Queering Dystopia

You wake up to a pounding at the door to match your pounding headache.1 It's your friend Jesse to tell you that you're already running late for patrol duty, and some clickers have been spotted in an abandoned suburb just outside the perimeter. On your way to grab your things, Jesse confronts you about kissing his ex-girlfriend Dina last night. Stumbling through a defense—She kissed me. It was just Dina being Dina. She didn't mean anything by it—he cuts you off, “I'm just messing with you, man. I don't care. Get dressed.”Fortunately for you, heteronormativity and compulsory monogamy have faded somewhat since the outbreak. Maybe the presence of infected helped to displace those bigoted anxieties. You scoff at the joke and, recovering consciousness after the night before, throw on a jacket, and toss a notebook and handgun into your backpack. Stepping outside of your apartment, a garage reappropriated decades after the outbreak, you head out into a snow-covered Jackson, Wyoming.2 You click pause and, unclutching the PlayStation 4 controller from your palms, take a deep breath. It's the summer of 2020 and a global pandemic has been raging. Between being cut off from friends and filtering much experience through screens that put coverage of forest fires, January's right-wing tantrum at the Capitol, and the pandemic's death counter in regular rotation, it has become more difficult to not slide into some version of dystopic thought: the shroud of present dystopias, the accumulation of past dystopias, the questions of what will come next. In regular Zoom meetings with queer comrades, you locate glimmers of emancipatory hope in the formation of broader realizations that there seems to exist a pause button on the churn of mass exploitation, save, of course, for those designated as “essential workers.” Together, you wonder if this relatively widespread opening up of consciousness is just enough to reveal a portal into an alternate reality that plays by a different set of rules, one more akin to the queer politics and intimacies that forge your learning, unlearning, and organizing.You pick up the controller again. For now, there is only The Last of Us Part II and the fact that you are taking control of Ellie for the first time since your senior year of undergraduate when The Last of Us was being lauded by some as the best video game ever made. Of course you loved The Last of Us. The kinetic intensity and affect of dread pervading survival horror games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill has always been your bag, but the case that The Last of Us made for game-as-cinematic-experience seduced you: the smirking micro-expressions that Joel attempts to hide from Ellie when she reads out corny one-liners from a joke book, the flecks of blood that burst from a clicker's mushroomed-skull when you score a headshot, the decaying and maze-like urban environments enveloped by a rapid reclamation of more-than-human nature. . . . Horror has always served a kind of ironic escapism for you, transmuting the kinds of everyday horrors that conjure immiseration into simple, even campy plays of grotesquerie.When you pick back up with Ellie in Jackson, Wyoming, it's been four in-game years since the events of the first campaign. That is, since Joel, unbeknownst to Ellie, shot up a hospital to save Ellie's life. But it's been seven long years for you. As you navigate Ellie through Jackson's labyrinthine development, you move slowly, taking in every layered intricacy of this queered dystopia. That is, of this figuration of a post-apocalyptic future that may contain some preferable alternatives to your dystopia's present form—perhaps, a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”3 You let it absorb you and, if only for a few hours, your fears about this world's deadly outbreak. Leaving a footprint trail in the snow, you make your way through the commune. It has been a quarter century since the outbreak, and the town of Jackson has been slowly building out its model for social organization premised upon horizontality and reciprocity: farmers cultivate the town's food supply in well-insulated greenhouses, signage atop storefronts and a blacksmith forge advertise the community's simple needs-based trade economy, and rotating labor obligations are visibly marked on the walls of the stable. In the old world, the labor form governing Jackson would have been called anarcho-socialism and emerged only from violent revolution against a ruling class's reign of terror at-a-distance, but the outbreak's instigation of system collapse ironically enabled its emergence otherwise. In stark contrast to the FEDRA (Federal Disaster Response Agency) governed quarantine zones that sustain control through fascistic surveillance and death rituals, Jackson's ethos seeks to facilitate not only life, but livability.Jackson leaves room for exploration, creativity, and queer intimacy. Like last night, you explored something in the open with Dina that the two of you don't even need to define. Back at FEDRA, with Riley, you both would have been exiled or worse. Not here, even as normative cultural tendencies from the old world occasionally haunt present ideologies—just as they did last night when one of Jackson's residents, who has clocked more years before the outbreak than after, made heterosexist comments to you and Dina. He will apologize later that morning and offer you and Dina some sandwiches that you will begrudgingly accept. Not for his or your sake, but Jackson's. The town is animated by shades of queer utopic potentialities in a dystopic present tenuously negotiating the logics of difference that formerly governed normative social reality.4 It is 2023 and you and your partner share a blanket on the couch while watching HBO's The Last of Us. In the series’ representation of queer worldmaking at the end of a world, you can't help but reflect on your past few years together, learning and relearning your own queer intimacy even amid a global pandemic, ecological crises, and looming threats of fascism. During one of your viewings, you gleefully point out that the writers have decided to insert the town of Jackson into their adaptation of the first game. The sequence does not quite capture the vision of anarcho-socialism as presented by The Last of Us Part II, but it does similarly present a nostalgic echo of the “Old West” as utopic enclave amidst dystopic violence.In a warped reflection, the real Jackson, according to High Country News, “is one of the most economically stratified places in the country. It is the largest town in Teton County, where in 2021 the average income sits around $300,000.”5 Host to mansions and resort destinations for the extremely rich—Dick Cheney, Kim Kardashian, Tiger Woods, etc.