VIDEO GAMES VIVID : MASTER ESSAY TV

 

Unlocking a video game goldmine for television. As video games have become more complex, developers have used the medium to spin rich, character-based stories.

Over the past decade - as video games have become more vivid and complex, developers have used the medium to spin rich, character-based stories that rival film and TV in quality.

When ''The Last of Us'' came out in 2013, the hit video game's premise - a fungus turns people into zombies, leaving society in shambles, and what government remains is controlled by fascists - seemed squarely in the realm of fiction.

A decade later, on Sunday, an HBO series based on the game was released to a public that has grown all too familiar with the possibility of a germ apocalypse.

The reality of what the world has been through over the past three years is alluded to in a chilling opening scene in which a pair of scientists describe the risk of various pathogens to a talk show audience.

After one of them describes something like Covid-19, the other silences both the fictional crowd and us when he expounds upon the ways in which the warmed - up planet could lead to something much, much worse.

''Part of writing for an audience is just feeling in your bones what cultural knowledge,'' said Craig Mazin, one of the showrunners. ''On the other hand, it's not a show about the pandemic - it's about what it means to survive and and what's the purpose of survival. So we get out of the way pretty quickly.''

Over the past decade, as video games have become more vivid and complex, developers have used the medium to spin rich, character-based stories that rival film and TV in quality.

''The Last of Us,'' for instance is less about the actual break than the father-daughter relationship between a smuggler named Joel [played by Pedro Pascal in the series] and a 14-year-old girl named Ellie [Bella Ramsey].

Their journey across the United States, past zombies and cannibals, raises questions about the limits of love and the atrocity a parent will commit in the name of protecting a child.

But while a handful of game-to-screen adaptations like the ''Tomb Raider", ''Resident Evil'' and ''Sonic the Hedgehog'' franchises have made enough money to warrant sequels, there is a sense that unlike, say, comic books, the stories in video games have never been properly translated.

''A lot of them have been embarrassing,'' said Neil Druckmann, who led the creation of ''The Last of Us'' and its 2020 sequel, ''The Last of Us Part II,'' and created the HBO show with Mazin. [Druckmann is also a showrunner.]

For Hollywood that means a gold mine of intellectual property with a built-in audience of video game players has gone mostly unexploited. Given the pedigree of the creators - Mazin created ''Chernobyl,'' the Emmy-award winning mini-series, while Druckmann and his studio, Naughty Dog, are considered the benchmarks for narrative storytelling in games - fans are hoping '' The Last of Us '' will be different.

Either way, viewers should prepare to see much more adaptations : Other popular video game franchises with film and TV adaptations in the works include ''Twisted Metal'', ''Ghost of Tsushima'' and ''Assassin's Creed.''

The World Students Society thanks author Conor Dougherty.