I had a friend once who lost a finger.
It was the unfortunate culmination of a construction job, a scroll
saw, and an momentary lapse of concentration. He was all right in the
end. It was a just pinky finger, and only a day after it happened he
was making jokes about the whole incident, more a testament to this
individual's character than anything else. But still, I remember it
kind of shook me. How would I respond to that kind of loss?
Sometimes I look at my own hands. I
move my fingers one by one in a swift, rhythmic motion, as if they're
treading water or pressing against some tiny invisible bicycle
pedals. I see my bones press up against the skin of my backhand like
the spindly metal arms of a typewriter, and I marvel at how
simultaneously complex and fragile I am as a physical form—a soft
package of nerves and flesh and blood, capable of moving and feeling
and accomplishing an infinite number of tasks and feats, but also
subject to immediate termination should it intersect with some
fast-moving sharp (or, more likely, blunt) object.
Anyway, the point is that some things
heal. Other things don't. Some things can be reclaimed. Other losses
are permanent. That's life.
As we all know, video games—even the
ones that emulate it—are not life. Okay, video games can be life
for those of us that spend a lot of time playing them, but I'm really
talking about what games represent. Everything is ultimately
expendable in games, even 'lives.' Video game lives are a plentiful
digital commodity that, unless they happen to be tied to quarters in
an arcade cabinet, can be very easily resupplied through the quick
punch of a reset button or its equivalent. This is one reason why
games are so incredible. They can simulate just about any activity,
while at the same time removing almost all danger and consequence.
All the same, I've been thinking for a
number of years now about how fresh it would be to play a game where
this wasn't necessarily the case. I would play a stealth-acton game
like Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
and chide myself for my habit of restarting a checkpoint immediately
after being spotted and shot at by a patrolling guard. I wouldn't
even have to die. I just didn't like the fact that I'd been
compromised and forced to absorb bullets. It wasn't the narrative I
wanted to believe. And so I'd try again, and again, and again. By the
time I actually managed to perform my so-called 'perfect'
play-through, it was a stale, lifeless accomplishment.
In many respects,
this was really just a matter of discipline. The game wasn't forcing
me to behave in this manner. I was doing it of my own free will. And
it wasn't just Splinter Cell. It was really a pattern of
behavior that would manifest itself in other games as well,
particularly ones that allowed me to save anywhere. A creeper in
Minecraft would destroy my laboriously constructed home, and
instead of dealing with it I would reload a previous save. My
companion Lydia would die valiantly in the bowels of some Skyrim
dungeon. Did I give her the humble honor of 'a good death,' as
one particular orc in the game liked to say? Oh no. I resurrected her
every time.
And so I began to
look out for a game in which I could learn to actually practice this
idea of letting go—yield control of my ability to reverse my
mistakes or bad decisions.
One
game that seems to encourage this is Civilization V.
After all, here's an example of a turn-based strategy game—emphasis
on the word 'strategy.' What's the point of playing a game of
strategy if you don't allow your poorly strategized decisions
(usually, in my case) to play out to conclusion? I've more recently
come to enjoy the permanent deaths of Spelunky and
The Binding of Isaac.
As it turns out, the roguelike lends itself to this kind of playing
style as a matter of its design philosophy, which is great, but even
a rouguelike has its limitations. By nature of its difficulty, a
roguelike game teaches a player to be both cautious and daring at
every step, but it also tends to foster a kind of attitude whereby
nothing is precious. Whereas victory becomes a genuinely satisfying
accomplishment, that victory is more often that not simply an outlier
experience, a monument built atop the burial of hundreds, if not
thousands, of previous failures. There's no point in really mourning
all those losses as anything truly lost.
I'm
happy to say there's another game that does a remarkably fine job of
allowing the player to experience loss. I'm talking about The
Walking Dead, an episodic
adventure game series developed by Telltale Games, based on the
popular graphic novels created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist
Tony Moore. I had been hearing a lot of good things about these games
over the course of 2012. I think it's the first game that really
managed to nail the episodic format. It was a running water cooler
conversation. People were talking about these games like a television
show. Having finally played the games myself now, I can see why.
So if
it wasn't obvious from the title, The Walking Dead is
yet another game about the zombie apocalypse. Unlike the glut of
zombie stories that treat the subject as either one of horror or
satire, The Walking Dead series
falls closer to drama—intense, violent, shocking drama. It sort of
asks the question, what would life be like if this really happened?
Specifically, the game puts the player in the shoes of a character
named Lee Everett (voiced by Dave Fennoy) as he makes a go at
survival among a band of fellow struggling humans.
While
'adventure game' is probably the best available genre for which to
describe The Walking Dead,
it's a lot different from adventure games of the past. Yes, there are
point-and-click segments aplenty, whereby the player uses a cursor or
reticule to interact with objects in the environment, and to call
these segments irrelevant would probably be a bit overzealous. But I
don't think it would be unfair to say that the real standout portions
of the game occur largely outside of that traditional framework. It's
in the conversations with other game characters. It's in the
interspersed moments of crisis, danger, and trauma, when the game
confronts the player with a series of timed choices. What do you as
the player character say in a given situation? Who do you save? Who
do you hurt? Where do you go?
At first I wasn't
sure if I liked it. Its earliest instances of decision-making felt
strangely binary and mechanical. There was one early encounter that particularly irked me. Some zombies attacked. A good person died. But
it all seemed so cheap. I felt I hadn't been given enough time and
information to turn that situation towards a better outcome. Maybe I
helped the wrong person. I still don't know. The important thing was
that I didn't bother going back to try again. I didn't go online and
look up what else might have happened. I would treat it, as best as I
reasonably could, like a 'real-life' scenario. I found myself more
interested in actually internalizing the situation as an
honest-to-God role-played experience.
I think the four
episodes that followed actually ironed out some of those early kinks.
The moments of choice felt more personal and organic. They were based
on relationships and power dynamics with other characters. Certain
decisions and conversations stacked on top of previous decisions and
conversations. Dialogue options seemed both appropriately varied and
surprisingly believable.
The Walking Dead
is far from perfect. But it's a thrilling and surprisingly emotional
experience. And I ask myself a similar question that Tom Bissell poses at the end of his critique for Batman: Arkham City
when he says, “Am I alone in
wanting to play a game this good about something other than a dude in
a batsuit?” Should I hold The Walking Dead in
less regard for being another game about zombies? I think the short
answer is no. The Walking Dead
isn't really about the zombies. It's about living at the end of your
limits. It's about cutting through the bullshit of everyday existence
and being forced to come to grips with what really matters. It's
about holding onto a diminishing notion of humanity in a desperate
world that has otherwise gone to hell. It's about the heavy weight of
our choices in both word and deed, and coming to terms with the fact
that real loss is permanent.
