Virtual reality
July 24-25, 2021
For game makers, the plague has been good for business, writes Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba
You’re a grizzled, 40-some- thing pandemic survivor, travelling through a post- apocalyptic world. You’re not alone. You’re a surrogate father of a teenage girl, whose immunity to an infectious disease could lead to a vaccine.
Except you’re not. You’re sitting on the couch in front of the TV. This pandemic world is not ours but the plot of The Last of Us, a 2013 Play- Station game.
It follows Joel and Ellie, survivors of the cordyceps virus, a real fungus that grows on the brains of insects. In the game it jumps species to humans and ends civilisation.
This now-prescient story of people in a post- pandemic world won awards and has sold more than 20 million copies. The June 2020 release of its sequel, The Last of Us Part II, coincided with the first Covid-19 lockdowns and a worldwide uptick in gaming.
In the sequel, the virus turns people into zombies. And in a shift that recalls real-world super- market brawls, the survivors can be inhumanly brutal to one another. This bleak allegory has been a hit, with sales hitting 2.8 million in the first month of release, making the game the best- selling PlayStation launch of all time.
For game makers, the plague has been good for business. Digital Australia 2020, a report into the sector published pre-pandemic, studied 1210 Australian households and 3228 individuals of all ages. It found that since 2009 nine out of 10 Australian households had at least one device on which video games were played. In 2018, video game sales were worth $4.03bn.
The end of 2020 saw the release of the latest consoles. Sony’s PlayStation 5 came out on November 12, two days after Microsoft’s latest Xbox, the Series X. In April, Microsoft reported that the number of subscribers to its Game Pass subscription service had exceeded 10 million and that multiplayer engagement was up 130 per cent across March and April.
Nintendo, creator of the Switch console, announced sales were up 24 per cent year-on-year, with 53.71 million individual units sold in March 2020 and more than 65 million in September 2020. Global stocks all but sold out during initial lockdowns. Its new game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, has sold 13.5 million copies since its re- lease in late March.
The pandemic has seen a dramatic uptake on streaming sites, TV, gaming and books, all media that offer escapism.
Marcus Carter, a researcher in digital cultures and human-computer interaction at the University of Sydney, thinks being immersed in a vir- tual world offers a break from the anxieties of everyday life.
“It’s restorative,” he says. “It allows us to come out of that immersion and tackle the problems we’re faced with.”
Carter believes gaming offers escape and empowerment. A game that allows us to save the world returns to us the control we lack in our pandemic lives.
Another important element of the video- game boom, Carter says, is the ability to play games with other people. “It gives us the opportunity to connect with people,” he says. “It’s much more social than a Zoom call. You’re not just staring at each other on a screen; you’re occupying a virtual world together, you’re doing something together. Even if it’s something as silly as planting crops in Animal Crossing.”
Video games pioneer the technology required for developing socially distanced experiences. In April, Epic Games, an American developer of video games and software, collaborated with Houston rapper Travis Scott to organise a unique musical concert in Fortnite, one of the top online games in the world, earning $1.8bn in 2019. The average minute audience for the Scott performance, recorded by global market re- searching firm Nielsen, reached 4.7 million; half were live viewers.
The immersive experience, which at the time of writing has 150 million views on YouTube, featured Scott’s avatar, rendered to look like him through motion capture. As a gamified giant he stomped through a desert-island arena, which filled with water as spectators swam around Scott’s figure as he costume-changed into a deep-sea diver.
In the gig’s astronomical crescendo the sing- er appeared as a neon cyborg in space. The Economist described the digital concert as taking place “in a world, of sorts — not merely on a screen”.
While gaming has been growing exponentially, it’s not yet clear if the trend will flow through to the Australian video-game industry.
Mark Johnson, a lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, thinks the opportunities for Australian game developers are growing but piecemeal.
“If major game producers, in the US for exam- ple, become disrupted by Covid, it’s possible the Australian game sector would take up some of the slack.”
