Immersion through illusion

Case Study: The Walking Dead

TURUN YLIOPISTO Informaatioteknologian laitos Interactive Storytelling, essee Miikka Lehtonen – mijule@utu.fi Joulukuu 2012

Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 2

2. Choices in games ....................................................................................................... 2

2.1. Problems with choices ........................................................................................... 3

2.2. New approaches to choices.................................................................................... 5

3. Case study: The Walking Dead ................................................................................. 5

3.1. The interactive story structure of The Walking Dead ........................................... 6

3.2. Strong writing, good characters ............................................................................. 6

3.3. Better choices through forced role-playing ........................................................... 7

3.4. Social interactions and small but meaningful choices ........................................... 8

3.5. Making the player care .......................................................................................... 9

3.6. Don’t abstract the horror...................................................................................... 11

4. Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 12

5. References ............................................................................................................... 14

1. Introduction

Immersion is a key component in telling any good story. If the audience is not invested

in the story, they will lose interest or even walk away without ever experiencing the

story all the way through.

There are different ways of building immersion, and these ways vary between the

different styles of storytelling, interactive or not, as each style offers its own tricks and

possibilities.

On the surface it would seem that computer games offer the widest possibilities. A

storyteller choosing to operate with nothing but text can tell their story through

interactive fiction. Those wishing for a more cinematic approach have access to high

fidelity visual and aural components along with dedicated software designed for

cinematic storytelling, along with professional voice actors.

Along with these possibilities come a host of requirements and problems, some of them

shared with all forms of interactive storytelling, others unique to the medium. Since

games are by definition interactive, the audience is not merely a passenger along for the

trip, but an active participant in how the story is told. This means they must have a

meaningful part in crafting the story’s outcome if they are to feel at all invested in it.

These meaningful choices and tangible effects come at a cost. Game development

schedules are tight as are budgets and teams often find themselves struggling to find the

balance between unrealistic amounts of extra work and unsatisfying consequences.

Even a small amount of customizability creates exponential amounts of extra work as

the team has to write and design all these additional possibilities, supply them with high

quality art assets and voice acting and test them thoroughly (Fendt et al.).

This essay discusses the unavoidable limitations placed on this method of storytelling

by the game development process and what the consequences of these limitations are if

they are not taken into consideration. It also examines the success achieved by Telltale

Games with their 2012 episodic game The Walking Dead, where they were able to

bypass these limitations through careful design and skilled writing. Why did The

Walking Dead succeed with comparatively limited resources where others have failed

with much more? What are the lessons we could learn from it?

2. Choices in games

As computer and video games are a relatively new form of interactive storytelling, they

have always been something of a derivative medium. They have borrowed heavily from

other forms of storytelling for both style and content. For the purposes of this essay, one

of the more significant borrowed concepts is the idea of choice and morality.

While the concept itself is universal, it could be argued that the systems for moral

choices in computer games draw a direct lineage to traditional pen and paper role-

playing games. It is hard to say whether this is because the game designers themselves

grew up on these traditional games or because the first games to offer these kinds of

systems often were based on traditional pen and paper RPG licenses and thus had to

strive to replicate the experience the best they could.

Whatever the reason for their inclusion, computer gamers welcomed the new systems

with open arms. Early pioneers like Planescape: Torment, Fallout and Knights of the

Old Republic won praise for allowing the player large amounts of choice in how the

story progressed and even allowed them to impose their own code of morality on the

game world. Whether the player chose to be good or evil, these choices affected how

other characters in the game world viewed the player character and even the ultimate

conclusion of the story.

These kinds of moral choices are a traditional method of increasing player immersion in

the story. The player feels his actions and decisions are having a tangible effect on the

game world and the story and naturally the opportunity to role-play the player character

as the player sees fit also greatly increases immersion.

These choices are also one of the biggest problems for storytelling in computer games

due to the limitations of the medium.

