[Music] [Music] what are you doing [Music] hello Internet welcome to game theory the show whose primary objective is turning your favorite cute cuddly little video games into nightmare fuel the game we're talking about today though doesn't need that treatment The Last of Us was is and will always be depressing gritty and honestly one of the best pieces of video game storytelling I've ever played released back in 2013 The Last of Us immediately stood out as something different to the attention to detail in the cutscenes and the character relationships showed the world that video games were
more than just mindless entertainment but they could tell mature and meaningful stories that are full of heart full of emotion and full of difficult choices so we can then squeeze dry for all the mimis it quickly became the poster child for the are video games art debate that was still raging back at the time because yeah that was all we really had to argue about back then ah simpler times anyway the release of Last of Us part 2 got me to revisit that first game really uncanny timing by the way releasing a game about a
world ruined by global infection at exactly the time when everyone is totally in the mood for that kind of thing way to ride the trend on that one guys regardless Joel and Ellie story in that first game is so compelling that it's hard not to get completely sucked into the world that they inhabit the Last of Us delivered some of the most suspenseful and emotional moments that video games have to offer with the game's major final choice being the biggest gut punch in gaming history with humanity falling victim to a fungal plague that turns them
into zombie like husks we as Joel are forced to decide whether to save or sacrifice our companion Ellie the girl that we've been protecting the entire game and who has stood in as our surrogate daughter after we lose our biological one at the start of the story you see Ellie is immune to the zombie fungus and the Firefly is the human enemy faction that you encounter throughout the game has a plan to come up with a vaccine but to make it they have to kill Ellie the gut-wrenching moral decision for Joel then is whether it's
right to save Ellie or whether it's right to kill her for the good of humanity it feels like this terrible moral dilemma for Joel except it's completely meaningless utterly pointless there is ZERO moral quandary here no area there is very clearly a right and wrong answer and Joel absolutely made the right call and letting Ellie live you see the fireflies plan would never have worked in fact killing Ellie to make their vaccine is probably the single worst thing that they could have possibly done in that sort of situation and that my friends is what we're
covering today how the last of us his biggest and most difficult choice wasn't ever that really hard of a decision to begin with to understand why we have to talk about the zombie infection in this game the main menace plaguing humanity in the last of us is the cordyceps brain infection cordyceps is actually the name of a real-world genus of fungi and if the idea of a fungus somehow hijacking people's brains and turning them into zombies seems outlandish well it's not that far from the truth not in humans yet but definitely in other species we've
talked about this before in a previous theory but to recap here one specific species of cordyceps fungus works by infecting ants and compelling them to find a location that's ideal for the fungus to reproduce the ant bites into the vein of a leaf and stays there for a period of 10 to 14 days during which time the ants body rots away feeding the fungus as it creates more spores that it can scatter to the wind thus cordyceps infects more ants and continues this cycle of hijacking bodies and reproducing perhaps most horrifying of all though is
that some biologists believe that the hijacked ant remains conscious during this entire process unable to control its own body but still awake as its body is manipulated and consumed by the fungus now that is nightmare fuel imagine being left conscious during the process of your own zombification a helpless passenger in your own body it's horrific nature is the scariest creepypasta out there which is why you should always stay indoors where it's safe and play video games all day tell that one to your parents and loved ones so needless to say the idea of the cordyceps
brain infection and last of us acting as a fungus that turns humans into clickers isn't as far-fetched as it might seem which brings us to the main conflict of the game the fireflies want to capture Ellie the only human who seems to be immune so they can pick a parter brain to engineer a vaccine which will help save human our main character Joel is having non-events he fights to protect Ellie from the fireflies at all costs for some people this might seem like a moral debate but really we can sidestep the premise entirely by looking
at what's really going on with the science the fireflies goal is to fight the cordyceps brain infection by finding a vaccine what ever happened to me is the key to finding a vaccine the doctors tell me the cordyceps the growth inside her is somehow mutated it's why she's immune once they remove it they'll be able to reverse-engineer a vaccine vaccine but what is a vaccine really well first off a vaccine is entirely preventive if you're already infected a vaccine ain't gonna be doing you any good a vaccine works by preparing you for infection whenever your
body encounters a new kind of contamination your body's immune system kicks into high gear and destroys it or at the very least does its best the problem is that sometimes your body's immune system isn't fast enough viruses can multiply inside your body exponentially and sometimes by the time your immune system is kicked it into high gear and figured out the right tools for the job the virus has grown out of control basically the immune system is kind of like a research and development department responding to alien invasions it has to develop weapons to combat the
