Early Script: The Last of Us Part II and Guilt Trips (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

(Edit: Early script access is a $10+ patron reward, but I accidentally scheduled this post without that restriction, so I've decided to leave it here rather than take away something I'd initially given to everyone. Enjoy!)

You might already know this from my review of the game, but after playing TLOU2 I felt that the criticisms of manipulative guilt tripping were rather exaggerated. So I tried to write an episode about what it means to guilt-trip the player in a video game, and whether The Last of Us Part II was guilty of it.

I tried to go into not only what the game does to inspire this criticism, but also what its actual effect is compared to games that intentionally and explicitly criticize the player for their actions. I'm not convinced this is among the game's failings, and I do my best to express why in this script (while commenting very little on my opinion of the game's quality since that's a whole other topic that could easily derail the conversation).

It might need some more work, and I do still want to try and find an opportunity to talk about Alice, because I felt like she was used as a rather bad-faith example of the game's supposedly blatant emotional manipulation. But I think it's at least in good enough condition to put in front of all of you!

As always, comments are enabled in the Google Doc, so you can leave any feedback you think should be considered before I commit the episode to film. I hope you enjoy it!