This post contains spoilers pertaining to Telltale Game's The Walking Dead; I try to withhold any spoilers I find unnecessary to share, but at the same time I have come to the conclusion that proper discussion of this game requires me to reveal some plot points and scenarios. Read at your own discretion.
Morality is an elusive subject. Everyone has
something to say about it: religion points to dogmatic books as an ultimate
moral guide, politicians point to ideals between individualism and societal
cohesion as a way to do what's right. Horrific crimes in America, like killing your wife or slicing off a thief’s
hand, are hardly out of place in many Middle-Eastern countries. Normal social
activity a century or a half-century ago (like lynching people of different
ethnicities or beating a non-submissive spouse) is now widely regarded as
disgusting and immoral. We debate about gay marriage today, and tomorrow
politician's careers might be ruined by merely mentioning a disagreement with
marriage equality. Our culture has sanctioned genocide and condemned it in the same
era. No one can agree on what's moral.
Yet
so many video games (ex: Mass Effect
or inFAMOUS) address issues of
morality in extremely childish ways: a moral decision in a standard
role-playing-game could have been picked out of a "Choose Your Own
Adventure" novel. Somehow, video game designers have managed to take one
of humanities most basic questions-how
should we treat each other-and bastardized it to the point of silliness and
triviality. This is not to say that said designers are childish, of course,
many of them have the best intentions. The simple fact of the matter is that
the way most games operate isn't conducive to giving players real dilemmas
to chew on and real consequences for their actions. To borrow a rather telling
quote from a 2009 Gamespot article:
"Morality is not a black-and-white concept.
Reality is very seldom as simple as a choice between good and evil; the
spectrum of moral behaviours is as complicated and consequential as our
emotions. Instead of mirroring this complexity and including moral choices that
lead to genuine in-game consequences, video games often do the opposite--they
present a watered-down version of moral choice that ultimately results in
players having to choose between good or evil: to harvest or not to harvest
(BioShock), to be “paragon” or “renegade” (Mass Effect), to kill innocents or
to save them (inFamous), to have a halo or devil horns (Fable II)."
There are no
"right choices" in The Walking Dead; within half an hour of starting the first episode (of five) your
character (Lee) is forced to choose between saving the life of a young man you
have just met the night before,or the son of a man you hardly know from an onslaught of "walkers". I saved
the son (Ducky) and was forced to leave the farm I had been sheltered in . I
would've left the farm anyway, but having the father of the man I let die kick
me out under such circumstances really socked me in the gut. And it just gets harder
from there.
There
is something very organic about the way that players can affect the narrative with
their choices. Each choice you make has an impact, whether it be catastrophic or almost minute. One of the gameplay options The Walking Dead has are little text
notifiers that outline how people mentally react to your dialogue options.
Please, turn this off; playing the game solely from Lee's perspective and
seeing how people respond to you through the story itself is much more
satisfying and is a better test of Telltale's narrative chops.
Another
example from Episode One is a scene where you encounter a survivor of the
zombie outbreak who is holed up in a motel. One of your group members finds
this woman and enlists your help to get her out of her room. When you do
eventually lure the woman out of her sanctuary, it is revealed that the woman
is mentally unstable and believes she is infected with whatever makes the “walkers”
(read: zombies) what they are. Eventually, it comes down to two choices: one:
you voluntarily give her a gun- a means of death on her own terms, or two: you
try to keep the gun out of her hands. Regardless of what you do, the woman does
kill herself; your decisions don't always matter. What does matter is the fact
that how you handle the situation determines what people think of you. I didn't
give her the gun, and was properly scrutinized for withholding a chance to let
her be free, like she wanted. Not only that,
the means she used to get the gun put our group in jeopardy- jeopardy that
could have been avoided had I just let her do what she wanted.
The Walking Dead lets you own your decisions. A central element of the
source material is the idea that characters being pushed to their
extremes never make the "right" choice. Your actions in the game
aren't rewarded by Karma points or some other arbitrary tallying system instituted to constantly remind you that you are the good guy- the branching paths aren't sectioned into
"good" and "evil"; you play the game the way that best
appeases your conscience.
In the aforementioned
suicidal-woman scenario there was no clearly good or clearly evil choice to be
made. If another human being is in pain and wants an escape- than it is
fundamentally hard for me to deny it to them. Trying to stop a suicide may feel
morally superior in the moment, but at the same time it's a hard pill to
swallow, especially under the specific circumstances in the game. And since the game gives no absolutely positive or absolutely negative
feedback, the jury is still out. The Walking Dead toyed with me enough that I'm
still mulling over whether or not I make the right decision every time I play the game.
Posts
