Coming into this semester I had a fair amount of experience playing video games but I never sat down and thought about what makes them so great.  After playing the games we played in class this semester like The Walking Dead, Bioshock, Chrono Trigger, and many more I got to really think about how good video games can tell a story and teach us real life lessons.  What was even better than this was hearing what the rest of the class took out of playing the games and discussing topics that really made us think about what the games were teaching us and how they apply to real life.  A question that many people were forced to ask themselves in the beginning of this semester was does video games fit into common literature?  At first I didn’t really have a full answer to this question but now the answer seems much more clear.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.  When it doesn’t fit in it is usually more like a painting, it is something you experience and make you feel a certain way but doesn’t really teach you much.  When it does it is in my opinion much better than any book or movie, this is because when you are playing a game you are given much more control of what happens inside of it which really amplifies what the creators are trying to get across.  I am looking forward to what I can learn from video games in the future whether it is revisiting games I played before or new ones that i find in the future.

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.

Bioshock Infinite was probably the most confusing game I have ever played because when playing it you are constantly moving between both different times and different universes.  I could see why some people may be attracted to this type of game but for me it was just too complicated.  To me the most important time and place was when Dewitt/Comstock either decided to either accept the baptism or not.  This is significant because it resembles both the start and end of the plot.  The plot starts there because the version of Comstock is formed because he is the version that decided to find a way and forgive himself.  The version of Dewitt is formed because of him deciding that the baptism did not matter and he would go on to feeling shame.  This is also sort of the end of the plot because all of the Elizabeths from different timelines come back and kill Comstock at the baptism.  This is why the game seems like a paradox because while we see all of these things happen like bouncing around from different dimensions there is only one reality that we actually experience.

For me Bioshock was a very mediocre game. I definitely appreciate it as a piece of art but I would not say I would willingly play the sequels.  I did not enjoy most of the beginning of the game because I felt like I was doing a bunch of pointless work and I just wanted to get to the parts that were more important to the story.  This is probably because I am a fan of when games like this have more cut scenes and are movie like.  At the same time throughout most of this beginning part of the game all the way to the end I thought that visually it was amazing because of how beautiful the scenery is which is due to the fact that Andrew Ryan, the creator of this underwater city Rapture I was in,  valued art a lot when creating this “utopia” which eventually faces a massive downfall.  On the other side of its visuals the creators of the game did a great job of showing Rapture’s downfall through the grusom enemies you are faced to fight and all of the objects being obviously dated.  Even though I felt that the beginning and middle of the game was dragged out, there were two main elements that were crucial to the story’s plot, fighting the big daddys to get the little sisters and the tapes.  The big daddys were the hardest enemy to fight but using the turrets and finding new weapons and abilities made it easier as the game went on.  As for the little sisters I decided to save all of them because I knew it would have paid off in the long run and it definitely did.  As for the tapes they were important because it allowed me to figure out what was going on.  After I played most of the game I finally got to see Andrew Ryan and before killing him I was surprised to find out what exactly was going on and that I was actually being controlled the whole time it was then revealed to me that Atlas the person I was following orders from the whole time actually was Fontaine who was using me to defeat Andrew Ryan the whole time.  Not only was he controlling me, he genetically engineered me from a 1 year old to a 19 year old and caused the crash that brought me to Rapture in the first place.  After this with the help from the little sisters I was able to almost turn into a big daddy and fight Fontaine myself.  I was able to weaken Fontaine by taking the adam out of him but he still came close to defeating me, right before I was almost killed the little sisters came to the rescue and sucked the rest of the adam out of him.  At this point Fontaine was defeated and the game shows that me and the little sisters go off to live a normal happy life in the free world.  The question that this game left me asking myself was what if I didn’t spare the little sisters and decided to harvest their adam for myself?  This is exactly how this game shows that looking out for others is always the right choice in the end.

