The Walking Dead (continued)

To add to (and slightly contradict) what I said a couple days ago, I thought I'd share this anecdote, part of my experience with the game.  In the second-to-last episode, my group of survivors was making a quick getaway from a building full of zombies.  One of the characters, whose name need not be divulged, gets in trouble, and my character Lee stops him from falling down a stairwell shaft.  At this point, the game gives you the choice to drop him to save time.

Doing so would be a pretty heartless move, but the game provides some context for it.  This particular character has been less than useful until now, being more of a hindrance than a help.  He's well aware of this fact, and as he hangs there he actually asks you to let go of him.  Also, the zombies are swarming up the stairwell, and in real life that might be incentive enough to drop the kid and run.  But all this aside, it's still a pretty easy decision, and the vast majority of players saved him, as reported in the stats after the episode.  Except me.

I played the game on Xbox 360, and when the game asks me whether I want to save him, I hammer on the 'yes' button.  Or rather I hammer on an entirely different button, which I mistake to be the 'yes' button, but which actually does nothing.  I'm an experienced gamer, but in the heat of the moment, I forgot where the X button was. When nothing happened, and the timer was about to run out (presumably indicating the zombies were about to kill me), I start to think that the game, for some crazy reason, doesn't want me to save him, and I press the 'drop him' button instead.  In other words, I mistakenly, purposefully killed him.

At this point, I start to feel more than a little upset at the game, and at myself for being so stupid.  Before the idea of restarting crosses my mind, I've already passed a checkpoint.  The auto-save system is designed exactly to prevent re-dos, and so (probably) the only option would have been to restart the whole episode, which was nearly over at that point.  I decided to keep playing, but I felt no less awful. 

Other characters asked me what I was thinking, what could possibly have led me to drop him, and my only response was to remain silent, feeling shame.  Lee had made a mistake.  Or had he?  Whenever something awful like this happens, we search our memories over and over again, wondering why we did it and trying to hide from the possibility that we meant to do it.  In this case, the source of my mistake was clear to me, but Lee will never know exactly what was going through his mind.

Games occasionally allow us to make mistakes.  If we don't button-mash fast enough in Metal Gear Solid, then Snake will give in to the torture and Meryl will die.  But even so, we know Snake meant to save her.  I would argue that no game before Walking Dead, and then only by sheer accident, has let the player express frailty of will.  How a game could do this intentionally?

In my experience of Walking Dead, this was Lee's darkest hour, something he could never forgive himself for, and would not even try to justify to others.  Don't get me wrong - to this day, my stomach churns just thinking about it, and I wish it hadn't happened.  But it was the most crucial point in my character's development, and for me, it's one of the most emotional moments in my history with games.

The most meaningful choice in this game is the one I couldn't make correctly.