The Deeper Meanings Behind Video Games by Josh Love

                Video games are some of society’s most under appreciated art forms. While on the surface they may seem like just a source of entertainment, video games can be just as thought provoking as some of the best music or movies. They have stories and characters, which you can’t help but be interested in, and some of the best dialogue which rivals even that of great authors.

                In the game Bioshock you play as a man named Jack who has been in a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean. Jack discovers an underwater city called Rapture and is contacted by a man named Atlas who wants you to help find his wife and son. Over the course of the game you follow Atlas’s requests because he seems like a nice guy. During the game whenever Atlas asks you to do something he always says, “Would you kindly." It is only when Atlas asks you to kill Rapture’s founder, Andrew Ryan, that you learn that Atlas hasn’t been asking you to do these things, he’s been ordering you. It is revealed that Atlas was controlling you by saying the phrase: “Would you kindly." It is also revealed that Atlas was the one who ordered Jack to crash his plane in the first place, just so he could get to Jack. Bioshock uses the illusion of free will to express how everyone is not as they seem by taking the form of a question and turning it into an order.

                Another game with a shockingly good story is The Last of Us, which is about the world being taken over by zombies. The twist is that these zombies were created by a type of fungus called cordyceps, which are fungi that infect ants. This fungus is an actual thing in the real world. The story is not that different from any generic zombie movie/game. There is a group of people and one of them is immune to zombie bites. However the game’s writing between the main protagonist, Joel, and secondary protagonist, Ellie, is so amazing that you grow to care about these characters. The game starts off with Joel’s daughter dying in the initial zombie outbreak. The game then jumps 20 years forward to the point where Joel meets Ellie.

 The story focuses more on Joel and Ellie’s father/daughter relationship rather than the actual zombie outbreak. This makes the game feel fresh and new rather than another zombie cliché. The final act of the game has Joel take Ellie to a group who can synthesize a cure for the zombie outbreak; however, the operation to do so will kill Ellie. Joel is heartbroken, because he doesn’t want to see Ellie, the daughter he never got to raise, die. So Joel makes the ultimate decision to take Ellie back from this group, essentially leaving humanity to die a slow death. This is a controversial ending because either way, there isn’t going to be a happy ending. Yet the controversy alone expresses how much emotion The Last of Us instills within people.

                If anything, video games are a way of art. Whether it's a metaphorical game like Bioshock or an emotional game like The Last of Us, video games cause people to express complex emotions which make us think in ways some never thought possible.

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