Fatherhood in Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us, and The Walking Dead

There has been a recent convergence of triple-A games using fatherhood not as a simple background detail to justify all manner of violence, but as a central thematic component. I have read several critics theorize about why this trend occurred, and many of them believe it is related to the predominantly white-male triple-A game developer community getting older and having children. Whether this is actually true or not is a moot point but the fact remains that three games have been mentioned in the same breath quite a lot lately and thus seem ripe for an examination of how they approach the topic of fatherhood in the apocalypse. 

Of course, the games in question are Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Irrational’s Bioshock: Infinite, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. All three have garnered a substantial amount of critical acclaim—as well as criticism—but they all approach fatherhood in radically different ways. What follows is a survey of all three games in no particular order.  

Spoiler alert.

Bioshock Infinite:

Booker DeWitt is a terrible father, he knows it and it forms emotional and symbolic core of the narrative. Booker’s reason for entering Columbia at the start of the game is to deliver Elizabeth to unknown men—we assume men, because the line “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt” sets up an exclusion simply by calling her “the girl”—who we assume plan to exploit her power to manipulate reality.

Okay, off topic, but I've shot Nazis in more games than I care to admit.
Why did no one ever think to make Klansmen an enemy before now?

As is revealed later in the game, selling his child is a major facet of Booker’s past. Elizabeth is later revealed to be Booker’s daughter who he sold to the game's central antagonist Zachery Comstock, who we also learn is Booker from an alternate timeline. That Booker is both the protagonist and antagonist presents an extremely pessimistic view of the father in that he is both the worst thing in the world for his child and the means by which she can attain freedom. In that regard, Elizabeth and Booker’s relationship could be viewed as that of an abusive parent to their child. This duality on Booker’s part is also emphasized through Elizabeth’s relationship to the Song-Bird. The Song-Bird's role as both protector and jail-keeper places it in a position similar to that of an abusive spouse, and their interactions emphasize this abusive relationship. The Song-bird is further established as a reflection of Booker in that its death under the sea parallels both Booker’s drowning of Comstock and Booker's own drowning death at Elizabeth's hands.

Comstock Statues often herald the coming of the Song-Bird.

Both versions of DeWitt take agency away from Elizabeth, and view her as a way to cleanse their sins. Booker seeks to take her away from Columbia so as to make up for the act of selling her in the first place—an act for which he branded her initials into his hand. Comstock turned Columbia into a monument that idolized the sins of American imperialism and by extensions the sins he committed in service to that imperialism. He seeks to mold Elizabeth into a force capable of destroying the world below, effectually cleansing the remnants of his sins from the world. She ultimately does not have a choice in either and her destiny will be the result of Booker’s actions. The ending asserts that the only way to prevent all the myriad futures in which Comstock rises or she is exploited is for her to drown Booker at the moment when he makes the choice to either become Zachery Comstock or remain Booker DeWitt. In essence, the abusive parent’s good intentions do not outweigh his harms, and the only way to prevent one is to destroy the parent before it has the opportunity to either create or destroy the life of the child.

Pictured: Foreshadowing, Metaphor, and "return to Rapture" fan-service.

The Last of Us

I still wish I did not have to play The Last of Us as Joel. The small section in which the player plays as Ellie while Joel lies dying of an infection presents one of the most interesting genre subversions in recent gaming.

Before I get into that, Joel is established from the outset as a father and protective figure. The game opens up with the player in control of Joel’s teenage daughter, Sarah. As the player meets their first zombie they are not in a position to fight back, they are in a position of needing protection. Joel is able to dispatch the zombie but the player, as Sarah, is not and must stay back where it is safe. When a car accident injures her, the player is then put in control of Joel, carrying her through a mob of panicked people as they attempt to find a safe place. The player thus experiences both the impotence of having to be protected and the responsibility of being the protector. Sarah’s agency is essentially stolen by the player’s assumption of the protective role and Joel’s competence as a protector is critically undermined when Sarah is shot and killed a few minutes later.

Not on the box-art, can't be a main character.

After the twenty year time skip we see him as a figure that is resistant to change. He still wears the watch which Sarah gave him in the opening, despite the fact it has ceased to function; he cultivates and tries to protect a narrowly defined “us” initially represented by him and Tess and later by him and Ellie. If one acknowledges that parenting is about preparing one’s child for the world in addition to protecting them from it, it eventually becomes clear that Joel never grows out of the role of just being a protector.  Early on, he repeatedly refuses to give Ellie a gun despite the fact that she has grown up in the apocalypse and likely knows how to use one. His choice emphasizes that Joel views himself as not only being responsible for protecting her life but also protecting her innocence. While he is willing to do all the things necessary to survive, including killing, he attempts to maintain a social standard which is incompatible with the world they live in. Rather than trying to teach her to protect herself, he intends to be her sole protector, and in doing so, he ensures that she will need him.

