#Walking dead game online play series

Players must navigate through a series of ethically ambiguous scenarios, often with unpredictable consequences, involving characters who are far from black and white and whose own moral leanings unfold over the course of the player’s interactions with them. Borrowing extensively from both graphic novel and cinema conventions in its narrative structure and representations, gameplay is based around the point-and click style of adventure games, with an emphasis on verbal interactions and moments of crisis in which the player must make consequential and often split-second decisions, sometimes dictating the fate of other characters. Gameplay in TWD is driven by the increasingly vexing moral (and mortal) dilemmas of Lee Everett, survivor of a zombie epidemic, as he travels through Georgia with Clementine, the young girl he is tasked with caring for, and a small group of survivors. This paper reports on microethnographic research of players’ game-based interactions and decisions, involving Telltale’s The Walking Dead (Telltale, 2012 henceforth, TWD) and our subsequent discussions with them. Keywords: microethnography adventure games avatars identification zombies The Walking Dead The utility of this schema is illustrated through in-depth analysis of one specific instance in participants’ play. We offer a provisional schema which accounts for the variety of “attractors” informing these dynamic engagements: simulated, relating to the gameworld lived, relating to participants’ real world experiences and orientations conventional, relating to participants’ prior engagements with other related media and situated, relating to the localized and embodied settings of play. Eschewing perspectives that view the player/game avatar relationship as an exchange between two fixed and stable entities, we draw from microethnographic explorations of participants’ playing and commenting on The Walking Dead (Telltale, 2012), to illustrate the ways in which their relationship to Lee shifts from moment to moment. The Walking Dead video game offers a compelling site in which to explore whether, how, and through what processes players form associations with the game’s playable character, Lee Everett. Me and Lee: Identification and the Play of Attraction in The Walking Dead by Nicholas Taylor, Chris Kampe, Kristina Bell Abstract: Her work uses critical and interpretive methods to explore issues of gender and race in digital media and pop culture. Qubein School of Communication and a Ph.D student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. Kristina Bell is an Instructor of Communication in the Nido R.

His research falls within Games Studies, with attention to: the use of games as pedagogical tools or as a medium to discuss serious issues the role of interface in participant experience of digital spaces lastly, how games are changing the ways we tell and engage with stories. He is co-founder of Circuit Studio, a collaborative maker space at NC State.Ĭhris Kampe is a PhD student of the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media Program at North Carolina State University. His work applies critical, feminist and socio-technical perspectives to experimental and mixed-methods research with digital gaming communities. Nicholas Taylor is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University.

Walking dead game online play