The Walking Dead and the Importance of Player Agency in Gameplay

About a week ago, I bought The Walking Dead on sale on Steam. While I’d read a fair amount of the comics and the first season of the show, I’d never really considered myself that much of a Walking Dead fan. The comics were good, and the TV show had quality, though I wasn’t that interested in it. That being said, as soon as I saw Telltale’s critically acclaimed five-episode series on sale for $10, I grabbed it as soon as I could, largely due to the critical buzz surrounding it. I finished the series last weekend, and I can definitively say that not only is it a game of the highest quality that everyone should play, but also demonstrates a clear understanding of one of the most important aspects of storytelling in gaming: player agency in gameplay.

Now when I talk about player agency, I mean the ability that a player has to interact with a game. Unlike other media like film or literature, video games have the unique quality of interactivity: rather than watching events unfold on the screen, the player can affect those events through his interaction with the game.

However, the proper use of agency is far more important than the amount of agency given. For example, Minecraft gives the player an immense amount of agency–the player can do almost anything, make anything, and so on. In a game like Minecraft, this agency only has the purpose of giving the player a world to play in; this agency isn’t used to tell a story. On the other side of the coin, there are games that are almost entirely, well, cinematic: games that take agency away from the player and force them to watch a cutscene, rather than interact with them.

Now, neither of these approaches to player agency are strictly bad–on the contrary, they’re usually quite fun. The real problem with these approaches is that they ignore the ability of interactivity to tell stories in fundamentally different ways than other media, and the use of agency is where The Walking Dead transcends many of its fellow games.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE WALKING DEAD BELOW

Unlike Minecraft, The Walking Dead is notable for its discerning use of agency. Rather than giving the player an immense amount of agency, The Walking Dead selectively gives and denies the player agency to great effect, largely in three areas: dialogue, the lack of a save system, and quick-time events.

In dialogue, The Walking Dead excels. Not only are the characters and dialogue well-written (and devoid of the annoying dualistic moral choice system present in many RPGs, but that’s a whole another article), but the dialogue system also contains a crucial element for player agency: a timer. For conversations in situations where the player, in the guise of former professor and felon Lee Everett, actually has conversations with other characters, the player is forced to choose between four different dialogue options before the timer runs out, or else the game defaults to the silent option. This creative system has two results: firstly, it gives every conversation a sense of realism, as if the player is actually conversing with another person, rather than a computer program. This is a fresh difference The Walking Dead has compared to other RPGs, like Mass Effect or Skyrim, in which the player has as much time in the world to choose between his dialogue options. Secondly, this revocation of the player’s ability to think over their choices allows for more instinctual, organic dialogue choices, with consequences that the player must then live with.

This leads to the next area in which The Walking Dead excels: choices and their consequences. Because of the timed dialogue system, a player may make decisions that he may immediately or later regret and would like to change–which many games allow, through the use of a save system. While this system may allow for more fun on the player’s level, from a storytelling aspect this approach is horrible. The ability to load a save from immediately before an action destroys any real impact that a choice might have; for the ability of the player to choose–an ability unique to video games–to have true significance, the player must not have such a system. Thankfully, The Walking Dead possesses only an autosave function, meaning that players would have to replay an entire episode to change their decision if they later regretted it. Thus, by taking away the player’s agency to redo his decisions, the player’s decisions become all the more important and consequential to the player’s experience.

Finally, one area perhaps demonstrates The Walking Dead’s use of agency best: quick-time events, or QTEs. While there are some who decry quick-time events as being lazy or ineffective, The Walking Dead disproves this standpoint with one single moment. Throughout the game, the player will have to deal with many different events through QTEs, such as fending off attacking zombies or lifting objects, which (on PC) involve swiftly pressing the “Q” key many times. Inevitably, though, the player succeeds in these QTEs–until the end of the game.

By the end of Episode 5, Lee Everett has been bitten by a zombie and is slowly succumbing to the disease. As the player attempts to save the young girl Clementine, Lee’s illness reaches his peak, and he falls down, unable to get up. Clementine desperately encourages Lee to get up, which prompts a QTE. However, this QTE cannot be completed, as Lee can no longer physically stand. As the player frantically presses the “Q” key, the QTE appears to function as normal; however, no matter how fast the player reacts or presses that key, there is no way to achieve success. This is perhaps the greatest use of the revocation of player agency for a storytelling purpose: by making a QTE–events which the player could always had the ability to achieve–which the player cannot actually win, The Walking Dead hammers home the futility of Lee’s situation to the player.

It is this excellent use of player agency, combined with excellent writing and direction, that makes The Walking Dead not only one of the best games of 2012, but one of my favorite games ever. Much like games like Braid and Bioshock, The Walking Dead demonstrates the heights to which video games can soar as a unique art form, and I hope that we’ll see more and more of these kinds of games in the years to come.

Erickson Bridges, aka Indraklyr, is a book-, movie-, and game-loving classicist and RPG fanatic who just started writing for the Red Shirt Crew. This game tore him apart emotionally and he loved every second of it. Until he gets around to getting a twitter, tell him your thoughts in the comments below.