Game Critique: The Walking Dead

The following is a critique of the video game The Walking Dead by Telltale Games. It's rated M for Mature by the Electronic Software Rating Board and is available on Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, OS X, iOS, Kindle Fire, and Ouya.

The Walking Dead by Telltale Games is a fantastic game, one that I'd recommend to most people.

And it's not a game—at least not in the way we may think a game is.

When I asked my friends if they wanted to play The Walking Dead with me, they were expecting a zombie shooter game well within the confines of typical game mechanics. When we finished the final of 5 episodes, we were left stunned—a disheveled, sobbing mess. This is what makes this game so special, what sets it apart from the brown and gray cookie-cutter wasteland of popular gaming.

In The Walking Dead’s apocalyptic interpretation of Georgia, you play as Lee Everett, history professor turned convict who catches a break from the law when the police car hauling him to the local penitentiary hits a zombie (referred to as a “walker”) and tumbles down a hill, killing the driver. Soon after, he meets a seemingly orphaned eight year-old girl named Clementine, whom Lee swears to protect. Throughout the game, they find themselves in multitudes of harrowing situations, meet friendly and dangerous people, and above all, survive. 

If I were to stratify this game across the many genres games fall into, this one would fall into the realm of Interactive Fiction. Carolyn Handler Miller describes these as stories that, although interactive, may not be considered “games” in the strictest sense because they do not rely on conventional gaming models. Greg Roach, CEO of Hyperbole Studios, refers to interactive works as having granularity, meaning that the work is composed of many small pieces that constitute gameplay. Many games are very granular in the sense that there is a lot of gameplay but not as much room for story. Super Mario 64 is one such example. In this game you have immense opportunity to explore the game world at your leisure, completing objectives in many different fashions. Your main objective is to save the Princess, but the story doesn’t extend far beyond that. The Walking Dead, however, is the opposite. The story is expansive. Each of the game’s five episodes takes a couple of hours to complete. Yet, the majority of input you have with the game involves pushing buttons.

Just like most works of interactive fiction, whether or not they're games, you press buttons to advance the story. Some think it's boring. I think it's riveting.

The cornerstone mechanic of The Walking Dead is decision-making. Through your choices in dialog and action, you advance the plot forward. There is no wrong choice. The choices you make develop Lee as a character and nudge the plot in a certain direction. These choices range from whether you say "whoops" or "shit" when dropping something, to deciding whom to save from two dying, helpless companions. While these choices won’t affect how the game ends, it will affect how you reach it. The decisions you make will affect how the game plays out. Threaten a man and his daughter will show contempt for you. Try to convince a man to stop a train and it could end through peaceful discourse or a bout of fisticuffs. Each character will remember the choices you’ve made. They'll help you out later, or leave you to fend for yourself. 

Despite the emphasis on choice and decision-making, there are still artifacts of point-and-click adventure games from long ago. Just like in King’s Quest, the protagonist can explore and interact with the environment, especially to solve puzzles. Just like The Secret of Monkey Island, you have an inventory, and can use (or refuse to use) certain items at will. Unlike these two classics, you can use a controller or touchscreen to play, to the relief of many gamers. 

Just like real life, you can't be friends with everyone. Take this asshole on the right, for instance.

Roach would probably consider a game like The Walking Dead to be rich in both story and granularity. Players experience a richly developed story and still have room to express themselves through their decisions. Thus, Lee’s behavior, is a reflection of the player. This contrasts to many popular first-person shooters like the annual Call of Duty scapegoat, which are big on fast-paced, competitive gunplay, with minimal emphasis on establishing a story.

The Walking Dead is a work of interactive fiction because of the great emphasis on story. The only gameplay mechanics the game expects you to be able to perform are 1) Repeatedly mashing a button during a cut scene (a “quick-time event”) (2) solving the occasional puzzle. The plot calls on players to act actively, react quickly, and explore the walker-ridden expanses in between. And while there are times that you can fail, these aren't terribly common, and are generally easy to bypass.

In episode four, Telltale tried to shoehorn a first-person shooter segment into the game. It felt clunky and sluggish, not to mention that such a mainstream game mechanic felt out of place in a game like this. Needless to say, this kind of segment did not make it into episode five.

So, it’s apparent that The Walking Dead is unlike other game you’ve probably played, but is it really a game?

One benchmark people typically use to qualify games is the idea of fun. If the developers of a game designed it to be fun, then it is a game. Ask anyone who plays video games regularly why they play them and at least one will probably say, “because I enjoy playing them. They’re fun.” The Walking Dead is not fun. I’m not having fun when I’m trying to reason with a violent man hell-bent on killing a child. I’m not having fun when I’m weighing the pros and cons of pulling this guy up versus letting him fall to his death (with only seconds to decide). Nothing about the zombie apocalypse is fun.

Chopping arms is kind of fun, but moments like these are few and far between in The Walking Dead.

Is fun really the endgame of video games as a medium? Do people look at art because “it looks good” or watch movies because “they're exciting?” Warren Spector doesn’t think so. He’s a legendary game maker; two of his greatest works are Deus Ex and System Shock. In his essay “Fun is a Four Letter Word,” he argues that video games are akin to paintings and film in that not all of them should elicit the same feelings. You may cry at the end of The Notebook, but chances are that you won’t during Transformers. Games, like many works of art, evoke feeling in the player. The most prevalent feeling is fun. This is the feeling that sells the most copies, and gets publishers the most money. But, games that only focus on fun are ignoring the rest of the broad range of human emotion. Consider Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s anything but fun, unless your idea of fun is the constant fear of the unknown (you masochist). Despite this, it’s sold over a million copies, spawning an uncountable number of reaction videos. Like The Walking Dead, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is meant to be experienced, more than played.

What makes The Walking Dead any less of a game than Wii Sports? Is John Cage any lesser an artist than Vincent Van Gogh? Is 4’33” not a song simply because its sheet music is blank? The amount of pixels that can be shown on screen has increased exponentially. The range of colors developers can use to express their creativity has increased tenfold. The potential for video games to make us feel raw, visceral emotion has expanded infinitely. As video games as a potential art form mature, our consideration for what we classify as games must increase accordingly.

As I lied on the couch, stunned, I realized that not all games have to be fun. There can be games that make you cry. There can be games in which you mainly make choices. There can be games that unlock a paternal instinct you didn’t realize you had. I never knew I could find myself loving and caring for a video game character such as Clementine. It seems like a no-brainer now, but being “fun” isn’t an end-all classification for video games. Like any form of art, the definition has been stretched so much that—as long as you call your work a video game—it’s a video game. If you don’t believe that video games can be art, The Walking Dead may make you reconsider.

Above is a brief montage of gameplay from the first episode of The Walking Dead. It demonstrates the three main elements of the game: exploring, quick time events, and making decisions.

Sources

Nick Iuppa and Terry Borst, “Game Play Design,” End‐to‐End Game Development: Creating Independent Serious Games and Simulations from Start to Finish, pp. 187–202. Copyright © 2010 by Taylor & Francis Group LLC.

Carolyn Handler Miller, “Interactivity and Its Effects,” Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment, pp. 54–67. Copyright © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group LLC. Reprinted with permission.

Spector, Warren. "Fun Is a Four Letter Word." The Escapist. Alloy Digital, LLC, 3 Oct. 2006. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
Portnow, James. "What Is A Game?" Extra Credits. N.d. Youtube. Google, Inc., 27 Nov. 2013. Web. 26 Jan. 2014. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blj91KLOvZQ>.