Playing Whiteness in Crisis in The Last of Us and Tomb Raider

Soraya Murray argues that The Last of Us (2013) and Tomb Raider (2013) present beleaguered white protagonists as reflections of a post-9/11, post-Obama United States anxious about shifting demographics and the erosion of narratives of progress. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, including Frankenberg and Ross, and on Richard Dyer's visual-culture theory, she contends that whiteness is neither invisible nor empty. Both mainstream culture and the games industry recognize it acutely, and "making whiteness strange" can loosen its hold as an unexamined norm. She situates the games within post-9/11 media that cast white "heartland" families as idealized victims, reinforcing a binary of American innocence against a threatening "other."

In The Last of Us, Joel functions as an "everyman" anti-hero comparable to the protagonist of Falling Down. His protective bond with Ellie, a surrogate for his dead daughter Sarah, stands in for innocence and purity. Ellie resembles the white women Dyer finds in colonial fiction: a figure of conscience and moral suffering who ultimately "does nothing." Joel's decision to kill the Fireflies, deny a possible cure, and lie to Ellie enacts Dyer's notion of "white death," whiteness destroyed by its own kind. Building on Voorhees, Murray reads player responses to this choice as evidence of attachment to heroic American masculinity.

Murray ties the games' resonance to anxieties following Obama's 2012 re-election. She reads the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot as a "heroine in peril" narrative organized around Dyer's predator/protector framework, noting that scholarship on Lara Croft has centered on gender while her whiteness remains under-theorized.

Her conclusion is that both games express a "trauma narrative of ideological whiteness," in which whiteness presents itself as both universal and normative and as an embattled, victimized "other," revealing anxiety over lost power and dominance. The games are best understood as the visual politics of dominant culture and as expressions of whiteness's totalizing logics. The analysis centers on U.S. culture and two major 2013 AAA releases.