In both real life and video games, people seem to feel like they have control of the direction they go. Unfortunately there is no controlling it. Whatever your fate is will happen just because of the person you are.  While playing the video game the walking dead, I played as the main character named Lee who was trying to protect himself and a little girl named Clem through a zombie apocalypse and experienced this exact concept.  Throughout the game we travel from place to place trying to survive and ultimately find Clem’s parents.  On this journey we end up meeting new people that either serve as an obstacle or help in our efforts.  Walking Dead the video game uses the concept of decision making, characterization, and alternate outcomes to show the concept of free will and fate.  As you play the game you are able to make choices that will affect what happens throughout the game but for everyone that plays it they all have the same end result.  To determine this you must know what the concept of free will is according to dictionary.apa.org free will is “The power or capacity of a human being for self-direction. The function of the will is to be inclined or disposed toward an idea or action. The concept of free will thus suggests that inclinations, dispositions, thoughts, and actions are not determined entirely by forces over which people have no independent directing influence…”(American Psychological Association) In more simple terms free will is the idea that we are able to control our own lives and that we have the ability to make our own decisions not based on any other factors.  The almost sad reality about this concept is that most psychologists believe it isn’t true at all, they think that every decision is based on genetics and the series of events that lead up to whatever point you are at where you have to make a decision.  In The Walking Dead we can see many examples of this concept because we can control some parts and based on those decisions the game decides where it goes from there.

There are many instances where we must decide what to say or what to do so I will only be focusing on a couple of the big ones.  First of all I will be focusing on the end of episode 1 when you have to decide between saving Carley or Doug.  In this scene when the dead grab a hold of both of these characters you have to decide who to save.  In my case I chose to save Doug which I thought was a good idea for Lee’s sake but looking back on it I think it ultimately didn’t matter because no matter who I saved they would both end up dying soon after.  This example shows how there is a lack of free will not just in the game but in real life.  The game shows how depending on each character’s traits their fate is already determined, in Carley and Doug’s case their fate has them dying early in the apocalypse and no matter what decisions they make or decisions you make playing as Lee their fate can’t be changed.

Another similar instance is when you decide whether to save Ben towards the end of the game or let him fall into the stairwell of the dead.  Similar to the last situation if you decide to save Ben then he will still end up dying the next episode.  What is interesting about this decision is that everyone in our class decided to choose the same decision which was to save Ben.  This goes to show that as the player we don’t have free will and it is amazing how every student no matter how different we all are we all still came to make the same decision to save someone in a game where there are no real world consequences.

Finally I want to look at Lee and Clem’s story as a whole.  We start off the game with Lee in the back of a cop car and learn that he is getting arrested for murder.  Soon after the car crashes and we go to a house and meet Clem where she is hiding in a treehouse, this first interaction between the two we learn a lot about both of them.  We learn that Lee is not just a murderer and is a caring person due to the fact that he is willing to help a little girl find her parents in the middle of the chaos that is going on in the world.  We also learn that Clem is a girl that is both intelligent and brave for a little girl but she needs the help from Lee to survive.  As we move on through the story we see how close the two characters get and it starts to show how caring of a character Lee is.  A great representation of this is when he gets into a fight with Kenny and he says “A man isn’t bad…a man just is, all we can do is take care of who we can and keep moving forward” (e.3) This realization that Lee has made carries with him throughout the game and all the way to the end.  When looking at the final scene of the game it is easy to see how fate and the lack of free will have taken place throughout the game.  Because of the relationship between Lee and Clem there was no other ending that was possible when Clem was in trouble. Lee was going to save her because of who Lee was at that point based off of all of the events that led him there in his life.  In this moment we see Lee as a man that just is, just as he mentioned to Kenny earlier, but if it wasn’t for the actions from his past even the ones as a bad man he may not have sacrificed himself for Clem or even been in the position to do so.

All in all through the experience of characters and decision making in The Walking Dead we could see how the concept of free will isn’t much of an obtainable thing and fate has a greater control than anything in most people’s lives.  This is an important thing to learn because once you do you start to become much more forgiving of people who have bad historys.  Through Lee’s character we can experience this for ourselves, that is why as the player we are so easily able to forgive Lee for being a murderer.  Not only do we see how we forgive him but we see how other characters in the game do.  As we learn who he is early on in the story we also have a small idea of what his fate is, which accurately led to the game ending off with him saving Clem.