2.1. Problems with choices

While storytelling in computer games offers all the challenges faced by storytellers

operating in any medium, it also has its own challenges and pitfalls brought on by the

requirements and limitations of the medium itself.

The most obvious limitation is that all the additional paths and branches created by the

player’s choices require large amounts of additional work from the development team.

Even a small number of choices will soon increase workload exponentially as the team

has to generate assets and story, test new areas of the game and so on.

Figure 1: Even a small number of choices lead to exponential story paths

Ideally significant branching points in the story will lead to discrete story paths. To use

an example a player might choose to investigate the haunted mansion or the pirates’

cove for additional clues. Any choices made in these areas lead to further paths and so

on.

It becomes quickly apparent that catering to all these discrete events and possibilities is

unrealistic. If allowed to branch out again and again these story paths and possibilities

will result in countless variations of the story, which ideally should be accounted for

when the story concludes.

Interplay’s Fallout role-playing games have attempted this, but with the necessary

tradeoff that the story concludes in written form. After the player completes the game

they get text screens which outline the ending and how it affected various factions, non-

player characters and places in the game world. Thus every ending does reflect the

player’s choices and actions, but might not be all that satisfying as an experience.

A more common approach is the so called diamond model. Named after the suit of

playing cards the model visually resembles, the diamond model states that interactive

stories have a common starting point, branch out to various degrees during the story and

then come together for the conclusion.

Figure 2: The diamond model

The immediate problem with the diamond model is that as the story approaches its

climax, players will invariably start to feel like their choices matter less and less. A

good example of this problem was the Mass Effect Trilogy by Bioware. The three part

space epic placed players in the role of Commander Shepard, the last hope of the

universe against an otherworldly menace.

During dozens of hours of gameplay across the three games players made hundreds of

choices. From the very start the publisher promised players that their actions would

affect the trilogy’s ultimate conclusion and how the story played out. Of course this was

not true: the game had a single unified ending. Bioware did try to account for player

choice by reintroducing characters and choices from past games, but largely in

peripheral roles.

As a result players were disappointed and voiced their frustration with great volume.

The earlier two games in the trilogy were well received (at the time of writing, on the

review aggregator site Metacritic.com they have user review averages of 8,7 and 8,9 out

of 10, respectively) whereas the final game in the trilogy was poorly received and was

commonly named as one of the biggest disappointments of 2012. The extreme negative

reaction tarnished the reputation of Bioware, formerly one of the most respected

development teams in the industry.

As problematic as player choice is, it is also becoming something of a requirement in

most game genres. What, then, is the solution?

2.2. New approaches to choices

In his 2011 paper “Structuring Narrative Interaction: What we can learn from Heavy

Rain” Huaxin Wei approaches the problem of implementing choices from a production

standpoint.

He examines the 2010 game Heavy Rain which was at its time of release praised for

offering players significant amounts of choice in how the story played out. Heavy Rain

was remarkable in offering a long and freely branching story told with extremely high

production quality. This, of course, is the nightmare scenario.

In his paper Wei examines the mechanics behind the branching and how the game

disguises its prescribed narrative structure and gives players enough control to just feel

critical to the narrative experience.

While these lessons are not immediately usable for all game designers due to the unique

style of gameplay Heavy Rain offered, they are worth considering. As production

qualities and thus budgets – for both money and time spent – increase, games wishing to

offer significant amounts of player choice will possibly have to look at new ways of

producing content or resorting to offering just the illusion of choice.

The latter is the conclusion reached in a 2012 study which studied the illusion of player

agency (Fendt et al.). The study offered players a simple game which seemed to offer

them large amounts of choices. In reality these choices were largely inconsequential.

Their experience was then compared in a blind test with a control group who

experienced a story where they had more actual effect.

The study found that if left to their own devices, the unchanging story left players

feeling less satisfied than the control story. However, as long as players were given

explicit and immediate feedback following these choices, they came away satisfied and

feeling a larger sense of immersion and player agency.

