As someone who is always looking for a good story to be told, I am constantly searching on Netflix for a series that I will enjoy, and as the cinematic hipster I am, I usually try to find something that isn’t overwhelmingly lolled or talked about. This is why I only got around to watching "The Walking Dead" about a year ago, and to be fair, there are a plethora of good reasons why it is held on the pedestal that it is currently on, although it has fallen ever so slightly thanks to the slow start to the current season. But instead of going on and on about how great the show is, or how deeply the viewer is able to feel for the characters, I’d rather talk about a game created by the company Telltale Games, which is known best for its procedural butterfly-effect style of the player determining how the game is going to play out.
When I had first heard about Telltale, I didn’t bite, mostly because the games themselves are relatively short, at least in terms of their episodic structure. Each episode costs a little bit, so the games themselves are thus economically dependant on the wealth of the story in those episodes. That being said, for a few of those games, Episode One was essentially a demo, so the player could get a feel for the story and then decided whether he or she would want to go ahead and purchase the next one. In principle, this is probably one of the best ways to release a game of this nature, especially if they are within previously-established gaming universes, such as Westeros and Gotham City.
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One of the hallmarks of "The Walking Dead" as a whole, however, is that you feel for each and every character. The game follows Lee, a convicted criminal from Macon, Georgia on his way to prison, who is thrust pretty gruffly into his harsh new reality post-outbreak. Right at the beginning, he meets Clementine, a girl waiting for her parents to return from Savannah, and from there, an immediate mode is set.
What makes this series so compelling is that it makes you choose. You have to watch as you leave people behind, or they’re eaten by walkers, or when you’ve upset them. And the game makes you live with those choices for the rest of your playthrough. It is like you get to watch an entire season in which you have all the power, and get to do all the dirty work. There are some really tough scenes, to be fair, but that’s why this series is so compelling. The show sometimes cuts out the goriest parts, but the game has you pulling the trigger with just a click. It immerses you and teaches you just how powerful your choices can be in a situation.
Since Telltale’s momentous beginning, there have been games such as "Until Dawn," which is also built around the idea of the butterfly effect: that if you step on a butterfly, it can have a chain reaction and cause the future to create completely new opportunities or dangers. Then there is the "Shadow of Mordor" series, which introduced the nemesis system, so that enemies that you have fought before will remember you, whose sequel plans to expand that to work with allies, as well. These systems give the player the feeling that they are both playing a game and being told a story, and it makes it that much easier for the player to want to make decisions both for the characters and for him/herself.
All things considered, I am not a game designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a writer, and I know how difficult it can be to get a character to feel meaningful and worth caring about. That is why I care about this series so much: it’s not enough to be able to control a character’s movements, if you want to tell a story worth remembering and replaying, you have to be able to control their thoughts, too, although for some, the inability to control a character’s thoughts, even to the slightest degree, feels equally as compelling.
