Yes, it's the section you mentioned, not the full third post.
The same trajectory? That's much the point in what's written there. I argue that she hasn't exited the first game on the same trajectory with every player because her lessons and experiences have been unique in every playthrough, presenting different possibilites as to how she might next evolve and into what. Also, the loss of her surrogate father marks a critical point of transition for her where the time and set of experiences immediately following will test her considerably for the first time and have her develop and relatively solidify her views and personality and advance her arc to a noticeable degree until it plateaus by the time she's 11, which is where we've now taken up her story once more. I simply do not recognise who the girl is anymore save in the way I define her for myself.
Because the circumstances and possible results of change are many, and because those changes are expected to accelerate after she loses Lee, that intermediate stage is a crucial, shaping one that leaves me unable to start off or identify where we are now as if she has just emerged from a logical, pre-set path from Season I. The game tries to accommodate by having you plug in for yourself the character you think she has become, with the game unable to have Clementine explain this in the context of a past of which we barely know (or in the context of Lee's influence), and the result to me is rather abruptly forced and unengaging.
Why is it crucial her thoughts and actions (those that convey a certain conviction at any rate) should be independent of our direct dictation? Simply because it shatters her individuality and renders her evolution frustratingly artificial and unsatisfying. Riadon I think said it best in a few sentences:
I'll add to those reasons and say that despite his death, I still see my role in this game as that of Lee, and not Clementine's. In fact, my motivation of concern for Clementine largely exists because Lee vicariously bound me to his own motives. (Notice, incidentally, how even my relatively blank-slate protagonist Lee whom I approached with the full intention of making my avatar was able to draw me in to his own goals, cares, and purpose, whereas Clem, a protagonist in whom I was hoping to realise a strong, cohesive NPC component as I played her, cannot even do what that fully protagonist Lee could; I have to define her emotional drives for her, such as any interest to locate Christa.)
My motive for following through with Clementine's story is that I see her story as in fact still being Lee's, which has a post-mortem continuation of its own that will reach its conclusion once his pedagogical role is either vindicated or condemned in the course of Clementine's story. After all, when she reminisces about him, I am meant to feel she is talking about me. I wish to see the role my mark on her plays in how she independently acts and thinks and copes as well as how she comes to respond to and ultimately regard what I have taught her, and that goes beyond seeing her able to shoot a gun. Clementine may be the protagonist, but I would like to approach her as I play not as somebody with whom I mind-meld, but as somebody to whom as a player I can still react and towards whom I can direct my feelings as if she were her own person. If that is even possible in the context of her being assigned a protagonist role is an issue of discussion on its own, and a difficult one pertaining to game design and mechanics as well as writing I would think.
That being said, I agree with your point about the fear of losing control and the tension it presents. The control I've in mind however is not direct control. It is the exertion of influence, what we exercised in Season I in respect to Clementine's mind, and influence is a two-party affair where the person I work to influence reacts accordingly, with her reaction in turn being a source of anticipation and suspense for me. Direct control wrests me of the independent object of my focus and implies reacting to one's own behaviour and can at best have me indulge in a forced satisfaction akin to one engaging his own fan fiction. That's the issue for me, but I'm with you that having my influence ultimately fail could prove to be quite satisfyingly tragic and cathartic. Aside from Lee's imprint, I would like to exercise an influence, no doubt, even manipulate the course of events to have her tested in various ways, but the right mechanics for that are tricky to figure out if the aim is both to preserve Clementine's individuality and grant us agency in the game. It's a tricky son of a bitch, that one, I'll grant you.
As Maxwell says, the issue seems set up in a binary way vis a vis survival because the time skip has rendered her character arc seemingly co… moremplete.
How has the time skip rendered her character arc complete? It seems to me like she's still continuing on the same trajectory she was headed in at the end of Season 1. I mean yeah, she's certainly more capable now, but it's not like she’s a fully matured adult, ready to take on anything and everything the apocalypse throws at her. She still has plenty of growing left to do.
It's just a matter of whether inevitable plot events lead her to snap, with both her actions and her thinking during the course leading up to that being dictated to her by our direct intervention, not as responsive reactions, but as applications of whatever we have decided to craft of her as our avatar.
