![]() She is also capable of showing cold fury and vengeance when the vagaries of frontier justice demand it.Ĭlementine then represents a fascinating subversion of gaming expectations. Clementine, with our guidance, is empowered to turn the other cheek and offer endless patience. She may be kind, compassionate and fundamentally naïve but she also has a backbone of iron. She is the conscience of the survivors, but one forged in suffering and battle. She is uniquely capable of offering a perspective that is free of challenge or confrontation. It is her influence which is most consistent, most compassionate, and most coercive. She is never in charge, but always sufficiently close to those that are to steer and shepherd them towards doing what is best. In an inversion of traditional expectation, those that should be responsible for her care turn to her for guidance. Within season two she grows to take on a leader’s role – surrounded by grown-ups and alpha personalities, she retains her central importance as the keeper of the community spirit. She survives not because she is a cold killer, but because she still retains the compassion and the hope to see the best of the people she encounters. We don’t equip her with a vast library of survival skills, but instead a kind of fatalistic self-confidence in her own moral compass and wisdom. By the time season one ends, she has the confidence to strike out on her own. Our guardianship of Clementine is destined to be brief, but the relationship we build with her is seminal to her development. No other morality system in gaming is quite so effective in making the player feel genuinely regretful for the spontaneous harm they may have inflicted. When we tell a lie, demonstrate distrust, or allow the darker side of our nature to reveal itself we are constantly aware that we are shaping Clementine’s view of how one survives in the apocalypse. In this, we are guided by perhaps the most chillingly effective piece of game feedback in all of history, the occasional admonishment that ‘Clementine will remember that’. ![]() As temporary stewards of Clementine our key contribution in the first game is to allow her become the person she needs to be – the one that can shoulder the almost oppressive weight of adult responsibility that becomes her burden within the second season of the franchise. We know that Clementine will need to go on without us at some point. Our role, implicitly communicated, is to help her develop these talents and trust in herself because nobody survives for long in this dark world. She is shy and yet possessed of a keen coolness of perception and insight of situation that puts her at odds with the arbitrary and often angry attitudes of the people around her. We are shown her in all her complex nuance - sweet, compassionate, innocent, and yet reluctantly aware of how terrible the world around her is. When she breaks, we break with her.Īnd yet, Clementine is not presented simply as a weak point in our emotional armor. And yet she does and in the process communicates much of importance about ourselves – of the value of compassion, and our natural impulse to shelter that which is fragile. Clementine, as a character, should not work at all. ![]() The imposition of pseudo-parental responsibility is not a game design convention that has traditionally demonstrated much effectiveness. Children too are rarely well characterized in games, and often-times seem a design indulgence attempting to artificially spark feelings of protectiveness but failing. It is perhaps surprising that Clementine should be such an emotionally effective character - the game is largely one long escort mission, and bitter experience with video games has taught us that our charges are sources of frustration, not affection. ![]() At the core, it’s about a young girl and her relationship to a terrible world doing its best to break her. At the core it’s about innocence denied and yet retained in the face of grotesquery and violence. Yet at the core, it’s a touching and emotionally resonant story about redemption and humanity in the face of tragedy. It’s a pitch-black story full of woe, heartbreak, death, pain and loss. The Walking Dead (Telltales Games, 2012) is a gritty, harrowing adventure game set in the grim, unforgiving darkness of a zombie apocalypse. A couple of months ago, I withdrew my participation in the project due to irreconcilable differences with regards to the ethics of their editorial policy So here it is, for those that may be interested: I was asked to write an essay on Clementine for the a forthcoming book on the '100 greatest video game characters'. ![]()
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