes through the hospital to get Ellie back and kills everybody in his way. Eventually he gets to the doctors about to perform the procedure and he kills them too (including the head surgeon). He grabs Ellie and they go back to a nice little community in Wyoming. It’s got electricity and everything. Ellie confronts Joel and asks whether he saved her at the expense of saving the world and Joel lies to her. And that’s the game.

It’s a pretty good game.

The Last of Us II takes place about four years after the events of the first game (with an entire *HOST* of flashbacks). Joel and Ellie are enjoying their new little community (hey, there’s some friction among the young people engaged in serial monogamy and all of the drama that that entails) and we play as both Joel and Ellie in various stories involving going out on patrol on behalf of their new community and, wouldn’t you know it, Joel finds himself in a pickle where he meets up with some new people who are also in a pickle and they go to a safehouse where Joel gets jumped and tortured. The game focus shifts to Ellie and we see Ellie watch Joel get killed.

The next arc of the game involves Ellie doing research and finding out who the people in the safehouse were, where they live, and we play the game where she hunts them down one by one and kills most of them in fairly brutal fashion. One happens to be pregnant (you kill her attack dog too), another gets dropped into some zombies where she gets zombified… it’s all pretty emotionally satisfying for you, as Ellie, to track down the people who killed your Joel.

Well, the game focus shifts and we start playing as Abby (the woman who tortured and killed Joel). Abby, as it turns out, is the daughter of the head surgeon from the first game. We see her flash back to finding her dead father in the operating room (multiple times). We see her working in her own community where she is a respected person adjacent to leadership and we see her interact with her friends. We see her deal with the aftermath of a handful of failed relationships, we see that she is a competent soldier in her community and she does a good job of protecting her friends (physically, anyway), and we see her deal with her own minor triumphs and tribulations that come with the day-to-day of living in a zombie apocalypse.

Through our interactions with her and her friends, we find that a handful of her friends were pretty traumatized by the journey to Jackson, Wyoming where they hunted down a guy and then watched Abby torture him to death before brutally killing him. I mean, it’s one thing to be part of a group that kills the zombies that attack the community and another to kill the religious fanatics in the region who keep attacking them, but travelling states over? To find one guy? Just to torture and kill him? That’s something that messes a person up. It’s one thing to be loyal to a friend but another to be loyal to someone who tortures and kills people that they have to hunt down first.

We meet a couple of exiles from the religious fanatics and they become additional members to Abby’s found family. Through our interactions with all of them, we talk to the pregnant lady, we play fetch with her pet dog, we have conversations with the people that, in the first half of the game, we hunted down as Ellie. We find out their names, their loves, their resentments, and we get to experience them as somewhat fleshed-out people.

And we get to say “oh, this dog that I’m playing fetch with is a sweetie. Oh, the pregnant lady that I killed *REALLY* resents Abby for the Jackson, Wyoming incident. Oh, the boat guy we killed had an affair with Abby while his girlfriend was pregnant and so Abby is kind of ‘the other woman’ in a triangle and… man. Young people.”

And the game then has you start playing as Ellie again. And then as Abby again. And then as Ellie again. With more flashbacks to events alluded to in previous scenes.

We get to experience both of them, as fleshed-out characters with their own motivations, perspectives, and complexities. We find out that each has a *LOT* of trauma and this trauma is messing them up and it has ripples and echoes that go on to mess up others.

And in the final (of many!) climaxes we see Ellie and Abby finally have a great big fight and we see how that fight resolves… And we see the aftermath with Ellie as she goes back to her old, empty house.

Now, it seems to me that there is a handful of interesting moral discussions going on in the game.

The first game made it somewhat clear that Joel was not someone who was going to die in his bed. We knew that Joel was going to end up in a situation similar to the one the game put him in.

The interesting questions involved whether Ellie was going to become someone who died in her bed and, with the introduction of Abby, whether Abby was going to become one too. How deep does the trauma go… and is it possible to overcome the trauma and become someone who isn’t going to end up beaten, tortured, and killed at the hands of people who want revenge?

Personally, I think that the game did a good job of undercutting itself at the tail end. I think that the game should have switched over from being a railroad game to giving the players a choice:

Would you prefer to play as Ellie or would you prefer to play as Abby? And then play as that person.
Then, in the final confrontation, ask “Are you going to pull the trigger?” and then explore what happens if you do. Or explore what happens if you do not.

Mass Effect had a funny tweet where they talked about making all of this content for the “Renegade” (bad guy) playthrough and how 92% of the people who played the game just played as a regular old vanilla good guy.

Yup. Something like 92% of Mass Effect players were Paragon.
And we put a lot of work in to the Renegade content too 🙁 https://t.co/lywwx7n4Hy

— John Ebenger (@EbengerJohn) February 19, 2020

I was someone who played through as a Paragon, then beat the game as Paragon again, then played through as a Renegade, and *THEN* played through as a Paragon all over again. And you know what? The choices I made as a Paragon *FELT* different than if I were playing a railroaded game where being a good guy was the only option available to me. When you’re asked “what do we do here?” and you have the choice of saying “save the council” or “we have bigger fish to fry”, it feels meaningful to choose to Save the Council.

And I found it interesting that not only that most of the people who played, wanted to play as a good guy, but the OVERWHELMING SUPERDUPER MAJORITY of them wanted to play as a good guy. I would have guessed, oh, 80% played through as a Paragon. That number was 92%! Not 4 out of 5, but 23 out of 25.

My buddy asked me, after the game, what I would have done if I had the “choice” ending that I suggested above.

I told him. “I would have played as Ellie and I would have killed Abby.”

“YOU’VE LEARNED *NOTHING*!”, he yelled at me. “I would have played as Abby and I wouldn’t have killed Ellie.”

And we went on from there to talk about morality, zombie apocalypses, post-apocalyptic economics, and so on. It was a good and engaging game, I guess. The gameplay itself was solid, if on rails, the characters were interesting, the illusions of the moral choices presented to the characters were interesting, and the choices made by the various characters (and those reacting to those choices) all seemed to involve picking up the idiot ball and headbutting it five or six times.

I understand that there is a The Last of Us III in the works. I imagine that it won’t offer choices either.

So… what are you playing?