We Both Know

Telltale: Keeping adventure games alive since 2004.

I've recently finished the Walking Dead video game, and I have high hopes that it indicates a turning point for the adventure genre: moving away from the irritating "combine inventory object A with B and then rub it on stationary environmental object C" style of puzzles, and toward a more straightforward form of interactive storytelling where rather than trying to present the player with challenges to overcome by skill, the player is expected to participate in a dramatic story, making the hard choices that define the very meaning of the narrative.

Spoilers ahead: The moment that I have in mind was a timed decision in Episode 4, that, thanks to a bit of lead-up, the player has about 1 minute to make: whether to allow a high school student named Ben to fall from the highest floor of a bell tower to the ground below, or haul him back up to safety. Context being everything, it's important to note that when Ben finds himself precariously dangling from this particular ledge, there's also a growing zombie herd making their way up the stairs nearby, and the rest of the group is evacuating through the window.

Barely hanging on, Ben asks that the player let him fall and run, rather than waste time rescuing him. Much more importantly: the zombie herd has only arrived – putting everyone in danger – as a consequence of Ben ineptly removing a hatchet that was being used to bar a door (Ben needed the hatchet to hack through a padlock elsewhere, and apparently did not bother to observe the active zombie horde before taking it). This is the most recent in a string of actions that Ben has taken that put every member of the group in immediate mortal danger.

Previously, Ben's largest crime has been stealing the group's medical supplies to trade to marauding bandits as part of a protection racket – all without discussing doing so with the group (in fact, actively hiding his actions when questioned), and ignoring the fact that supplies at the time were already stretched too thin for this to be viable. This ultimately led to a bandit attack when Lee unknowingly intercepts one of the deliveries, which in turn drew a zombie horde and resulted in the fatal infection of one of the group members, the murder of another, the suicide of a third, and the loss of the group's only available safe house.

I can argue for rescuing Ben on the same universal grounds I might argue for anyone: he's another pair of hands to have around; I would want to be rescued in his position, and it is important to set a precedent; he is well-meaning and might take this as an opportunity to correct his behaviour. But I can also simply point to his track record of constant cowardice, uselessness, stupidity, dishonesty, and lethality to justify leaving him to die.