“You’re my people”

Abstract

In The Last of Us Part II, the second installment in the hit video game series, players are made to reckon with the moral consequences of its protagonist Joel’s disastrous actions in the previous game. For his inaugural column, Ramzi Fawaz argues that the sequel “is one of contemporary popular culture’s most explicit statements of what political theorist Hannah Arendt calls ‘representative thinking.’” The video game as a medium makes representative thinking an embodied experience, forcing players into a range of perspectives and moral positions as they both commit and become victims of virtually enacted violence. In doing so, the game functions a critique of “the ceaselessly spreading network of human violence and its unforeseen consequences,” and testament to the forms of collectivity and connection that are forged in its wake.