Why is it so crucial that her thoughts and actions leading up to a mental breakdown fall outside of our i… [view original content]
Okay, I think I get what you mean. The game is trying to get you to fill in the blanks of Clem's recent past yourself based on what your Lee has taught her and what you imagine her going through. But having to craft even a rough outline of a 16-month period of character development puts a lot of demand on the player, especially since that crafting has to be done while the game progresses. The approach doesn't work for everyone and the result can be fairly jarring.
However, there was a similar sort of thing going on with Lee, wasn't there? The game gave you a basic description of his character as a starting point but left much of his recent past ambiguous, including the motives and details behind the crime he committed. To turn him from a foreign entity into a coherent character with whom you could identify, you had to fill in different aspects of his history and personality as you went along.
The difference here, I suppose, is that for the Season 1 protagonist to "work," players had to define Lee in such a way as to be able to identify with or at least empathize with him. In Season 2, players had to do this while also bridging the gap between Clementine's S1 and S2 personalities. This requires a lot more finesse from both the game and the player and it may simply take more time for things to click into place this time around.
You say that Clem’s evolution is "artificial" and I would agree in the sense that it is something that we as players build for ourselves. But to me, the change from S1 Clem to S2 Clem doesn't feel forced or feel as though it were completely manufactured from nothing. So far, I think the game has done a fairly good job of providing us with choices that reflect a natural progression from different versions S1 Clementine to different versions of S2 Clementine. For every exchange I've encountered so far, I could point to at least one of the options and say "That's what my Clem would have done/said." That's enough for me.
All of this isn't to say that I don't have my own gripes and concerns about Clementine's progression as the protagonist, of course. The game's primary shortcoming, I think, is in Clem's lack of a clearly defined, long-term external goal, something you alluded to in your post. With Lee, even if you couldn't identify with any other aspect of his personality, so long as you could could share in his drive to protect Clementine, you could empathize with him.
The equivalent motivation for Clem this season, I think, is supposed to be a desire to find a group of people whom she can trust. But this is a fairly abstract goal compared to Lee's "I have to protect Clementine" because there isn't any particular person who seems essential to that goal. The game gives us the freedom to say "I need to find Christa" or "I'm sticking with Luke and the Cabin group" or "I want to stay with Kenny" but none of those people feel absolutely essential to Clem's goal the way that Clementine felt absolutely essential to Lee's goal. As a result, her character seems lost and unmotivated. While that may be an intentional design choice to reflect her psychology at the current time, it does cause the player to be less engaged in her story this season.
Yes, it's the section you mentioned, not the full third post.
The same trajectory? That's much the point in what's written there. I arg… moreue that she hasn't exited the first game on the same trajectory with every player because her lessons and experiences have been unique in every playthrough, presenting different possibilites as to how she might next evolve and into what. Also, the loss of her surrogate father marks a critical point of transition for her where the time and set of experiences immediately following will test her considerably for the first time and have her develop and relatively solidify her views and personality and advance her arc to a noticeable degree until it plateaus by the time she's 11, which is where we've now taken up her story once more. I simply do not recognise who the girl is anymore save in the way I define her for myself.
Because the circumstances and possible results of change are many, and because thos… [view original content]
A good post, and I appreciate the effort in trying to summarise the positions of another.
Jarring? Yes. How jarring I think depends on the level to which a player places value on continuity especially.
There was a similar thing going on with Lee, yes, but Lee was a newly introduced character with no past we could relate to by way of our own direct experience as players, whereas Clem is a pre-established character newly re-introduced whose character traits, lessons, and story the player had acquainted himself with intimately well, and whose place the player would find himself trying to understand in reference to the line connecting to and leading up from that point of origin.
In each case, my approach or stance towards ambiguous backstories would be coloured differently because I approach playing the two as protagonists entirely differently. Ambiguity in the first case attracts and has an allure to it. It is intriguing, but not so in the second case where it becomes a chore, a fracture in the flow of narrative and evolution to be repaired. Not just a chore, but an opportunity cost. I could be doing something else, exercising an agency of a different kind in the space it takes me to try to discover and assemble and input my character.
