Summary Of Half Lives: The Walking Dead

In ‘Half-Lives: The Walking Dead: 400 Days, Sorcery!, and Depression Quest,’ by Tevis Thompson, the connection between video game characters and players on a metacognitive level is described. Thompson explores this connection through several games of different genres, stories, and gameplay. He says that games, in order to really connect on an empathetic level with their players, need to force the players to live the lives of others and face the consequences of lasting choices the player must make. He praises games like ‘The Walking Dead,’ (specifically its ‘400 Days’ episode), because it requires the player to live the life of someone other than themselves, possibly the life of someone completely unlike themselves, and to create outcomes dependent
on their choices. This game is meant to strike players emotionally, and to, if appropriate, regret their choices and wonder at what could have been if another path had been chosen. Thompson, while not undermining the value of these games, adds a criticism to the games that fail to do this. In ‘Sorcery!,’ the player may immediately reverse and correct a decision he made so that he may almost effortlessly reach the outcome he desires most. Even if the end-all is consistent despite the choices made, this kind of gaming makes the player’s choices transient and insignificant, and his character may walk through his life in a sort of try and retry state, which allows no remorse or achievement for the player’s journey, and therefore no connection between the life of the character and the player. He goes on to say that the kinds of playable characters make this connection more relevant in a game, and to truly experience the life of another, the player must play as anyone other than themselves; he must see the world through the eyes of a foreign character, a character foreign in gender, race, age, condition, etc. I agree with all of this; to really make an empathetic connection, one would want to remove himself from his current situation, as this would just be a repeat of his real life, and no one plays video games to relive his everyday. Even a game that simulates a situation very similar to his own has value to a player if he can experience it in a different manner, whether through slight differences in choice and freedom or simply by experiencing it through another’s perspective.