Joel and his one true love: his brick.

This assumption of parent as protector rather than teacher is reinforced every time Joel and Ellie encounter water. Whenever a body of water needs to be crossed, the game requires Joel to find a pallet and push Ellie across the water on. In most of these cases, the pair is not in any immediate danger. The player has infinite time to either find a pallet or sit and watch the water texture. In almost all of these instances there is plenty of time for Joel to teach Ellie how to swim, but he never does. They joke about it at one point late in the game, after they have been traveling for the better part of a year. Over the course of an entire year, Joel never tries to give Ellie one basic survival skill. Instead, he puts it off because a designer spent a lot of time designing those mechanics he needs her to rely on him for the construction of his idyll.

But that does not mean that Joel is not shaping Ellie unintentionally. During the segment titled “Winter,” the player takes control of Ellie as Joel lies bedridden from an infection. The roles of protector and protected are switched in that now Ellie needs to forage for food, find medicine, and lead angry cannibals away from their hiding place. But very little changes in terms of mechanics between Joel and Ellie—the only real difference is that Ellie cannot carry as many weapons nor shiv her way out of getting insta-killed. In other words, where Joel has upgrades and potential for improvement, the RPG elements are stripped away from Ellie. She should be the embodiment of pure potential, but because of Joel’s need to protect her, she cannot improve beyond the skills she possesses. Yet she does still learn from Joel. She learns how to imitate him. Since the player is the same for both Joel and Ellie, she ends up relying on many of Joel’s tactics—in my case, this meant she adopted Joel’s fondness for throwing bricks at people’s faces before stabbing them repeatedly—indicating a level of learned brutality that the game never comments on. In essence, she acquires a facsimile of Joel’s skills, but cannot move beyond them because he does not teach, only protect.

Insta-kill Zombies aside, "Winter" was the most interesting section of the
game. Too bad Joel took over being the player character afterwards...

The ending is perhaps the ultimate moment of criticism for Joel’s behavior, though it perhaps does not go far enough in. Upon reaching the Firefly stronghold, it is revealed that Ellie will die if they attempt to synthesize a cure for the zombie-fungus her. Joel goes into a rage. Rehearsing Liam Neeson’s role in Taken, he slaughters everyone between him and Ellie, and takes her off the operating table by force. As they drive away from the Firefly base, she awakes and he tells her that “they’ve stopped looking for a cure.” His lie is cross cut with his cold-blooded execution of Marlene, the firefly leader and Ellie’s friend. The game then time skips and the player briefly regains control of Ellie, as she requires Joel to pull her up a ledge. She then explains that she had been waiting to die since she was first bitten—when she learned of her immunity—and needs to know if what he said was true. He lies, and says “yes,” protecting himself and keeping Ellie as his surrogate daughter. Fatherhood for Joel is about building an idyll, even at the cost of humanity and the agency of Ellie. Joel does not want to make her self-sufficient; he just wants to keep her alive.

This scene of him picking up and running with Ellie is supposed
to mirror the part earlier in the game with Sarah. Symbolism!

In short, Joel is a terrible father and though the ending makes it clear that he should be criticized for it, he goes unpunished for depriving Ellie of agency throughout the text. He dooms humanity and robs her of her agency for his own selfish reasons while successfully maintaining his idyll and his role as protector. As Ellie lets him help her up that last boulder, it becomes apparent that she will always be in his shadow and will probably always need his help, and that is his goal.

The Walking Dead

Lee from the The Walking Dead is the only figure on this list who is not a biological father. His attachment to 8-year old Clementine is a voluntary one, lacking the coercion of Booker or the promise of reward for Joel. In their first encounter she warns him about an incoming zombie and helps keep him alive—a stark contrast from Elizabeth and Ellie whose first encounters have them following the player’s lead, or acting as signposts for where the player should go next.  Yet the encounter also involves the killing of her zombified baby-sitter, representing a transfer of her from the protection of an unfit parental figure to one that is supposedly more fit by the virtue of being alive. Yet the game is pretty critical as to whether Lee is a fit parental figure. One of Clementine’s first lines of dialogue is a mournful “you aren’t my daddy.” Her reaction coupled with Lee’s exceedingly violent dispatching of the zombie baby-sitter only a few feet away from Clementine, and the fact that Lee was on his way to prison at the start of the game, asks the player question both Lee’s fitness as the surrogate parent and his own. Lee’s assumption of protection is also based on the promise of helping Clementine find her parents, even though he can be pretty sure they will not be alive when and if he finds them.

