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Quick disclaimer before I get into things here: I’m only going to be discussing The Last of Usseries’ first game (aka The First of Us) and its parallel season of TV. If you’re (somehow) excitedly watching season 2 of the HBO show week-to-week and you (somehow) aren’t familiar with the events of the game The Last of Us: Part II, don’t worry — you’re safe from spoilers here. I won’t even do any golf jokes.

Okay? Okay.

I don’t like HBO’s The Last of Us. I don’t like it for reasons unfair to the show. I don’t like it because The Last of Us The Game was a game written to be a game and The Last of Us The Show was a show written to be a game.

There’s a notion that game stories are held back by their medium, as if “video game” is some inherent disadvantage to any story. To be fair, sometimes it can really feel that way. Alien: Isolation‘s story would probably be better realized if it was less concerned with the big final boss-ish endings expected of AAA games. The urgency of any storybeat in Yakuza is hampered by Kiryu’s need to give seemingly every homeless person who looked at him funny a concussion. And, yeah, I suppose one CinemaSinsly-minded enough might wonder why Aerith couldn’t’ve just popped a Phoenix Down.

The problem isn’t that these are bad stories, or that games are a bad way to tell stories. Rather, the issue is that these stories didn’t consider the unique weaknesses of games as a storytelling medium, and more importantly, they didn’t consider the strengths. It’s stories that explore the opportunities, shortcuts, and virtues of games as a storytelling medium that succeed the most. Disco Elysium shouldn’t be a book just because there’s a lot of reading. It should be a game because you’re in charge of what you do or don’t read, how you spend your limited time within the day, who you do or don’t trust, and when you take action or fall back. Red Dead Redemption II shouldn’t be a movie just because it’s pretty and well-written. It should be a game because the story isn’t happening entirely in the beautifully voiced cutscenes or dynamic setpieces. It’s also happening in downtime, long horse rides to nowhere special, holding the craft button for 20 minutes while Arthur hacks away at his +1 bullets until they’re all +2 bullets, gunning down some daggum cowpoke who offended you because you’re bored, because Arthur’s bored, or making the decision, in complete synthesis with your protagonist, to spare his life.

The Last of Us is a video game.

Those who’ve grown up with their literacy intact can probably think of a book narrated in first person by one of its primary characters. The movie adaptation, probably, if it’s good, was not. Dune The Book is about guys planning events years in advance, in their thoughts, thoughts which are accessible to readers. Dune The Movie is about things happening to people. Rather than hearing about events planned years before they’re to happen — years before they’re to happen — audiences are led to believe that the characters are just reacting in the best way they can think of to events out of their control. Massively different characterization when compared to the book? Yes. Worse for the story? Well, no, because it’s a different story. The movie was changed to account for the inaccessibility of movie characters’ interior lives, a limitation of film not found in books, books which, uniquely, can be narrated in first person without being dumb. Books and movies, like games and television, have to tell their stories differently.

Here’s another example. Plays feature their characters talking out loud to their audience, because plays are plays. Movies do not do this, because movies aren’t plays. If movies were plays, every movie would be Ferris Bueller, and even the most diehard Ferris Bueller fans don’t – I hope – want every movie to be Ferris Bueller. Musicals, similarly, are musical. Characters can’t sing in books, because books are words, and characters can’t sing on non-musical TV because, L to the OG notwithstanding, it would be very bad TV. Plays and musicals, like games, books, movies, have different ways they’re able to – yeah you get the idea. 

Sony’s Naughty Dog’s HBO’s The Last of Us For Your TV is irreparably worse than Sony’s Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us For Your Chosen Game Console because the latter is a story just as much about opening cabinets and shooting people as it is about a big guy with a tough voice and a small guy who uses a lot of bad words.

According to reddit user Perryapsis, who I trust with my life because they used a spreadsheet, there are 565 killable dudes in The Last of Us. In video games, such as the one that The Last of Us is, you can encounter 565 killable dudes and not think to yourself, “damn, this big dad and little girl are unbelievably good at killing dudes.” Instead you think, “these two are about as good at killing dudes as I expect of a pair of video game protagonists.” John Wick, for comparison, kills dramatically fewer dudes than 565 in the film franchise John Wick and yet, even when these movies dedicate so much effort towards convincing us that John is video game protagonist-level good at killing dudes, we still think, “how is he so good at killing dudes?” This is because, despite the film’s attempts to promise us that John is, in simple terms, “like a video game character in a movie,” a discerning audience will be able to detect that he is actually a movie character in a movie.

I don’t remember much from AMC’s The Walking Dead, a show about people forming bonds in a zombie apocalypse, but something I do remember is that Carl finds pudding, and then eats that pudding. This moment of scrounging for useful supplies and subsequent discovery of said supplies is treated with a substantial amount of weight in the show, enough for me to remember it as, “the bit where Carl finds pudding.” If throughout the entire show we were shown dozens of scenes where Carl looks for and then finds pudding, it would be a bad show. Sony Dog’s The Last of Us for PSsomething-or-other, a game about people forming bonds in a zombie apocalypse, is extremely invested in stopping for pudding. Stopping for pudding begets bullets, upgrade pills, magical Minecraft items that can be turned in seconds into bullet wound-fixing first aid kits and zombie-on-firing molotovs. We don’t even think about all the pudding we’re looking for, because it’s a video game. It’s something we can just accept as part of the loop. When gameplay goes unquestioned, that gameplay can serve a purpose in the story.

