Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
help you win or lose; it's the opposite of an important choice. When the meanings and inter-
pretations of a story become intertwined with a game, however, the act of choosing becomes
more complicated. Not every action a character makes in a traditional story changes the fate of
the world or means the difference between life or death, a good ending or a bad one. Instead,
many things a fictional character might do or even think are reflections of who that character is,
how she reacts, and what kind of person she is.
The Walking Dead
(2012), a game based on the comic book series by the same name, includes
many examples of reflective choices. The setting of
The Walking Dead
is the United States
during and after a zombie apocalypse. The fates of many characters are extremely bleak in
the comic book as well as the videogame and television series based on it. In the game, the
player controls the choices of Lee Everett, a convicted felon who escaped during the out-
break and joins up with a group of survivors. In the second chapter of the game, Lee meets a
woman who's been infected
by a zombie bite; she's sadly awaiting the worse-than-death fate
of becoming a zombie. The choice to make is awful: she wants you to give her a gun so she can
commit suicide. The player must decide whether to give her one or refuse (see Figure
7.13
).
Figure 7.13
Making a difficult and memorable choice in
The Walking Dead
.
This difficult choice turns out to be mostly reflective, because even if the player refuses, the
woman grabs a gun and commits suicide. The experience of having to make this choice, how-
ever, was a memorable one for many players, despite not having any way to create a positive
outcome.
The Walking Dead
is full of choices and situations like this, from deciding whether to
bury a young boy's corpse to whether to listen to a dying man's final words. Reflective choices
may come naturally to a story about survival in such a grim setting where there's no happy end-
ing in sight.
In such circumstances, the game seems to suggest, what's important is how you
react to the harshness of reality and what kind of attitude you have no matter whether you can
change the outcome or not.
If choices don't necessarily need to affect the outcome of a game or the course of its story, we
can consider whether many kinds of apparently “small” choices can play a role in affecting the
emergent experiences of a game's players. Many games give players the opportunity to decide
what the character or avatar they control will look like—whether to play as male or female,
