Sony's The Last Of Us Helps Us To Learn About Ants

Sony's mysterious marketing campaign for The Last Of Us — an upcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive that the platform holder's been drip-feeding information about for the past couple of weeks — has brought out the budding researcher in much of the video games media.

PlayStation Lifestyle's got the research bug (pun intended) quite bad. It's written an article — more a thesis really — exposing every piece of minutia pertaining to Sony's soon to be announced game. We already know about the Cordyceps fungus, which attacks and alternates the behaviour of ants in order to increase its presence. What we don't know is more about the project itself.

One thing we thought curious when performing our own research on The Last Of Us was that the game's official YouTube account was registered as far back as 2006. PlayStation Lifestyle thought it was interesting too. The PlayStation publication uncovered a research and development presentation about group animal movements on PS3. Interestingly, PSLS then discovered that the research leader of said project was heavily involved in stigmergy, or the concept of swarm behaviour, which, stick with us, is connected to bullet ants.

Earlier in the week, Sony updated The Last Of Us' creepy ant promo video with a series of chilling clicking sounds. We suspected some kind of alien communication, and we were partially right. PlayStation Lifestyle discovered that the clicking sounds are actually the noises bullet ants use to communicate. It's already speculated that The Last Of Us will take place in Texas and New Mexico — based on the evidence of a newspaper image uncovered on the game's official website — and unsurprisingly bullet ants are located just south of there, in Brazil.

It's straw-clutching but ultimately fascinating stuff. We're still not sure what to expect from The Last Of Us when its announced overnight, but we're definitely anticipating a dark horror game based on all the build-up. Check back tomorrow when all will be revealed, and hit up PlayStation Lifestyle if you'd like to know more about, erm, ants.