Games+Learning+Society 10 Conference

Start with the guts, go for the head: A Well-Played paper on The Walking Dead
Kenneth Rosenberg

This paper is meant to serve as a close reading of the dialog system in The Walking Dead (2012). Specifically, it explains how the developers grafted principles of good learning onto the ethical dilemmas written into the game’s narrative. By reviewing the literature on games and learning, media enjoyment, and moral judgment, it is shown that the game’s dialog system fosters reflective awareness of moral agency. The mechanics of the dialog system rely on moral intuitions for quick choices, but the branching-path narrative and episodic design encourage reflection and development of moral reasoning skills. This is explicated further in a series of examples. Then, this learning is analyzed in relation to more traditional teaching goals. The paper concludes with suggestions for future games in this vein, as well as applications for society.