—Jackson epitomizes our dystopia of class hierarchy. With borders regulated through the logics of colonial capitalism, Jackson's economic inaccessibility has forced its Indigenous inhabitants to be displaced, with many of its service workers commuting all the way from Idaho. Meanwhile, the ruling class plays out its rugged fantasies of the Old West in luxury. Even the filming location for the series’ representation of the town had to be moved to Alberta, Canada, due to the impossibility of filming amid such elite tourism. You and Dina pass someone helping their one-year-old child take their first steps. Images of a future, unimaginable just a few years back, begin to stutter into view. Clinging to nostalgic echoes of a fictionalized past, but without the fully institutionalized weight of it, you wonder what it might mean to start to call this place home.You then wonder if you are only momentarily enclaved between traumas, already witness to so much death and hurt while knowing that the cycle cannot, will not, be held off for long. You let the thoughts pass as you and Dina mount your horses and ride out of town toward the suburbs.6 In Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark argues that video games tend to provide an atopian economy of play, wherein players become easily empowered through mechanics and in-game economies that reflect simple modes of exchange between player input and reward. Kill enough zombies, collect enough loot, manage your resources well enough, and you can upgrade your player character to, in turn, more dynamically navigate the adventure. Thus, the atopian virtual world offers a predictable gameplay loop satisfying the investment the player puts into their experience.Of course, this model of in-game labor only feels satisfying due to how starkly it contrasts the complex and predatory economies that often govern players real lives.7 For poor and economically precarious players subject to an unpredictable market largely privileging able-bodied, white, cishet subjectivities, the anxieties that circulate around capital and material access is momentarily dissolved in game worlds that allow for the transcendence of human capacities, death and rebirth cycles, and the exclusion of landlords and bloated health-care fees.Survival horror games are the exception to this atopian model of gaming economies. With an absence of resources necessary to survive, players must navigate hostile worlds with looming anxieties of constraint and disempowerment. Rather than save the world, the objective of survival horror is often to just stay alive.8 In this sense, the in-game economies of survival horror tend to more closely reflect the real-life navigations of cisheterosexist colonial capitalism for those cast outside of spheres of normative privilege. You and Dina ascend one of Jackson's lookout towers to assess the situation. At the top, snow-covered mountains, forests, and housing developments of Wyoming sprawl out before you. Snow drifts down in ghostly patterns, some edging through the window where you and Dina stand close. You notice Dina scanning your body. “Question: were you wearing those same clothes yesterday?” she asks. “No judgment!”Your mind whirls back to last night. You think about you and Dina's kiss. Then you think about how Dina probably wants you to think about you and Dina's kiss. You blush but need to brush it off. There are infected wandering the perimeter of the commune. “It's patrol, you know? We're here to kill infected, not to look fancy.”“You still look nice,” she playfully remarks after a beat.In the suburbs, the two of you burgle long-abandoned homes frozen in time. The windows you hurdle through are portals into lives abruptly abandoned in 2003 when the outbreak began—a now decaying crystallization. Of course, your main objective is to scavenge for resources—medical tape, scissors, alcohol, bullets—but you can't help but get swept up in the intimate details of these spaces: punk rock posters on the walls, spaghetti stains on the carpet, lines drawn in doorframes to indicate growing height, game consoles and now-useless discs littering the floor. Little antiquated escapism machines, now turned to garbage.These remnants of the past sometimes feel artful in their placement. Like perfect disorder in an intricate maze of memories and death. Sometimes you find long-dead bodies, sometimes a note detailing the final moments of a life, and sometimes . . . “Shit. Ellie.” A small horde of clickers begins to make their way down the street and toward the house that you and Dina are exploring.