If HBO’s The Last of Us: The Hit TV Show Based On The Hit Video Game was just as much about watching its characters kill 565 dudes and stop for pudding as it was about watching its protagonists bond, it would be a bad show. I would argue no show could ever be good under such suffocating restrictions. It’s simply not something the medium of TV is capable of, in the same way movies that aren’t Ferris Bueller can’t be plays and video games that aren’t Parappa the Rapper can’t be musicals. It seems HBO was aware of this, so it doesn’t happen. But it definitely needed to for the story to work in its current form. I’ll explain why.

HBO’s The Show of Us seems to operate under the assumption that Naughty Dog’s The Game of Us is a good story that sometimes takes breaks for gameplay. The misunderstanding here is obvious. It’s all story. When Joel violently dispatches 1 of the 565 killable dudes in The Last of Us: An Interactive Experience From Sony, we think, “this guy is mondo crazypants.” When Ellie surprises us by killing one of those dudes for Joel, and also, because of the interactive nature of video games, for us, we think, “I love my new daughter so much, and I would do anything to protect her up to and including the evilest possible thing that could happen within this setting.” When Joel stops for pudding, we think, “this world sucks, and you have to scrounge for bandaids, and that’s probably why Joel is so mondo crazypants.” The pudding runs afford time for character interaction, too. While we rummage for bandaids, Joel might mention that ice cream trucks used to exist, and Ellie responds in disbelief. The story never stops happening. The 565 killable dudes and the extremely finite supply of bandaids and tiny knives in this world serve to tell us that the world sucks, Joel is mondo crazypants, and Joel and Ellie really, really love each other. In fact, this world is so bad, and Joel is so mondo crazypants, and Joel and Ellie’s love is so boundless, that when Joel reverse-trolley problems humanity into a sort of Permanent Hell, we get it.

The entire story is prep work for this big scene where Joel kills this doctor, right? It’s not just gameplay for gameplay’s sake. It’s priming you not only to believe Joel could make this clearly awful decision, but manipulating you into making it yourself. It’s desensitization: You already killed 564 dudes to get to this point, what’s one more? It’s sunk cost: You didn’t scrounge for all those bandaids just to not get a happy ending with your new daughter. It’s, in a meta sense only capable within games, motive: How many times did you get shot to death, reload, and get shot to death again in this hospital? You should relish the opportunity to gun down this unarmed doctor. More than anything, it’s love: I’m willing to show my hand here and say Ellie in the show is better written than Ellie in the game — and that it doesn’t matter. I love a single unnamed Yellow Pikmin more than I love any character in any prestige drama HBO has ever released. In games, you’re not just watching characters, you’re living alongside them. It’s one of those “unique strengths of the medium” I kept mentioning earlier.

Roleplay is the lifeblood of any narrative game. I didn’t watch Joel do his “mad dad” routine parallel to Ellie’s “sad daughter.” I was that mad dad. When Joel is cold and closed off during the first half of the story, no amount of empathy is enough to counteract the frustration of being forced to play as A Guy Who Sucks. When he finally opens up, the joy is found less in watching a character complete his arc and more in finally finding ourselves in harmony with our player character. The game finally rewards our desire to roleplay with a protagonist whose thoughts match our own. We love Ellie, he loves Ellie, we’re all on the same page. The bond isn’t happening during cutscenes. We build the bond in gameplay, and get rewarded with cutscenes that showcase that bond. 

It’s not just about interactivity. It’s also about time. Like I said earlier, if HBO’s The Last of Usspent as much time killing dudes and looking for pudding as Sony’s The Last of Us does, it would be an incomprehensible mess. At the very least, it would cease to be character drama and become action. Video games, naturalized to action as a feature of the medium, can be both. In the game, the time Joel and Ellie spend together killing and scrounging is where the bulk of the bond happens. It occurs during gameplay, not cutscenes. Cutscenes in The Last of Us are prizes, showcases of the connection we cultivated while killing, scrounging, solving ladder puzzles. The same goes for the awfulness of the world, or the mondo crazy pantsness of its principle character. The big moment where we truly connect with Ellie isn’t watching her kill a deer, but the truly exceptional twist of playing as her killing a deer. This categorically cannot happen in a TV show. The story would need massive changes to work as a TV show, and because of the video game The Last of Us’ award-winning-ness, and narrative cutscene-ness, it seems nobody working on the show was interested in making those changes.

The show pays slight service to these moments of violence and scrounging, but in truth every single one of these moments as they appear in the game is crucial to the final twist working. I’m not excited for the on-going second season of the show. That’s mostly just because of showrunner Neil Druckmann’s troubling political positions, but also — well, it should be obvious by now. I just can’t comprehend how a story like that could be competently translated to TV. Even more than the first game, Part II is so deeply entrenched in the capabilities of games as a medium for storytelling that it seems to be impossible to just pop the script into a season of TV without losing what makes it a strong story. It’s a cynical way to look at games; stories held back by their medium, rather than made possible because of it.

Everyone’s favorite episode of the show was the Bill one, right? It’s a storyline that doesn’t happen in the game. There’s little action, barely any relevance to the main characters, and it’s told through vignettes spanning across years. It’s a story you couldn’t tell in a game. It’s a story written for TV, and it’s your favorite episode. No points for figuring out why that might be.