This was also one of the many methods used by Telltale Games in The Walking Dead to

achieve a great sense of immersion with limited resources.

3. Case study: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is a 2012 game by Telltale Games, a small independent design studio

based in San Francisco. The game was well received by both critics[7] and players[8],

reaching high scores and almost universal praise for the sense of immersion and

investment players felt in the story.

The Walking Dead is based on series of graphic novels by the same name but almost

exclusively features characters and locations designed for the game.

The game was produced on relatively limited resources, but through clever and

innovative use of mechanics and good writing managed to enthrall its players. It also

achieved a level of success which allowed Telltale Games to announce a second

“season” for a later date.

3.1. The interactive story structure of The Walking Dead

Much like the graphic novels it is based on, The Walking Dead tells the story of a group

of human survivors after a civilization ending catastrophe. After most of humanity is

wiped out by zombies, the few scattered survivors must find safety in a world that is

suddenly filled with dangers.

Told from a third person perspective, The Walking Dead has the player control Lee

Everett, a man previously convicted of unspecified crimes and on his way to prison as

the story unfolds. Everett meets various survivors and joins up with them in an effort to

survive. Notably the game also introduces Clementine, a child who has been seemingly

orphaned in the disaster. Lee unofficially adopts the child as his own. The player’s

interactions with Clementine throughout the story were especially praised by many

players and critics alike.

The game itself is a traditional point and click adventure game where the player moves

around game scenes interacting with characters and objects, solving puzzles and

participating in dialogue with other characters.

The story of The Walking Dead is told through five episodes, each consisting of roughly

three to four hours of gameplay. Each episode was released separately, one to two

months after the previous one. This allowed the team to utilize a two-tiered story

structure (Mateas, Stern) where each episode works towards an overarching larger, or

“global”, plot while also standing alone as a self-contained smaller, or “local”, storyline.

Each episode is designed to function like an episode of a TV show. All of them start

with a recap of the previous episode or episodes, highlighting significant choices or

events from them, and each one ends up with a teaser of what is to come in the next

episode.

Player choice within the story is largely limited. Players have no control over the large

overarching story and limited control over each episodic story. Instead, the choices are

largely social. The game places a heavy emphasis on social interaction between both

Everett’s group of survivors and the various characters they meet.

Despite this the game succeeds thanks to a variety of factors.

3.2. Strong writing, good characters

It should go without saying that any successful story, interactive or not, requires good

writing and characters. Despite this, writing and characters are usually among the

weakest elements in any given game, even those claiming to offer strong narrative

experiences.

Characters are often stereotypes, two dimensional cutouts rather than fully fledged

characters, who can without effort be accurately described in a single sentence. And

what’s more, that single sentence could effortlessly apply to a large group of characters

from a wide variety of games.

In contrast The Walking Dead’s writing is possibly the largest single factor to its

success. Writers Sean Vanaman, Gary Whitta and Mark Darin succeed in writing

believable and sympathetic characters the player can relate to. Perhaps this can be

explained by the writers’ pedigrees. Darin is an experienced game writer who has

worked on multiple games for Telltale Games. Whitta is a long time games journalist

who in later years has transitioned to screenwriting in Hollywood. And Vanaman is a

long time games journalist, who has taken an especially critical look at clichés and

weaknesses in game design and writing through his work with the Idle Thumbs website

and audio podcast.

The story introduces sympathetic and antagonistic characters, all with believable

personalities and backstories and very human writing. Combined with good voice acting

this makes it easy for the player to get immersed in the story.

While the game’s story does feature many traditional elements and is at times

predictable, the writers are not afraid of toying with the player’s expectations.

Surprising twists and early deaths for many seemingly significant characters helped

eliminate player expectations and created a heightened sense of danger. Players could

not be sure of anything which made every choice seem more meaningful. When death

or significant change can hide behind even the most seemingly innocent options and

choices, these choices suddenly carry a lot more weight than they normally would.