“Come on,” you say. “I know a place where we can hide out.”9 As you move Ellie to the workbench and click the triangle button, you realize that you have never played a game that fetishizes realism to the extent that The Last of Us Part II does. From the intricate, even intimate, environmental dressing to the quivering pleas of mercy from human enemies who have just discovered that they are now the last surviving member of their cohort, each detail breathes nuance into the player's experience of this dead and violent world. At the workbench, the field of vision sweeps over Ellie's shoulder and down to her artillery. When you spend some gear items that you collected in the suburbs to upgrade your rifle and give it a scope, a full animation of Ellie dismantling the rifle, quickly cleaning its chamber with a grease cloth, attaching a scope, and then reassembling the weapon plays out. There is bleeding-edge technological shine animating this brutal, terrifying dystopia. This sleekness, of course, arrives at a cost.Just three months before the game was released, journalist Jason Schreier published an article on the video games news site Kotaku detailing the working conditions at Naughty Dog, the game studio where The Last of Us Part II was developed. He writes of a highly exploitative culture wherein developers often work over twelve-hour days, seven days a week to ensure that a game ships on time.10 Although “crunch,” the term used in game development discourse to describe a high-intensity period of development labor in the months leading up to a game's release, is already ubiquitous in the industry, the level of perfectionism required at Naughty Dog somehow manages to stand out. By hiring hypermotivated artists who are passionate about video games, operating in a highly competitive labor market constantly subject to studio closures and massive layoffs, and never requiring employees to go home, Naughty Dog's company mentality has been frequently characterized by its developers as producing something akin to Stockholm Syndrome—developers formulating a sense of attachment and identity to a company and industry that abuses them before leaving them jobless. Still, such cultures of labor can never begin to resemble the extent of colonial-capitalist superexploitation involved in, for example, the material construction of gaming consoles and tech employed in games development processes. No doubt, the materiality of video games are networked into dystopic systems of planetary-level exploitation and immiseration,11 even as their stories invite players to save the world.“He's over here!” a human enemy shouts to their fellow paramilitary organizers. You note how the writers took the extra step to include a soon-dead enemy AI's gendered assumption about the player protagonist, no doubt a riff on gaming's masculine-dominated history of representation. After you snipe the last one from the top of a garage, you hop down and wander over to the body. It lies in a heap, and you see that bits of brain and skull have spewed onto the sidewalk and trickled into the grass. You think about the developer studying the physics of a bullet's impact on the human head, the visual language of meat and blood, the decision to include a fragment of skull to the digitized violence. You imagine them staring into a screen long after the workday is through. “Oh . . . oh my god,” you say after opening the basement door to Eugene's secluded “It's was a relatively patrol member from Jackson's before and now you can see You are by on all of a of to A used to from in reappropriated as a sits on a in the a of dead Dina before you her your a with The two of you alternate between attempts at opening the before Dina it on the go she the clickers and the you that the two of you will be for at a find you two of you collapse on to a couch and in before Dina I you a There is a look in her of one to being like and being . . . how would you our from last There is no and is You feel a to Dina's but before you can give some of a she give it a You both know what you both know that the has now become about how it The last time you that way with A deep momentarily your by Dina's a There were a of You I now I to know how There it is, you think as it that the has not, in into of and each you You don't notice the world outside You it, at for this that its cycle and by The Last of Us Part II was in that its representation of queer a to on its own the of Joel in the game of the first the game's representation of of a and cisheterosexist gaming and and queer of the first game the representation of of Meanwhile, as by and video the exploitation of developers to its about the of cultural in both hiring and a atop a of immiseration and capital As you navigate Ellie through a construction of you can't help but sense a to the game's emancipatory identity and utopic vision of queer and at the end of a world. The game an and to a system of by and mass a between the logics governing our real-life dystopia that virtual Jackson as an gaming the real Jackson a site of mass and the and cisheterosexist and the glimmers of queer worldmaking in The Last of Us Part II a of dystopia. This normative of dystopia through a of the up by all while the dystopia of the As you reflect upon The Last of Us Part opening in Jackson, Wyoming, you to the game's of queer potentialities and its for building worlds amid the of old In this of you locate an case for the of queer a world of the horrors and of our present world, as by economic help to a queer utopic vision when she writes much identity politics may tend to class as just to system in its form is a than a of Thus, the of building utopic worlds that queer must be a this for a to an investment in class when they not to to in we call queer in the of must be the of first the class the of and the of the working as the exploitation of labor with control over both labor and the of life, the of and the of the of for than this is to only against class to the to for the lives of the poor to not be so wonder if The Last of Us Part Jackson might players a of how the colonial-capitalist they contain potentialities to toward more emancipatory of social through an of capital as both a of exploitation and a of gendered and You hope that the game can as a kind of You and Dina on a couch in the You each and share stories of your by the conditions of the world's did you get this about this queer intimacy is and it will not You not know that Jesse will make his way to the to tell you that some patrol have You not know that this will be the of it is enough to know that this is

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