It's traditional to start blogposts about videogames with a 'spoiler alert'. If you're reading this and you don't want to know about the end of 'The Last of Us' then you should probably look away now. There's a particularly fine piece on Thomas Kinkade a little lower down if you like. Better still, open the Writing tab above and read some short stories and extracts of my work.

The Last of Us was published recently by Naughty Dog and is one of the best videogames I've played in a long time. It's set 20 years after a plague has killed most US citizens and turned a good proportion of the rest into something resembling zombies. The uninfected survivors are divided into a military government, cannibals, guerrillas and a very few civilians. This scenario sets up the gameplay, which is as gory as one could hope and rather more difficult than in many similar productions. I died a lot.

You play a smuggler, Joel, and your cargo is a girl, Ellie. The story insists that she is 14 years old, though her height suggests she can't be more than 12 (maybe they're not so well nourished in post-Apocalypsia) Zombie bites are invariably fatal but Ellie has somehow survived one and you have to take her from one side of USA to the other on behalf of the guerrillas. Once there, you are told, they have the medical facilites to make a vaccine from her antibodies.

This quest takes a year in game time and it took me about twenty hours in real time. What sets the game apart from other games is the relationship that develops between Ellie and Joel, which is narrated in cutscenes (cinematic sequences in which the player does not control the character's movements) A demonstration is outside the scope of a blogpost so I shall simply assert that The Last of Us is much better in this respect than World War Z (the film, I didn't read the book) or The Walking Dead (both the television programme and the graphic novel, I have not played the game) or The Road (the Cormac McCarthy book, I didn't see the film)

At the end of the game it turns out that the guerrillas plan to kill Ellie and harvest her brain in their search for the vaccine. When he finds out Joel fights his way through them and saves her when she is already etherised upon a table. The game requires him to kill at least one of the surgeons to do so. I killed all three and I used a flamethrower because I was furious with them. Joel carries Ellie out of the building and drives to safety. The final scenes show Ellie examining her bite and Joel promising her that the guerrillas had given up looking for the vaccine.

It may be that Ellie had started to turn into a zombie. On my television her bite looked worse than it had before- but my television is cathodic and not suited to HD games. I am probably wrong- the internet commenters do not seem to have noticed.

http://thelastofus.eu.playstation.com/en_GB/lastofus

What I found astonishing however is that almost universally they think Joel should have given up Ellie so as to (possibly) save mankind. John Stuart Mill might have agreed but it seems to me that giving up a child to vivisectionists is not the action of a dramatic hero. This is even more the case in narrative terms as Ellie can be considered as Joel's adoptive daughter by the end of the game. Off the top of my head I can only think of one 'give up the kid to save the world' story where this is considered the right thing to do- and I'm not the first person to point out that if that story ends on Good Friday rather than Easter Sunday then its meaning is entirely different. Agamemnon does not get praised for sacrificing Iphigenia.

A sort of folk utilitarianism is the dominant ethic of our time. 'The greatest good of the greatest many' is cynically or thoughtlessly used to justify any monstrosity. Many of the attacks on Joel- and on the writer for forcing the player to kill 'doctors' to progress in the game- were of this simple arithmetical type. I was more interested by a different thread of comments. Many said that Ellie would work out that Joel had lied to her and that their relationship would be destroyed by this deceit. I do not think this reflects a touching suspension of disbelief past the end of the narrative. I think it is a reflection of a style of literature teaching that is vastly overused in Anglo-Saxon schools. I will characterise it (only a little unfairly) as the 'Pretend you are Romeo and write a letter to Friar Lawrence explaining why you committed suicide' theory of literature teaching. Character and motivation are the only things of interest, and narrative is merely a device to reveal them. The demands and structures of the story are thought to be too difficult and so teaching about narrative becomes primarily an examination of the psychology of the protagonists. Film and television programme makers often mock this, especially in films about making films. But even in The Sopranos Chrissy Molitsanti the up and coming gangster asks 'What's my motivation?' and 'When is my story-arc?' before going out to do his mob work.

For the last few years the scriptwriters' names have been creeping up the order of the credits at the end of a videogame, as their importance to the game increases. Only a few years ago the plot chiefly existed to put the player character in a situation he would have to fight his way out of. The cutscenes could be (and often were) extremely well done but they were little more than a peg for the action sequences. If it is the case that videogamers are starting to use the literary critical techniques they have been taught to analyse games this is a positive sign. It shows that videogames have gone past the point where the mechanics of play which depend on hand-eye co-ordination are the overwhelming features of interest. Now character is also a feature. The next challenge is to make 'character' and 'narrative' playable parts of the game. There have already been attempts to do so by, for instance, letting players chose what to say to non-playable characters from a short onscreen menu, or by providing different endings to the narrative, and these have met with some success. It is easy to imagine this trend continuing as games become more sophisticated and move away more from cinematic (and to a much lesser degree novelistic) narrative techniques to develop new ways to tell stories.

We are going to need new ways to talk about them too. The 'Pretend you are the serpent in Paradise Lost and write a letter to God explaining why you decided to tempt Eve' school of lit-crit isn't going to be able to cope.