On a more serious note I've been playing the episodic Walking Dead game. The one with Lee and Clem. I'm very pleased to report that even on a second play through the game hasn't lost any of the emotional and moral impact that so enticed me to play in the first place. In my humble opinion that has to do with the system of moral choices made by the player during the game and it's inspired me to talk about a rather thorny topic in gaming, which is often left un-tackled.
As always when I analyse any game or games in this depth there is a massive:
With this particular game however I'm going to have to add two additional warnings. You're experience of the game may be different and this is going to contain mature themes, including images from the TV show The Walking Dead, so if your squeamish, stop reading here.
So, lets talk about death
In the TV series, The Walking Dead, there is an interestingly contradictory view about death. It is shown by the way the group deal with their dead, burning walkers but burying members of their own group (and later others) regardless of whether they have been bitten or not. This is such an emotional line in the sand for the TV series that it actually comes to blows very early on in the series after a raid on the survivor's camp. This is a rather difficult position to be in because it forces us to think about our humanity, after all, zombies where human at one point.
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| "We don't burn them! We bury them!" |
So the question is, where do we loose our humanity? In opposition to this Daryl takes on the practical view of the world they now inhabit. All dead things are a potential threat, if we bury them we just give them an opportunity to come back, so we burn them. It's a harsh view but you can see the morbid logic behind it. Finally, we get Rick's view, and like any good leader, its a compromise between morality and practicality. Later on in the series, the group is raided a second time, this time in slightly different circumstances (This isn't a blow by blow account, go watch the program!) where during the clean up operation Rick says "We bury the ones we love and burn the rest". To me this seems like an excellent compromise for him to make. It stops his group focusing on the nitty gritty of what is human and what isn't, which may be slightly boring for us a viewer, but for the group as survivors, its absolutely essential.
I'm going to let you side with whom ever you want to in this situation as everyone is going to have their own conflicting viewpoint and I don't particularly want to start World War 3 in this blog. All I will say is this. Death affects us all, the closer the death the more it hurts. The Walking Dead series is so well loved by its fans due to the closeness we feel to the characters and the pain we feel when they inevitably die. I say a huge Bravo! to The Walking Dead franchise for tackling issues in this manner.
Now your probably wondering why I'm prattling on about the TV series on a blog about thoughts and opinions whilst gaming. Well if you've hung on this far you will see that there is usually some method in my madness (ok slightly more madness than method but you catch the drift). The TV series is an excellent counterpoint as to why videogames are so different from film or books or pictures etc.
I'm just going to give you one last big warning to get out now if you don't want me to ruin the game for you, because it WILL ruin the first play through for you.
In The Walking Dead game you play the part of Lee (Say hi Lee!) in his final days. That's more or less the gist of game, its not obvious throughout the storyline but you are going to die. Full Stop. End of Story. Dead.
I'll probably go into more detail about Lee in a future post but for now, lets just say you rescue a young girl called Clementine (or Clem for short) from her zombified babysitter and set out across the country to try and help find her parents, who where on holiday, in savannah, a major city, now populated by the dead... yeah you can probably see where I'm going with this. Along the way you have to help Clem and your group cope with everything that happens along the way, this includes both moral and physical crises, including lack of food, looting for survival, drinking, killing, and a whole load of zombies. In the last episode of the game you have to even have to confront your own mortality, as you get bitten searching for Clem, who has been abducted. This then leads you on to the most terrible yet most gripping series of moral choices I've ever had to make in a game. Do everything possible to survive, so that you can find Clem (and look like an armless murderer in the process) or leave Clem in the arms of her abductor and hope that she has a better life. This choice is thrust on us at every single opportunity, and the courage it must have taken for the developers to put it in is staggering.
But back to the point, the reason I rabbited on about the TV series before the game was to show the interesting counterpoint created between the two. In traditional media you have to be convinced by the program. The director will use clever cameral angles to help everything feel real, awesome special effects are used to the point where we don't really even need sets anymore (still, sets do rule!), in books authors even go so far as to use the first person, in an attempt to make you feel like the character's decisions are your decision. However, all this pales in comparison to gaming, where the character's decisions ARE your decisions, especially in a game like the walking dead.
So, what are your opinions on the matter? Is death an appropriate thing to discuss through games, should art be left to painters and film producers? How awesome where The Walking Dead games
Share your opinions in the comments section!
Matt
(Bluuurgh.. Braaaains...)
PS. Im sorry for the late post guys! As you can imagine I wanted to think long and hard about this one, normal service should resume presently
PS. Im sorry for the late post guys! As you can imagine I wanted to think long and hard about this one, normal service should resume presently
