How The Walking Dead Used Artificiality To Heighten Emotion

Here are the four most harrowing words in gaming this year:

Carley will remember that

They're written in The Walking Dead, episode three (this piece will contain spoilers, by the way). It's possible that if you were playing, Doug would be swapped in for Carley, but either character at that point serves as the nicest, most supportive character in the game at that point. In the middle of the episode, during a stressful point, all the characters get in an argument. Your character, Lee, is given the dialogue option to take sides in the argument. After you make that decision, the top of the screen says Carley will remember that. And an instant later, Lilly shoots Carley in the head.

The moment works because it breaks the rules of the game. The notifications of other characters paying attention to the things you say and do are supposed to be helpful. Through the course of the game, you'll learn that those moments are the components of the game that are going to carry forward. You say something to one character, they'll bring it up in conversation later. So when The Walking Dead publishes it on the top of the screen, the implication is that Carley is going to live, at least long enough for that notification to bear fruit later. Instead, she remembers it for a couple seconds, before she gets a bullet in the brainpan.

Many of The Walking Dead's players won't even notice it. The game gives players the option to disable those notifications, and people do, believing it's a better or more pure experience. (When I initially downloaded the game, around the time of episode three's release, fellow game critics told me that disabling them was the first thing I should do.) Yet by this third episode, the game's developers started actively using the notifications to affect the player's perception of the game, and people without those notifications may have missed some of the game's cleverest moments. 

The notifications aren't the only trick that The Walking Dead uses to distract the player, making Carley/Doug's death that much more shocking. The game's camera cuts and changes focus during the climactic argument. As it progresses, another character, Kenny, is busy fixing the vehicle that all the characters are riding in, and the game's perspective switches to him every now and then. Kenny finishes his repairs and the camera pans over, away from Lilly, the impending murderer, and to Kenny. By removing Lilly from the field of vision, the game implies that Lilly isn't part of the action at that moment, even though she immediately takes action. So The Walking Dead utilizes both cinematic trickery as well as ludic (game-derived) trickery to convince the player that a character is safe, despite everything in the game world indicating that no one is ever safe.

It's not an accident. The Walking Dead utilizes similar deception at two other junctions. Just a few minutes prior to the Carley/Doug incident, your character finishes working on an investigation that you can invite the boy Duck to help you with. If you do, at the end, you walk past him, and can click to give him a high five. If you do so, the game says Duck thinks you're awesome. A sweet sentiment, and the last one you'll see from Duck before he gets bitten by a zombie, leading to his mercy killing at your hands or his father's. Duck may think you're awesome, but Duck quickly stops thinking at all.

The third powerful use of this device comes at the very end of the game. As Lee lays dying, he gives his last pieces of advice to Clementine. It doesn't really matter what he says, but the game publishes Clementine will remember that regardless. There's a slight implication that perhaps there'll be an afterword where Clem is shown following Lee's path, but that's not what matters. The notification matters because it combines the text of the game with the game's story. At that point, if you've gotten through five episodes, if you see Lee handcuffed and dying, your emotions are running high. For the game to note, via notification, just how much Clem cares about what Lee's saying, what you're choosing for Lee to say, just reinforces that. The use of artificial, “gamey” notifications in this fashion indicates both the intelligence and confidence with which The Walking Dead was made.