The writing also manages to keep the characters consistent throughout. While naturally

motivations, personalities and situations change and are sometimes obscured for

storytelling purposes, the characters remain internally consistent throughout. This is

crucial in any interactive story, as inconsistent characters and characters who act against

established personalities and motives can be misinterpreted. Players can incorrectly

perceive poor writing to have storytelling significance where none is intended. (Si, et

al.)

It is also worth noting that while the game deals with supernatural elements, the actual

plots, global or local, focus on the mundane elements. The supernatural acts merely as a

force which drives the characters and is not the focus of the story. Rather the story deals

with everyday problems like finding shelter or food. This gives players a good access

point into the story, because much like the characters, the important events in the game

are something everyone can relate to.

3.3. Better choices through forced role-playing

Many games offer players choices and many have these choices result in more

meaningful changes and effects than The Walking Dead. While it does offer a

significant amount of choice, the actual effects they have on the story are limited. The

global overarching plotline will play out with minor differences despite the player’s

choices and even the local plotlines in given episodes or scenes are for the most part set.

This is all largely compensated for with the way The Walking Dead handles choices.

Because the writers are not afraid of surprising and even shocking plot twists, players

quickly learn to be wary of even the most innocent-seeming choices. The real triumph,

however, is that with a few exceptions all these choices are aggressively timed.

Every time the player has to make a choice from the smallest lines of dialogue to life or

death situations, the choice is accompanied by a rapidly dwindling timer. When the

timer hits zero, the game automatically selects the default option on the player’s behalf.

These choice windows are so small that players rarely have time to consider the

mechanical ramifications of their actions. Instead they quickly learn to role-play their

version of Everett and make choices they feel he would. The writing helps, because

Everett is intentionally left as a blank slate. His past and motivations remain somewhat

up to the player’s interpretation, so they can react from a pure perspective without being

weighed down by their perception of what Everett may have been or done before the

start of the game.

While this may not seem important, the effects are dramatic. In most games players

have the time to carefully weigh out their options and even consider outside information

on the consequences of their choices if they so choose. In The Walking Dead players

largely have to make their choices on the fly, less on intellect and more on intuition.

Whatever consequences and effects these choices then have, they feel more personal

and immediate as a result. The effect is heightened, because The Walking Dead tells a

dark story where many choices have extremely negative outcomes. Even if the player

feels like they’ve played perfectly, the stories can still have negative or even tragic

outcomes which then feel like the player’s fault. “I made that choice and then this

horrible thing happened.”

3.4. Social interactions and small but meaningful choices

The Walking Dead leans heavily on social interactions. The actual puzzles in the games

are fairly simple and more emphasis is based on how the player interacts with the

various characters he meets.

A core mechanic introduced early on is that the game notifies players when a non-player

character has remembered something they have said. As an example, upon meeting a

farmer for the first time the player is asked to describe his relationship with Clementine.

The gamer offers the choice of telling the truth, lying, trying to evade the question or

saying nothing at all. Whatever the player chooses, the non-player character will

remember it and it will possibly have an effect on a future interaction with that

character, even across discrete episodes.

Figure 3: Choices may have long-lasting effects

Additionally, as the story is very dark indeed, as the story progresses many of these

interactions become awkward or even painful. What will the player say or do when

confronted by a man who has just lost his entire family and is lashing out in his pain?

This is a very human situation which everyone is familiar with at least on some level.

Even if we haven’t personally dealt with a similar situation, we understand the pain of

losing a loved one and how we ourselves, or at least other people, would react to it. We

can immediately relate to it and again are forced to subconsciously react to the situation

as we ourselves would. The game does not give the player time to consider what the

most beneficial option to pick is. This immediately makes the choice and its results

seem even more personal.

A common problem with many games is that they try to make the choices too big. Will

you save this planet or that planet? Will you save humanity or doom it? While we can at

intellectually understand these choices at least on some level, they don’t mean anything

to us on an emotional or personal level. They are rendered abstract and any effect they

might have is entirely a byproduct of the game’s production values and cinematics,

whereas in The Walking Dead players are constantly dealing with choices they can

understand all too well from their own experience.