In November, Kotaku Australia, a gaming news website, reported the Victorian government had announced a $33.8m investment into local screen industries, $19.2m of which will be dedicated to attracting international and local projects to the state. For the first time, video- game studios are eligible to apply.
And there is a local talent pool. In Melbourne, game developers House House created the Un- titled Goose Game, in which you play the role of a mischievous waterfowl causing a ruckus in a sleepy English village. It sold a million copies, a milestone for an Australian game company.
Another Australian developer, League of Geeks, winner of the 2020 Studio of the Year at the Australian Game Developer Awards, has partnered with American game developer Private Division, an arm of Take-Two Interactive Software, which also owns Rockstar Games, creators of the Grand Theft Auto series.
Australians working remotely on international gaming projects, however, is not without pre- cedent. Antibody, a motion-graphics design company, has made animations for Ubisoft, a popular French video game company, and HBO, the American premier TV production company.
Patrick Clair, who was interviewed in these pages last year, worked on games in the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series on and off for 10 years. He says it’s deeply satisfying to be at the point in his career where he works on those same things he used to consume.
“I think back to growing up in Brisbane, and playing one of the early Ghost Recon games, and saying to my mum when she told me to get off the computer, ‘Well, Mum, this is creative and you know this might really help me in my job one day.’ I was lying through my teeth.”
Along with creative partner Raoul Marks who is in Melbourne, Clair works from his home in Sydney’s Surry Hills. They’ve created award- winning title sequences for shows like True Detective, Halt and Catch Fire, and Westworld.
Clair describes himself as an evangelist for Australian creatives who want to work on TV series and games, even if this country isn’t big enough to support that niche.
“Your market isn’t what you see out the win- dow of the train on the way home from work. Your market is the globe,” he says. “If you can find a way, through the internet, to reach the people that want what you do, then you can get paid to do the things you love.”
The realistic look and feel of The Last of Us is recorded through the motion capture of actors Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker. Their charac- ters, Ellie and Joel, struggle to hold on to their humanity, giving the game a cinematic gravity, echoing films such as Children of Men, The Road and True Grit.
Joel wanted to be a singer, but had a daughter when he was young. He lost her during the out- break. Ellie was born after, and doesn’t know a life outside of their new normal. She had wanted to be an astronaut.
The cinematography showing nature reasserting dominance over the built world is re- markable. Trees grow through buildings, grass over asphalt, rivers run over roads. As a player, you experience the beauty of a world reimagined after the fall of civilisation. You also think of yourself as a father, or a daughter.
Video games are still a relatively untapped market, despite having been explored as source material for Hollywood adaptation. Games are notoriously difficult to adapt; there’s not a single example of a live-action screen adaptation hav- ing been done well. But The Last of Us may be in the right place at the right time.
Creator Neil Druckmann, co-president of Naughty Dog, the game developer, has partnered with HBO and Craig Mazin as writer-pro- ducer to bring the game to life as a miniseries. Gustavo Santaolalla, composer for The Last of Us games, and an Oscar winner for Best Musical Score for Brokeback Mountain, has also signed on to the project. Pedro Pascal, star of The Mandalorian, has recently been cast in the role of Joel. Before the eponymous role for Disney’s streaming hit, Pascal had breakout roles in Net- flix’s Narcos and HBO’s Game of Thrones. Ellie is being played by his fellow Game of Thrones cast member Bella Ramsey, who stole every scene she was in as Lyanna Mormont.
Druckmann and Mazin’s storytelling styles are similar; even the aesthetic for the show will be comparable. Mazin was the writer and pro- ducer of the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries Chernobyl. If you haven’t seen images of the abandoned city since its nuclear disaster 30 years ago, it looks a lot like the world of The Last of Us.
If the pandemic’s disruption continues even longer, Johnson thinks we might see video games represent a bigger percentage of people’s overall media consumption. “This is a
sector which can, for the most part, continue to produce its products, compared to some other media sectors where it
is far trickier to make their products while under Covid conditions.”