Abstract

Since the release of The Walking Dead in 2012, the "Telltale Model" of interactive narrative has attracted a lot of criticism for providing choices that 'don't matter'. This paper is a response to this discussion taking place both in academia and popular games culture. While Telltale's choices indeed 'don't matter' this overlooks the ways in which they actually function. The Telltale Model works in a way that is analogous to the philosophical thought experiment. It presents a sequential series of moral dilemmas that all communicate a common theme. The penultimate choice in The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 5: No Going Back (2013) performs as a final lesson - testing the player to see if they have properly internalised the themes of the series. It then responds not to the accumulated memory of their choices, but to how they respond to the final 'test' that bookends the series’ many ethical dilemmas. Telltale's choices may not have any long-term consequences, but they do serve an informative pedagogical function - just don't expect Kenny to ever "remember that".

Highlights

  • The ELIZA effect is a term coined by Noah Wardrip-Fruin in Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games and Software Studies (2009)

  • The ELIZA effect is central to the operation of The Telltale model

  • Once consequences are removed from the equation, the choices within the Telltale model can still provide some level of reflection for the chooser; they are limited in their expression as the player knows that it can only comment on the player’s short term behaviour, rather than developing a holistic response to the player’s behaviour as a whole

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Summary

ANTRANIG AREK SARIAN

This quote was produced in a 2014 discussion article hosted on the pop-culture website The A.V Club as a tentative defence against the claim that choices in games produced by the prominent game development company Telltale Games “don’t matter” (Gerardi 2014).The Telltale ‘model’ has gained notoriety since the original publication of The Walking Dead: Season 1 (2012) for its novel approach to interactive storytelling—with each episode opening with the phrase: “This game series adapts to the choices you make. The ELIZA effect is a term coined by Noah Wardrip-Fruin in Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games and Software Studies (2009). It was named after an early natural language computer program named ELIZA which could maintain conversations by taking whatever a user inputted and repeating it back to them as a question. Alex Mitchell in his paper “Reflective rereading and the SimCity effect in interactive stories” (2015) argues that the Telltale model embodies the “ELIZA effect”, stating that the game implies “a complex system underlying the game, a belief that initially encouraged rereading to explore different endings. The game is testing the player—trying to see if they have internalised the implied logic of the game’s many choices

The Telltale Model
The Thought Experiment
The Theme of Survival
Do you Shoot Kenny?
Conclusion
Games Cited

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