Anything, Anytime, Anywhere: Semiotic Landscapes, Labour, and Ideology in The Last of Us

Due to advancements in technology, capital-intensive videogames now often include rich semiotic detail in their simulated spaces. In The Last of Us, specifically, much of the playable space is stylised as dilapidated capitalist cities. In this article, I argue that the semiotic constitution of these spaces creates opportunities to reflect critically on contemporary life. It also reveals the ideological complexity of the videogame, challenging assumptions that videogames have singular, authorised meanings, and that mainstream studios produce games that uphold dominant values. By focalising the politics of abundance and the economics of capitalism, I demonstrate that the semiotic landscapes of The Last of Us unravel a parallel set of ideological assertions to those expressed in the dialogic mode – simply, that while dialogue exhorts us to count our blessings in late capitalist society, the semiotic construction of space raises the spectre of the exploited, underpaid worker for whom ‘apocalypse’ may not be such a terrible thing. My reading draws the actual conflicts between workers and capitalist in the videogame industry into the interpretation of the game itself, and raises the question as to why there is, as yet, no interdisciplinary work at the intersection of linguistic landscapes, ideology critique, and game studies. It aims to break ground for such projects in the future, and to show the transformative value of examining videogames from the perspective of their semiotic landscapes.