Episodic gaming always seemed born of necessity.
If you didn’t catch the show, you missed out on the conversation.
But it’s more fragmented now.
That dynamic goes for video games, too.
Games are diverse and have historically been more niche than television.
It was a perfect contextual framework for a game centered around tense decision-making.
Did you lie to Hershel?
Did you loot the car?
In the end most of these choices didn’t matter to the overall narrative.
It was about deciding what matters to you.
Why are those standards important to you?
Often our choices lined up, but sometimes they didn’t.
We would talk about our internal reasoning and why we made the decisions that we did.
Sometimes a choice that I had thought of as indefensible made more sense when I heard his reasoning.
The hero was doomed, but there was one more thing he needed to do before he died.
The emotional notes were preparing for a crescendo.
And when that crescendo finally came, it was devastating.
By this point I was completely invested in Clementine as a real, human person.
I wanted her to thrive in this broken world without me.
I wanted to feel like I was passing on something important.
I let Clementine go, then demanded that she leave.
I didn’t ask her to shoot me.
I couldn’t imagine making her go through that.
When I met with my friend this time, our decisions diverged more than usual.
His final words to Clementine were generally more practical, more focused on survival, less naive.
Mine were more principled, attempting to hold onto some humanity and innocence.
He wanted her safe, and I wanted her to carry the parts of humanity worth saving.
The Walking Dead would continue for three more seasons, and Clementine’s importance would wax and wane throughout.
To be honest, I never finished the series, having fallen off sometime during Season 3.
Or maybe it was Season 2?
I understand that Clementine’s season was especially great.
As a parent, you spend your entire life preparing your children to face the world without you.
Stepping into her mind and making her final decisions would cheapen that experience for me.
The entire catharsis of the first season of The Walking Dead was coming to terms with letting go.
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