Additionally, since the player constantly feels like they are driving the story, when

something terrible does happen and for instance characters die or leave the story, the

immediate player reaction is that they caused it, even if this is not true. In actuality most

character deaths, entrances and exits are pre-planned, but the game succeeds in hiding

this fact thanks to its excellent writing and by conditioning the player early on to expect

that his choices will have consequences.

3.5. Making the player care

Upon all these foundations is built the game’s best element, Clementine. Lee’s adopted

daughter is quite possibly the best written and acted child character in any video game.

After making the player unconsciously adopt the role of Lee Everett, the game then

places them in charge of a young child’s well-being in a world full of horrors. The

effects are profound.

After the first episode was released, many players reported that without even realizing

what was happening, they had stopped thinking of the game as a game and instead were

only or largely concerned with Clementine’s well-being as this small sample of player

feedback demonstrates.

“I found myself actually taking her presence into account when making decisions and

always checking up on her.”[4]

“I couldn't bring myself to do anything bad if I thought Clementine would see it. When

you're presented with the choice on whether to steal from the car or not, one look over

at Clem sealed it for me. I couldn't do it.”[5]

The game offers players numerous chances to affect Clementine’s personality and

character. At the beginning of the story Clementine is completely unprepared to face the

world in which she must now survive. Episode by episode players see her grow and

adapt to the player’s personality.

Figure 4: Clementine

Additionally, after giving the player the chance to affect Clementine’s personality, the

game places her in jeopardy with the player’s previous choices having a large effect on

how these scenes play out.

As an example, one scene in the game has the player teach Clementine survival

strategies. The player can give her either good or bad advice on what to do in a variety

of situations and even teach her how to shoot a handgun. The game does not force the

player to do any of this and will proceed regardless of how well or poorly they did, but

all these choices will come to play at later points in the story, when someone is in

danger.

If the player taught Clementine well, she may surprise everyone by rescuing someone

from a bad situation. If not, another character may step in and admonish the player for

the poor job they are doing in raising a child.

This is, of course, just the illusion of choice. Because Clementine is such a central

character to the story, her ultimate fate is not something the player can actually affect.

Should Clementine die unexpectedly, the game will end. But again the illusion of

consequence is maintained because the player’s choices affect the local storyline and

this in turn will give the player immediate feedback on their choices in both terms of

game mechanics and on an emotional level.

3.6. Don’t abstract the horror

As everyone can imagine, a world full of zombies is a nasty place indeed, full of all

kinds of horrors. Survival in such a world will require people to do unthinkable things.

This is nothing new for people who have experienced even one story set in such a

setting and in fact such things have become mundane to experienced audiences.

The Walking Dead succeeds in heightening the sense of horror through a strong sense of

player agency. Whenever Lee Everett is called upon to do something horrible, whether

that be bashing in a zombie’s head with a rock or chopping off a man’s infected leg with

an axe before he succumbs to his illness, the game does not abstract the horror.

Figure 5: The player has to face the consequences of his actions, whatever they are.

In a passive form of storytelling the audience would naturally be just a passive

spectator, watching as someone else is confronted with a horrible situation. This would

be the case even in many forms of interactive storytelling, where such scenes would be

depicted as movies or paragraphs of text.

In The Walking Dead all such scenes are interactive. In an early scene Lee Everett is set

upon by a zombie. The game prompts the player to back away by pressing a movement

key, while at the same time trying to position the cursor over the zombie to kick it away.

The scene is depicted as sensory overload with strong visuals and disorienting and

overwhelming audio.

After the player has survived for a while he has the chance to turn the tables on the

zombie and attack it with a weapon, again by positioning the cursor over the zombie’s

head and pressing a button to attack. Each hit has horrific visual and aural effects as

bones crack under the assault.

