The Walking Dead: Motivated to Murder

It's a crime that I was never able to post about Telltale's The Walking Dead while I was playing it, but better now than never.

WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

While this game is deservedly touted as one of the most ambitious narrative experiences in games today, and there are plenty of things to talk about, I want to focus on the character of Lee.

Whenever a developer makes a game in which the player can make decisions which affect the personality of a character, the safest route is to give the player a blank slate character. This allows the player to imprint their own motivations and desires on the character so that nothing breaks within the narrative. We see this with a majority of Bioware games. If you want to play a jackass, that's fine, because the character is what you make it. However, in The Walking Dead, Lee is a very defined character from the outset, and yet Telltale left it in your hands to decide the type of person he becomes. How did they do this without completely botching narrative consistency?

Tthe most substantial choices you make are the ones dealing with killing someone or allowing them to live. Being a murderer or not is a trait very largely based on character. Allowing the player to make a decision one way or another is a quick way to break a pre-defined character's internal motivations. But Telltale gives the player a way to define Lee within the parameters setup at the outset.

Lee is already a murderer. We learn within the first five minutes that he has killed someone in a fit of passion, not because he is a psychopath. So right off the bat, Telltale has given the player the motivational excuse they need to commit themselves to killing. Making the choice to murder won't break Lee's character.

However, soon after, Lee finds Clementine, and that could change everything. At this point, the player now has an excuse to allow people to live, because caring for this little girl and making a good impression is so important to Lee. The player can now decide if this little girl changes this murderer into someone who kills into someone with mercy.

In this way, Telltale has given us the character we need to make the important decision of taking another's life without creating internal dissonance within that character. In the end, you're choosing between whether or not Clementine has changed Lee from a man who is capable of taking life and will do so again, and a man who is capable of taking life but won't for the betterment of this child.