attackers as the war is being fought the weapons it creates are really effective but they would be much more effective if they could be deployed at the start of the war right as the enemy was first showing up you don't want a situation where by the time you finally develop the weapons that can fight off the invaders the invaders have already wiped out most of your population and that's the idea behind vaccines they kick-start the immune system and prepare it against future infection by exposing it to an agent that's similar to a pathogen that way
the immune system can start building the weapons that would fight against that sort of infection before a violent version of that infection actually attacks the body sometimes this is done by taking forms of the infectious microbe that are dead or weakened so much that the body can fight them off without a problem when you get vaccinated your body's immune system is able to equip itself with all the weaponry needed to fight off a real version of that infection if and when you actually get it vaccines work really well against viruses to name some historical examples
infectious diseases like smallpox whole measles all have been effectively wiped out by vaccine use which is great prior to the development of vaccines smallpox killed over 300 million people in the 20th century alone now it's nearly wiped out due to most developed nations having vaccinated populations just to make that clear how huge of a deal that is compare that number of deaths from smallpox to covin as of writing this four hundred thousand people have died due to the current pandemic it is terrible it is a huge huge number don't get me wrong but to give
you a sense of scale smallpox killed 750 times that number before vaccinations became widespread in one year alone 1967 so not that long ago it was estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and 2 million died that is crazy scary but vaccines helped to finish off smallpox so it's pretty obvious why the fireflies would want to develop a vaccine against the cordyceps brain infection vaccines are obviously good they save lives hundreds of thousands of lives there's just one problem all of the diseases we just talked about smallpox polio they're all caused by viruses not
by fungus and when it comes to vaccines against fungi well we don't have any take it from Professor Neal AR Gao co-editor of the Oxford textbook of medical mycology which is about both the science and the medicine of fungal diseases in humans there are no vaccines against fungi neither are there any established of Mura therapies where you help the immune system to work together perhaps with an antifungal drug to achieve a better outcome the cordyceps are based on a fungal infection fungi are well quite a bit different from viruses viruses work by hijacking your cells
and forcing them to replicate so the virus can make copies of itself kind of like zombies on a cellular level what makes it so tricky to deal with is that when you're trying to fight a virus the virus is basically using your cells as hostages medicines can't be as effective because you just be attacking your own cells fungi meanwhile are plant-like organisms except instead of getting energy via photosynthesis they get their energy by sapping it from living organisms they don't hijack your existing cells instead therefore in cellular organism that live inside your body they are
separate cellular components as a result they're actually way easier to deal with drugs and treatments can attack the fungal cells and only the fungal cells directly because they're not intermixed with our human cells all you need to do is get some I don't know some athlete's foot spray like some tough actin tinactin and spray those zombies away in all seriousness well a vaccine treatment for fungal infections is theoretically possible and something that is currently being studied by real world researchers one they tend to be largely unnecessary for the reasons I just stated fungal infections are
just easier and safer to fight and to even if it was necessary to fight this infection that we see in the last of us using a vaccine it's currently something that's beyond the reach of real world researchers performing cutting-edge studies in modern laboratory environments seems doubtful that the fireflies working in the ruined post-apocalypse of the last of us would actually be able to create the world's first anti fungal vaccine making matters even worse though they're going about the process the wrong way the fireflies plan for developing the vaccine is backwards vaccines work by exposing your
body to a safe form of the pathogen so that your natural immune system can build up antibodies to fight it off if it comes in contact with the real thing the key to finding a vaccine here would be coming up with a weaker non-threatening form of the cordyceps pathogen so that the humans immune system could build up antibodies it needs to fight the actual cordyceps infection their work should be focused on the infection actually disarming the fungus not on Ellie's brain in fact if the fireflies really wanted to use Ellie to fight the cordyceps the
single best thing for them to do would be to look at the antibodies that her body is naturally producing and that doesn't require killing her in fact killing her would be the single worst thing that they could possibly do in the real world plasma therapy is a thing that's being used to fight infectious diseases around the world infections just like the corona virus the situation we find ourselves in right now people who had the kovat 19 virus and recovered from it can donate plasma which is filled with the antibodies that their body built up while
fighting the virus this antibody filled plasma can then be transfused into other patients who have been more we affected and whose bodies haven't had time to build up those antibodies helping them beef up their immune system and give them the headstart that they need to fight off the infection if the fireflies really believe that there's something special about Ellie's immune system killing her is the last thing that they should want to do so yeah any way you slice it the big moral dilemma of The Last of Us isn't a dilemma at all the fireflies are
just idiots who don't understand science and Joel absolutely made the right choice and saving his best girl maybe he can find someone who does know what they're talking about and managed to save humanity that way but hey that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching [Music]