By making the player personally responsible for the execution of these horrific tasks the

game again heightens immersion. Because the player is already firmly in the role of Lee

Everett, the horrors feel so much more real to him, even if mechanically they are simple

quick time events or mini games.

In a brilliant move Telltale also play with the player’s expectations in these scenes. In

the aforementioned zombie struggle the game does not prompt the player to stop

attacking or alert him to the fact that his assailant has been subdued. Instead the player

can keep attacking for as long as he wishes or feels like he has to.

Player feedback revealed that many players were so startled by the tense scene that they

kept attacking the zombie’s lifeless body over and over again for a long time after it was

already dead, before finally realizing they could stop. The results of deep player

immersion were in full effect.

4. Conclusions

“I sat stunned in my seat”.

“I had to sit there for a moment, just staring at my screen, trying to gather up the

strength to continue”.

“No game has made me feel this way.”

“Just finished the game and I'm sitting here crying my eyes out.”

The Walking Dead is a triumph in player immersion and it is remarkable that it achieves

this feat while relying almost entirely on the illusion of choice. As the above player

reactions to various story points in the game illustrate, players are well and truly

immersed in the storyline. This is further illustrated by observing player reactions to the

game. They are consist largely of players describing their actions and choices

throughout the story through storytelling terms and talking about their feelings and

emotions during various points of the story, rather than commenting on mechanics or

gameplay elements. This shows a high degree of investment in the story.

Analysis of the game’s plot reveals that actual player choice is severely limited. The

player cannot affect the global plot at all and has limited effect on local plotlines. The

game works despite this, because it offers immersive illusion of choice. That is, each

player comes away feeling like they made a difference. Players feel like they

experienced their own The Walking Dead story, which felt personal and emotional.

One of the game’s designers commented that the development team was thrilled by the

tone of discussion surrounding the game. “It's mostly just thrilling to see people taking

the narrative content of a game with such strong suspension of disbelief and

conviction”[6]

While The Walking Dead is unique and attempting to outright copy its formula would

probably result in a less successful outcome, the game does have a lot to offer both for

players and game designers. Telltale Games were able to take a simple game running on

an old engine and created with limited resources and achieve remarkable results. They

did it by understanding the limitations and possibilities they were facing and making a

remarkable number of right decisions.

Ultimately the game succeeds because all the systems and mechanics in place are

designed to make the player feel invested and responsible for the story. By making the

player focus on the moment to moment choices and decisions, the game succeeds in

abstracting the global storyline enough so it doesn’t matter much when the player has

limited effect on it. When complemented with high quality writing and voice acting, the

result is a thoroughly captivating experience in interactive storytelling.

The Walking Dead teaches us a simple but important lesson: in a time when everything

is getting bigger, focusing on details can produce remarkable results.

5. References

Fendt, Harrison, Ware, Cardona-Rivera, Roberts, “Achieving the Illusion of Agency”;

ICIDS 2012, pp. 114-125

Wei, “Structuring Narrative Interaction: What we can learn from Heavy Rain”; ICIDS

2011, pp. 338 – 341

Si, Marsella, Pynadath, “Importance of Well-Motivated Characters in Interactive

Narratives: An Empirical Evaluation”; ICIDS 2010, pp. 16 - 25

Mateas, Stern: “Writing Façade: A case study in procedural authorship.”; Second

Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, pp. 183–207. MIT

Press, Cambridge (2007)

[4]

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3480887&perpage=40&p

agenumber=10#post403256404 , retrieved 12.12.2012.

[5]

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3480887&perpage=40&p

agenumber=20#post405156155 , retrieved 12.12.2012

[6]

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3480887&userid=49699&

perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post409909969 , retrieved 12.12.2012

[7] Navarro: “Review: The Walking Dead”; http://www.giantbomb.com/the-walking-

dead/61-34205/reviews/ , retrieved 12.12.2012

[8] User reviews for The Walking Dead on Metacritic.com,

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-walking-dead-episode-5---no-time-left ,

retrieved 12.12.2012