MY 16-year-old daughter and I cried our eyes out at the end of the first season of The Walking Dead.
Emotionally, the experience was the same as coming to the end of a great movie that knew how to work your heart strings in every frame. It could even be described as almost - and I can't believe I am going to write this - novelistic in the way the player, like a reader, could not help but fall in love with the characters and feel what they feel.
If you missed it, the first season of The Walking Dead came out in five downloadable episodes, which saw you assume the role of Lee, a history professor from Georgia who finds himself becoming the adoptive parent of eight-year-old orphan Clementine. It was a game about love and duty and choices and consequences - although all that emotional stuff was neatly wrapped up in a Zombie Apocalypse just in case it risked turning boy gamers off. It didn't turn anyone off. The Walking Dead was voted Game of the Year umpteen times over.
If you thought games were about running and shooting, The Walking Dead showed you that a game could be just as exciting if it centred on who you gave a can of beans to - because that decision could save a character's life, show that you care for them, or allow another character to die and mark you as heartless and cold. One simple act could also set off a chain of events that would end in hope or despair for a cast of characters the player quickly became closely attached to - again, the game's novelistic aspirations were startling brave and not wholly unfulfilled.
At the end of season one the Lee-Clem father-daughter dynamic ended in horror and loss - this is the type of game that gives the player the end they need, not the end they want. The game had dared to put narrative, character development and emotion at the heart of gaming - and to kick Hollywood endings out of touch. While it tried to be novelistic, it succeeded in being cinematic. Fans were bereft when it ended.
But now The Walking Dead: Season Two has come around. And where season one had the temerity to think it could rival a movie, season two is proving that a game can take on and compete with long-form TV shows like Breaking Bad or The Wire or the television version of The Walking Dead.
The long-form series is the tip of the spear when it comes to popular culture today - that's where the best writers and actors and directors want to work because it is currently where story and character are being really celebrated - and game developers Telltale Games want to be up there beside artists like Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan and The Wire's David Simon. You have to applaud their ambition. Gaming might make more money than Hollywood today, but many consumers - older people still don't get it. If they played The Walking Dead, they'd get it in minutes.
Back in season two, Clem is now 11 - and she has changed. In turn, the way you play changes too. This time around you are Clem, not Lee. She's on her own, and vulnerable, and so are you. She's become darker and lost a lot of her childishness. In season one, every action you took as a player was about protecting her. Now, as the pre-teen stretches her courage and ambition, there are moments when you can indulge Clem's cruel streak and her taste for danger. She's become a more rounded person - just as any child changes as they approach adolescence. I find I play her as mean as possible in season two. Mean because if I keep her cruel and hard then the chances are she will stay alive. Although, as this is a game where every choice you make has a consequence I could be setting this great ballsy little character up for an unpleasant and lonely last scene. Who knows - that's half the brilliance of the game.
Like Clem, the game is darker too this season. In season one, it was the undead walkers you had to fear, in season two it is other people who pose the greatest menace. Like the TV series and the comic books, The Walking Dead has chutzpah in spades when it comes to killing off central characters - which increases Clem's fragile grip on survival and sense of isolation despite her greater courage and cunning. So far, we are about mid-season and the game is at a half way-stage cliff hanger that is as black as hell. We'll give you an end of season review later in the year, but to be honest, if it keeps going like this, The Walking Dead won't just end up being Game of the Year again, it'll end up being this year's Breaking Bad.
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