I have spent the past couple of days in slacks, underneath a duvet, sniffling and sneezing my way through a bad cold. With my husband away at a church sailing week, I have found company through my dog and my Xbox. And in particular, the episodic masterpiece of a game that is The Walking Dead, which has had me in tears more than I had imagined a zombie video game ever could.
From the perspective of my cold-ridden, home-bound isolation, it may not be so strange that I am blogging about a zombie video game. Yes, I am aware of the reputation of zombie video games for gamers and non-gamers alike. Many of them are gory, bloody and lack any sense of deeper purpose than hacking and slashing. I wouldn’t willingly play a game like this (I tried Left 4 Dead with friends, and I was pretty much closing my eyes through the whole thing - not a great way to get through the game). This is not my kind of video game, and this is definitely not what The Walking Dead is like.
The Walking Dead is a character-centred, choice-centred, point-and-click video game. It is split into 5 episodes, which are amazing cinematic feats of storytelling. I don’t think I have ever played a game which has been so powerfully and simply crafted, so compelling and true to life and human nature. (Well, true to life and human nature in the event of a zombie apocalypse.) You can play The Walking Dead like it is a movie, a TV series - except that you can take part in the direction that the story goes. But it isn’t stunted in the way that RPGs often are [To non-gamers: Role-playing games, where you play as a protagonist in a story, making choices and doing quests towards an ultimate goal]. It doesn’t have many of the traditional RPG conventions that you come to expect as a gamer, which make the experience rather confusing and exclusive for a new gamer or first time gamer. The Walking Dead feels seamless and natural. Anyone could play it and have their internal world changed. It feels as if you were really there, you were really the protagonist Lee Everett, making these choices, speaking with these people, feeling the pressure and desperation and tragedy of the situation, where you can’t really win in the battle for survival.
My hours sitting with this game made me think hard about survival, humanity and the power of fiction. Actually, The Walking Dead made me think of Cormack McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. High praise for a 21st century video game I think!
The theme of survival is a common one that's been explored in fiction. In the event of a worldwide catastrophe, how would we survive? Would we know how to go about surviving in famine, hunger, illness and scarcity?
Throw in an aggressor, a threat: an epidemic which is contagious, zombies who infect and kill. And then in addition to the battle for survival, we see how human nature would fare. Would we turn on each other? What depths would we sink to in order to survive? In the absence of laws and structures which keep order, what would happen?
The Walking Dead explores this so powerfully. You are immersed in the story, making heartrending decisions that inevitably decide the fate of other people's lives. You are confronted with difficult choices that you have to make in order to survive. Every second you have to decide how far you will go to preserve your humanity, compassion, and integrity- and what you are prepared to sacrifice to keep on living.
You see characters at their most broken. Hunger, illness, exhaustion. Paranoia and aggression. Grief and mourning. Sick and brutal murders, driven by a twisted will to live. Deaths are common but you have to soldier on in a bleak reality with few hopes to cling to.
Some things really stood out to me in this game, and correspondingly, in ‘The Road’. In both of these stories, the protagonist is taking care of a child. In The Walking Dead, the child is an 8-year-old called Clementine who has lost her parents and has no one except you. The purity and innocence of the child’s way of thinking is a lifeline. It is a real juxtaposition in the dog-eat-dog, cruel world of survival, and a real connection to the most beautiful parts of humanity that have all but gone. The relationship between the protagonist and the child in both stories is heartrending - perhaps even more so in The Walking Dead, because you are the protagonist and you are forming the relationship. I don’t want to spoil the plot of either of these stories so I won’t say more. But it isn’t just the protagonist who keeps the child alive by taking care of them physically and keeping them safe. The child keeps the protagonist alive too with the innocence that is burning inside them.
Another thing that really stood out to me is the importance of humour. I hadn’t really thought of this before, so The Walking Dead was a real eye-opener in this respect. Humour is entirely absent in ‘The Road’, which makes it all the bleaker and gives it more of a heaviness and lethargy. But in The Walking Dead, the characters who can bring humour to situations are the ones who seem to preserve more humanity, showing more compassion and respect for others.
There is a scene in The Walking Dead where a guy called Omid makes (awesome) jokes about a bust head statue he sees in the attic where the group are trapped. His girlfriend yells at him to stop, that it isn’t the right time to be joking around. Omid eventually yells back at her. “I’m just trying to ease the tension a bit here,” he says. He continues to do make clever and funny comments throughout.
For me, Omid was a sanity check. The humour he was able to preserve and bring to bleak situations helped me not to succumb to the hopelessness of the situation. It reminded me that we were still human, and still had the capacity for joy and laughter. It made me think of Doug Stanhope’s philosophy - that the only real weapon we have against the crappiness of the world is our ability to laugh in its face. Even more important and relevant in a destroyed and hopeless world full of tragedy, death and brutality.
There are obvious things to learn. The value of compassion, above all other things. That it is worth being compassionate, even if it means there is ‘another mouth to feed’. Even if on the face of it, it reduces your chances of survival. Because without compassion, love and care, what is the point of surviving? What is the point of living if we don’t have the things that make us human?
In The Walking Dead, your group of survivors discover a barricaded area called Crawford where the survival of the fittest mentality is king. In an attempt to survive, the residents of Crawford form their own stringent rules and principles, casting out all those who are vulnerable and who are what they term a ‘drain on resources’. Children, the elderly, and the sick are left to fend for themselves outside Crawford, which has a monopoly on all essential supplies like food and medicine.
A young woman called Molly tells her story. “When the dead started walking and Crawford shut itself in, it seemed like a pretty good deal at first. We were safe, we had everything we needed to survive. Then the rules started coming down. No one who couldn’t justify their place, earn their keep. No one who required special care. My sister was a diabetic, and by Crawford’s rules, that made her a liability… Crawford, they always talked about how their system worked, how anything was better than becoming ‘one of them’. But I saw what they’d already become. I just wish I had seen it before it was too late. Before they came and took my sister away.”
I think the scary thing about all of this is that I can imagine it happening. I lived through H5N1 and SARS in Hong Kong, which is maybe why all these movies and games about contagion, epidemics and apocalypse strike a chord in me. I remember sitting on empty trains, being told to stay at home, being afraid to eat with others. Empty streets and suspicious eyes behind medical masks. I remember that time of mistrust and fear. I can see how, pushed to the extreme, people would turn on each other and chase after survival, leaving all semblances of love and compassion behind.
This is the power of fiction. It helps us to see through to our core, our broken human nature. It helps us to think deeply about the things that make us human, the things that are worth fighting and dying for.
I am, as many of you know, a massive gamer. I love video games. I think a great video game is the most powerful media of them all. The Walking Dead is a prime example of this. I know we are not living in a zombie apocalypse, forced to kill for our survival. I know this is a fictional universe with a fictional premise. But the things that drive the characters are so true. They are so real. The relationships, their motivations and fears, the beliefs that hold them together - they are close to us too. And if the world were to go to hell in a handbasket today, much of what happened to them would probably happen to many of us.
So I think there is a lot that we can learn from games, books and movies like The Walking Dead. About our humanity, about what we cannot lose even if all else is lost. About the true meaning and purpose of survival.
Sometimes we need some fiction to remind us of the deeper reasons why we are alive.
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