M Marko (@em_being)

For the end of the year, we take a look at the Games We Played, and the effects they had on us. This year we’re starting with a piece by friend of the site, M, who is one half of the duo that is the very excellent Abnormal Mapping.

We’re three years past the critical consensus that the dadification of games was upon us, and for all the ink spilled on the issue it seems that games are still just coming into that intersection of creator age and storytelling opportunity, for better or worse. While much of the critique of this not-quite-a-movement has to do with who gets to make games and tell stories, it’s also a critique of the limited view of how protagonists in games can operate. If you aren’t saving someone or something, protecting them becomes the next logical paternalistic step.

Uncharted 4 toes right up to the line of this sort of dadification story, but manages to take another path thanks to a single significant choice made in the prior game, Drake’s Deception: Nathan Drake is married. He didn’t linger in a love triangle limbo for long. He settled down. He hung up his guns. He made his choice. For all intent and purposes, his story was over at the close of the last game.

And that’s how Nathan Drake himself, as a character, likes to think about it. He had an ultimatum built up by the narrative of the prior games: does he continue to steal shit and murder dudes, or does he settle down with the love of his life Elena for a ‘normal’ adulthood? That choice made, Nathan trudges through a life he’s clearly mostly tolerating, keeping a good attitude about the sacrifices he’s making to an increasingly worried Elena, who knows Drake’s veneer of good cheer is a flimsy front. The man’s not that good a liar at the best of times.
The thing that makes A Thief’s End worth consideration, then, isn’t that when Drake is pulled back into One Last Adventure he struggles with this same question and makes the other choice, or has his choice reaffirmed, or any of the typical action tropes an aging protagonist suggests. Instead, it offers a glimpse at a reality beyond Drake’s selfish, all-or-nothing nature: that he’s an idiot adventurer and martyred himself for a cause nobody asked him to take.

The second half of the game has Elena showing up to bail her husband out of another sticky situation, and then pissed at him for lying about going off adventuring. Drake’s at first his normal, apologetic self, but as the two of them spend quiet moments climbing crumbling pirate structures and driving through muddy landscapes, Nathan is forced to grapple with the reality of the person he’s married to. Elena never asked him to sacrifice anything for her, he just assumed and insisted he would do it. Elena is a 'normal’ person in that she doesn’t seem to crave murder and plunder, but she’s spent literally as many games as Nathan grabbing a gun and scrambling a cliff face at the drop of a hat along with him. And Nathan, so busy being the player surrogate and saying the cool lines designed to beat the player to the punch, never noticed that his girlfriend-turned-wife enjoyed this adventuring nearly as much as him. She just also liked not being dead or in jail as a result of it.

What makes Uncharted 4 special isn’t that Nathan Drake has to make a choice, it’s that the choice is taken away from him by someone who knows him better than himself—his partner. Elena almost literally and very explicitly shakes him from his heroic, myopic stupor to tell him he doesn’t have to choose between this lonely protagonist life and a boring civilian life, but that people can be nuanced and make choices that are fun but not disastrous, can live lives that are fulfilling but not ruinous to health and home. 

Uncharted 4, the latest in a long line of blockbusters for the aging gamer, suggests that to try to stiff upper lip traditional husband or fatherhood is as immature as blowing it all off for high adventure. It offers, through the truly heroic efforts of Elena Drake, to suggest that you can be responsible and have fun and that this is a struggle you negotiate with your loved ones daily, not an irrevocable path you have to choose, Paragon/Renegade style. Binaries are no way to live, and no foundation upon which to build a home. Even one eternally focused with climbing geography upon which to still shoot a seemingly endless supply of men.