The Bibliographical Variants Between The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered

Abstract

Released on 14 June 2013 exclusively for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) by the studio Naughty Dog and the publisher Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA), The Last of Us allows players to control Joel, and at times Ellie, as they travel across a post-apocalyptic United States. 1 The game received critical acclaim from reviewers and game critics alike for its design and narrative, lauding it for expanding the boundaries of

Behind the Scenes at ApertureScience.com:Portaland Its Paratexts

“…One can place a 1922 first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses on a table in front of a class and plausibly declare, “this is James Joyce’s Ulysses ”; it is a different matter to place an original Half-Life installation CD-ROM on the same table and claim the game itself sits before them. (And a smart class would immediately question what the word original means in this context with respect to versions of the game; see Altice, 2015 , Appendix A, and Young, 2016 .) Video games, in contrast to books, possess the distinct advantage of being highly resistant to illusions that they are straightforward objects.…”

“… 8 A thorough literature review is beyond the scope of this article, but for examples of methods and concepts from textual studies being applied to video games, see Jones, 2008 ; Altice, 2015 , appendix; Young, 2016 ; and Schneider, 2019 . Much of Kirschenbaum’s work on electronic literature in Mechanisms ( 2008 ) is also germane to video games, given the game-like nature of the born-digital works he deals with, along with their similarities in media, formats, and platforms.…”

To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies

“…One notable “official” example of this reworking process is game studio Naughty Dog's efforts to remaster and rerelease its critically acclaimed Playstation 3 (PS3) exclusive release The Last of Us on the Sony Playstation 4 (PS4) console. Chris Young (2016) usefully illuminates the bibliographical challenges and frustrations related to “describing and classifying born-digital texts” using this case study in his article “The Bibliographical Variants Between The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered” (p. 484). Young's fascinating study identifies at least 24 unique product codes for the various PS3 and PS4 versions and editions of the game, but—using patch and update file information (iterations which would suggest further additions to his list of 24 variants) —comes to the conclusion that there are only two unique executable files, and thus two unique editions of The Last of Us (pp.…”

“…This kind of deep mapping approach to the preservation of such unstable environments would encompass but also extend the emulation, virtualization, migration, and metadata encoding recommendations put forward in the Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report a technical report that resulted from 4 years of collaborative, multiinstitutional research into digital preservation strategies by McDonough, Olendorf, Kirschenbaum, Kraus, Reside, Donahue, Phelps, Egert, Lowood, and Rojo (2010). As acknowledged in the report and amplified by Young (2016) and Newman (2012), though, without broader industry collaboration, all efforts to preserve game software and hardware itself will be hindered. However, understanding and deep mapping games as transitional and transactional paratextual fields diminish some of this focused preservational anxiety.…”

The Work and the Listener

“…) Space does not permit me to unpack the long history of bibliographical thinking beyond books, which runs from W.W. Greg through Greetham to the present, but even the journals of the Society for Textual Scholarship and comparable bibliographical societies have included articles on music and other kinds of "non-book texts", as McKenzie called them (1999, 31 and passim;e.g. Womack 1998;Wilmeth 1999;Broude 2011;Young 2016).…”