By the end of The Walking Dead game, I was really starting to wonder what choices of mine actually had any effect on the world at all. No matter what anyone selects, Lee still gets bitten and, even when consent for his arm to be chopped off it made, the disease still spreads rapidly and he dies. Frankly, this really, really annoyed me, because I felt like it was all a little pointless . . . but the kotaku article by Kirk Hamilton sort of made me feel better. He points out that, although the game does carry us to a certain point, our perception of Lee and every character in the game does depend on our decisions. That got me to thinking about something else, too: maybe it isn't just our perceptions of Lee and in game characters that change over the course of our journey, but perhaps also our perceptions of ourselves.
In his article, Galloway talks about diagetic/non-diagetic elements to a story. It's apparent that everything Lee does is a diagetic action. It happens in the game, with characters both instigating and receiving the action. Even if we sometimes choose what that action is, the event is still diagetic.
But what about the process of choosing what action to determine? Isn't that non-diagetic? The choice of what to say or what actions to take occur in our own brains, for whatever time we have to choose. This time isn't very long, though, so something striking must be picked right away--usually whatever stands out to us. Doesn't that show something about our morals as individuals?
Although The Walking Dead is a character study, is it possibly a human analysis, as well?
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