(For those of you who have not played the games talked about in this article, I will try to keep the events of them as vague as possible while still being recognizable to those who have played them.)
On Labor Day weekend, I returned home. (I do not wish to go into the motivations of my journey home, but suffice it to say I was not having a very good first week of classes.) I entered my home that Friday and spent the rest of the day feeling bad for myself in my room and surfing the Internet. The next day, I decided to play the final episode of the second season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead (an episodic game series that combines elements from Choose Your Own Adventure novels, Point and Click adventures, and Bioware RPG dialogue trees into a tale of death, survival, and the consequences of lying to children).
I played through the game, making decision after decision, all of which led to a climatic knife fight followed by a coda. In the coda (or, at least, in the one I received), we (the survivor of the knife fight, the playable character and a baby) returned to a location from a previous episode to restock on supplies. As the characters explored the abandoned location, our protagonist noticed a group of people in the nearby woods: two adults and a boy.
They claimed to be a family trying to get by in this terrible world of walking dead and awful people. With the events of the past two seasons, and this episode in particular, in mind, I was left with a decision: do I let these strangers into where I currently am, or do I force them to fend for themselves. In this playthrough, I chose the latter. As the game faded to black, we lingered on a shot of the young boy of the group looking back at the building in such a way as to look at the player, and I felt like my insides were hollow. At first, I assumed that it was the developers framing the ending in such a way as to repeat the feeling the players felt at the end of the previous season of The Walking Dead extenuated by my melancholy blues and thought nothing of my feelings for some time.
Flash forward to sometime before New Years Eve, and I decided to go back to the land of The Walking Dead and replay the entirety of the second season again to see how the whole story fits together rather than in episodic bits like I did with the previous season. Over the course of my replay, I made some changes to my original choices in the game. And then I reached the final choice and once again, I was once more faced with the decision to abandon the family or let them in. This time, I decided to let them in. I did not choose this ending because it was a less pessimistic ending, but because it felt like it was more in line with how I was playing the rest of the game. To me, the protagonist of this season felt like she still needed to be with people, even if she didn’t fully trust them.
Cut to January 25, 2015, and I’m still thinking about my choices in that game. As such I decided to write a blog post about it. But as I was writing the previous paragraphs of this post, I thought about the nature of choice in video games. When most people who make games think about choices in that context, they tend to highlight the subject through moral choices such as “do I harvest the little sisters or do I spare their lives“ and “do I have the people see me as a hero or as a villain”.
However, my thoughts writing this post were contextualized by another idea: the effects of replaying a game on how one plays the story. I don’t just mean when one goes back to a game they previously played, I mean when one goes back to a previous section after having died. And when one does go back, they sometimes decide to use a different strategy and change how things go, no matter how slightly.
And that’s the thing about video games: unlike most other forms of storytelling, no matter how railroaded the narrative is, the story of a game can never be the same every time you play it. Be it the number of brown people you shoot in Call of Duty, which character you side with in the Game of Thrones board game, or even the number of times you go back to the beginning in Super Mario, all the little things one does effects how one views the game they just played, even if they don’t notice it. No two playthroughs of a game’s story can ever be the same, even if they do have identical plot.
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