In playing the first three episodes of The Walking Dead: Season One, I was surprised to find that there is very little actual game play. The game is instead mostly dialogue as the player, acting as the character Lee, interacts with his fellow survivors, made up completely of NPCs. The direction of the game is decided by which of two to four replies you choose for Lee each time he talks with the NPCs. The answers vary from being more diplomatic and truthful while other choices make Lee harsh and a liar. The game casually reminds of you the consequences of your actions with a little ominous reminder popping up in the left-hand corner after a conversation choice, usually along the lines of “NPC will remember this.” Who you choose to save, what you choose to say, even who you give food to first changes the nature of the game. There are NPCs who you immediately distrust and dislike, like Larry, and others like Kenny, who you are immediately chummy with but grow increasingly concerned when he loses his family and slowly declines. The most important relationship of the game is between Lee and the little girl Clementine, who the player finds and basically adopts at the beginning of the game. The game wants you to care and fall in love with Clem as Lee makes the choices to protect her and become her father-figure. Like Lee, you begin to realize that protecting Clem is the most important object, at least in your own mind, as Lee threatens other characters like Ben that if he does not keep her safe while Lee is gone, that he will kill Ben. Katherine Isbister talks about this type of extreme relationship with NPCs in her work How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. One section of this work is spent talking about the game Hush, where the player must keep the mother singing to quiet her baby; failure results in both of their deaths. Isbister says that “the player becomes caught up in the responsibility of taking care of the child, and filled with dread about what may happen if he does not succeed. Playing the game and caring for the virtual child create a form of participation and involvement…” (24-25). The developers knew exactly what they are doing when creating the situations for these type of games. They know that humans tend to want to save children and playing on those sympathies. It makes for effective storytelling by making the player invested as they care for the children and other NPCs. I am very curious if it is possible for Clementine to die before the end of the game, if that was a mechanic and choice that is allowed. I am not sure if at this point Lee would want to continue in his journey without his little friend or if the choices of his dialogue would become rougher and even more extreme as his mental state declines. There are so many possibilities and routes to take, and with NPCs dying left and right, I wonder how much longer Lee will be able to choose.
Works Mentioned:
The Walking Dead: Season One by Telltale Games
How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design by Katherine Isbister
Screenshot courtesy of https://www.polygon.com/2012/12/26/3805442/the-walking-dead-story-clementine-telltale
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