      The Walking Dead was a great game overall and it used a lot of unique techniques to tell its story.  What caught me by surprise was the advanced use of decision making throughout the game.  In most games that tell a story based on decisions the player chooses you will find that the decisions you make will only have a temporary impact but not with The Walking Dead.  In this game every decision you make will have an impact later down the line making the game a different experience for anyone who plays it.  For example there is a scene in episode one where the two characters Doug and Carley are both getting attacked by walkers and only one could be saved.  I could have chosen either of them but I chose Doug because Carley had a gun and I figured she could just shoot it but to my surprise Carley still ended up getting eaten alive.  This was the first moment when I realized how important my decisions were and there were going to be some that really are not easy to make.  Thankfully my decision paid off because Doug ended up helping in a lot of ways like making a security system to protect the motor lodge, using his laser pointer to save the group from the dairy farm, and most of all saving Ben from getting shot by jumping in front of the bullet Lilly shot at him.

       What I found had the largest effect on the route of the game were decisions I made when dealing with other people.  You can see as you get further in the game how different non-player characters react to different things in different ways and it is important to understand what these character’s personalities and values are and who is most important to you while trying to complete the game.  In Katherine Ibister’s book “How Games Move Us Emotion by Design” she says “In a film, the viewer learns about the protagonist through his or her interactions with other people in the narrative world of the film” This is very similar to how we learn about the main character Lee in this game.  We start out only knowing he is in the back of a cop car and through his conversations we figure out both what exactly he did and that despite being a criminal he was still a caring guy.

   To end off this story we are stuck looking for the character that Lee got closest to, which is Clementine. Even though the crew is supposed to be leaving on the boat Kenny and Ben agree to help which also never would have happened if I didn’t help both of them in the past and got them to like Lee.  Sadly the both of them end up dying shortly after and Lee is left on his own which was disappointing because Kenny’s death just seemed pointless.  Once Lee finally finds Clem we really get to see how her character developed thanks to Lee.  I was happy to see Clem save Lee when it has usually been the other way around.  When they escaped it felt like the game was going to have a happy ending but suddenly despite amputating his arm Lee’s walker bite catches up to him and he can’t go any further.  As Lee dies on the floor I mostly felt like Clem was doomed on her own but thankfully for the relationship she built with Lee and how much she has grown, there is still hope for Clem’s future.

        In the video game and story What Remains of Edith Finch we are taken through the stories of life and mostly tragic deaths that took place in the Finch family and the house the many generations shared.  Some of these tragic deaths included food poisoning, drowning, suicied, and even a slide breaking.  What I think was the most interesting story was Barbra the washed up child star who was known for her scream.  The first thing that interested me was when we first see her room and Edith mentions how she was the one most asked about when she mentions her family to anyone that is who they ask about.  It interested me to see how in this world the story takes place in the family has relevance to pop culture and people outside of the family know Barbra’s story and not all the others.  This ties into the biggest detail to me which is the fact that Barbra’s story is told through the view of someone that is not in the family through a comic book.  The author of the comic book tells the story of Barbra’s death through a story that is meant to entertain people so it isn’t exactly what happened but is also similar to what actually happened.  This detail leaves us wondering who killed Barbra or what actually happened that night. 

         If you are like me and you like to learn more about video games seperate from what you learn while playing the game Matthew Robert Patrick’s Youtube channel “The Game Theorists” is definitely something you should check out.  Matthew Robert Patrick also known as MatPat started his channel in 2010 and since then he has gained over 14 million subscribers.  The reason he was able to become so popular could be for many different reasons including his unique commentary style, mesmerizing graphics, thorough research, or out of this world theories that seem like only he can think of.  All of these things are what make his videos worth watching to anyone that enjoys playing video games.  Something unique about MatPat’s Game Theorist videos is how much you can learn about both the game and real life.  In his Game Theory about the end in Minecraft MatPat goes in depth about his theory about how the ender dragon got there and what exactly the story is behind the end.  Part of this theory he said that there used to be many dragons but they mostly went extinct and he tells his viewers “Larger animals have less offspring than smaller ones which makes them much more likely to go extinct”  These types of small facts can be found in all Game Theory videos and for every one of these little facts about life you will also find facts about the game he is referencing.  On top of these facts MatPat really captures his viewers with his high energy and jokes that reference different parts about whatever game he is analyzing which is why I can even enjoy videos about games i’ve never played before.  Finally I think something that needs to be addressed is how impressive the amount of work that is put into each video is.  It feels like there are new images popping up every 3 seconds throughout the videos and the same goes for the facts he researches and the jokes he comes up with.  I truly think that MatPat is more dedicated to his videos than any other big Youtubers that is why he fully deserves everyone of his 14 plus million viewers.