Lee is also the one of the only black protagonists in recent triple-A gaming.

Unlike the other two games on this list, The Walking Dead is an adventure game, and like the comics it shares its title with, its core aesthetics are focused not on action and combat but on the tensions inherent in the social interactions of the survivors (the other walking dead). To this end, the inclusion of a timer on almost every dialogue choice—inconsequential or not—makes every conversation an exercise in quick-reading and snap decision making. As a result, the player often finds themselves wondering whether they made the right choice. During my playthrough, I told Sean that I was Clementine’s baby-sitter, but accidentally told Hershel something different and got caught in the lie. Hershel let Lee off the hook but told him that he’d need to do better if he wanted to protect Clementine. Between the uncertainty generated by the dialogue system nurtures uncertainty in the player as much as the uncertainty of the other survivors does in Lee.

From “Episode Three” onward Lee stops simply protecting Clementine and starts teaching her how to rely on herself. The death of Duck, the other child in the group, and the destruction of Kenny’s family as a result, hammers home that simply trying to protect Clementine will not work, because at some point, Lee will not be able to protect her. He teaches her to shoot, he cuts her hair, and he starts making contingency plans in case things go wrong. Dialogue choices also see the player having to straddle the line between doing what needs to be done and setting a good example for Clementine.  

Moments like this are not just tiny vignettes between combat. Character
interactions are the core of this game.

Uncertainty hounds Lee for the entire game and comes to a head in the ending. By the end, Lee sits dying in a warehouse across the street from where he and Clementine left the body of a madman who sought to take her away from Lee. A man who—in my case—Clementine shot to save Lee. The final scene has Lee leading Clementine through a series of steps to retrieve a key from a zombie security guard and preparing her to go out into the zombie city and find what remains of their survivor group. In this moment we see Lee continuing to act as teacher rather than protector. The player’s mind is laser focused not on further protecting her, but ensuring that she is able to keep herself safe in a world without him, which is ultimately a prospect that every parent faces—not the imminent mortality of a zombie infection but the eventuality that they will not be around to protect their children.  As Lee feels himself fading there is only one last question, will he let himself become one of the walkers, or potentially traumatize Clementine by asking her to help end it. In either event, the player will not know if she made it to safety, he will not know how she will cope with that final choice, or with Lee’s death. The player can only reflect and hope he did the right things when it mattered.

Summary (a.k.a. Conclusion [a.k.a. Some Rambling Thoughts])

If anything, BInfinite and The Last of Us approach fatherhood with an incredible level of distrust of self. Both are the stories of violent men who utterly fail at being good fathers. If one were to extrapolate from that initial suggestion that these games reflect the aging of their designers and their own experiences with fatherhood, one might suggest that much of this uncertainty of self might apply to the games industry at large. The question of whether or not meaningful narrative can be told by triple-A gaming while it remains mired in shooting and violence was raised at this year’s GDC in this wordless rant by developer Chris Hecker. Or perhaps it is more useful to read Charles Cox’s article "Why I'll Never Work on First-Person Shooters Again," specifically the part about “Superdad.” Both games seem to cry out for something more in terms of narrative and craft than triple-A gaming seems willing to offer. Both games seem to say that fatherhood through protection is not good enough, but neither really provides an alternative. Their narratives are all about questioning the protagonists yet the mechanics by which the player interacts with the world are so industry standard that doubt is never really a factor.

By contrast, The Walking Dead exemplifies the maturation of a genre: the adventure game’s traditional focus on writing and narrative is preserved while the mechanics are streamlined for a new age. Granted, the player has far more control over Lee than over either Booker or Joel; the player is not Lee’s blood-simple, combat/gameplay id as he is for the other two. But by simply applying new pressure to every choice the player makes and by emphasizing the eventual mortality of the parental figure, Telltale created a game which cuts to the heart of parenting in a way that is intimately interactive. While Booker fears himself and Joel fears the continued destruction of his carefully built “us,” Lee’s fears are for Clementine. He puzzles over whether it is more important to teach her what is right, or what is necessary; he worries about setting a good example by his actions; his worries are the player’s worries because the mechanics encouraged our understanding of his uncertainties.