Morality and Consequence in TWD (minor spoilers)

[BlankCanvasDJ]

I found this article on Gamespot and thought it was a great read. It pretty much sums up what I thought was great about the player choices in TWD too.

Beyond Good & Evil - Morality and Consequence in The Walking Dead

[JackSchirmer]

Originally Posted by BlankCanvasDJ

I found this article on Gamespot and thought it was a great read. It pretty much sums up what I thought was great about the player choices in TWD too.

Beyond Good & Evil - Morality and Consequence in The Walking Dead

It's a pity TTG kept telling us the game was more than it was, because it works decently as a tool for reflection on the level the author of the article describes.

That's true of any timed decision with high stakes, so the question becomes, did TWD game set up these decisions in a way that was particularly meaningful?

A fair answer is, yes and no. By hopelessly bungling the gameplay we realized all too soon that there were in fact, in the game, no meaningful consequences. In a setting that's trying to sell you on 'what you do matters!', we learned in the first episode, to our chagrin, that nothing we did mattered at all. You could have let every timed decision run out and the game would have effectively continued without you.

As someone wrote in another thread,

the teacher and not-Ben student both die immediately no matter what
Kenny won’t listen to you if you try to protect Larry, no matter how nice you’ve been
Lilly will up and shoot someone for no reason no matter how gentle of a mediator you’ve been
Omid breaks his stupid leg no matter what you do
Vernon betrays you no matter how nice you’ve been
Kenny will heroically sacrifice himself no matter how much of a jerk you’ve been
The crazy guy at the end is mad at you whether you stole his food or not.

In that very large sense, 'no'. Where we can answer 'yes', is when we ignore the irrelevance of our decisions in the play of the game, and treat it simply as a vehicle for posing questions. Granted, it's no more interesting in that regard than sitting around with your friends and posing ethical dilemmas, but given that's an activity that's inherently interesting, TTG did a respectable job, therefore, of taking advantage of the fact that the sky is indeed blue.