I understand that other players have warmed up to the idea of seeing Clem as their avatar and that they are satisfied enough with being able themselves to project through dialogue how they believe Clem would have now become in the context of their playthroughs last season, and if they've made their peace with that, then I'm happy for them.
The thing is even without the objections to plugging in a personality manually, I can't say like you 'that's how my Clem would ultimately behave, speak, or think' because, for one thing, Lee's influence and Clem's personality are separate--it's a two-dimensional affair. What I want her to be and what she is are distinct things. Initially, she might have a stronger chance at leaning towards the orientation I've impressed on her, but I do not see my Lee as having re-programmed Clementine's personality outright, such that in this game I can simply bring myself to choose behaviour and dialogue that comports to his ethics and outlook and christen the result Clem Version 2 (especially if we assume that my Lee taught her things utterly contrary to her original personality). That is far too one-dimensional for me.
As she faces challenges and reflects further, she can ultimately regard or disregard, embrace or become disillusioned with those lessons, if you recall the concrete examples given in that third critique. There is a wealth of nuance to be explored in those. That is why I've stressed on distinguishing between influence and control. The first adds another layer and dimension to the dynamics involved in character building that I'd like to see. I cannot fully anticipate, and therefore recreate, the form in which she should emerge from a time gap of that magnitude that sets in very soon after Lee's death severs the umbilical cord.
Yes to your last two paragraphs. Goals, motives, and relationship depth are general story issues that will concern all players irrespective of their different approaches to her as a player character, and the pace of plot events has given less time to devote to these, and I notice as well that it's even endowed the game with a certain cavalier attitude in how it will treat scenes of danger.
I'll let it wind down here for now. I think it would be good for others to carry on their own exchange of ideas more often about these particular topics because they are worth the discussion. Domewing, a cordial, sincere 'thank you' for being an overall good sport, for offering the benefit of the doubt in starting a discussion and helping by way of that to have ideas put forward more clearly in more summary form. It has at least salvaged this thread somewhat rather than having it remain a piss-pot for blinkered twats on this forum (leaving out those who offered respectful criticisms).
Okay, I think I get what you mean. The game is trying to get you to fill in the blanks of Clem's recent past yourself based on what your Lee… more has taught her and what you imagine her going through. But having to craft even a rough outline of a 16-month period of character development puts a lot of demand on the player, especially since that crafting has to be done while the game progresses. The approach doesn't work for everyone and the result can be fairly jarring.
However, there was a similar sort of thing going on with Lee, wasn't there? The game gave you a basic description of his character as a starting point but left much of his recent past ambiguous, including the motives and details behind the crime he committed. To turn him from a foreign entity into a coherent character with whom you could identify, you had to fill in different aspects of his history and personality as you went along.
The difference here, I suppose, is that for … [view original content]
Clem is not the Clem we met in S1. The time jump sucked out her S1 personality and thinks that it is bad writing, a cop out to have her star… moret a shell we can introduce ourselves into at the start of the season. He finds her attitude this season to be overly stoic. And a lot more.
This is a gross simplification. The guy makes a lot of good points and although I don't agree with some, it is a very interesting and thought out point of view.
By the way, Domewing, I've taken a look at your videos. 'Scream instead of holler': you should have placed Ben in there somewhere as that line played. :-)
The opening notes to the second reminded me of Monkey Island on the spot.
If you're interested, try these re-scorings of mine of last season's final scene. They have good emotional payoffs towards the end.
Okay, I think I get what you mean. The game is trying to get you to fill in the blanks of Clem's recent past yourself based on what your Lee… more has taught her and what you imagine her going through. But having to craft even a rough outline of a 16-month period of character development puts a lot of demand on the player, especially since that crafting has to be done while the game progresses. The approach doesn't work for everyone and the result can be fairly jarring.
However, there was a similar sort of thing going on with Lee, wasn't there? The game gave you a basic description of his character as a starting point but left much of his recent past ambiguous, including the motives and details behind the crime he committed. To turn him from a foreign entity into a coherent character with whom you could identify, you had to fill in different aspects of his history and personality as you went along.
The difference here, I suppose, is that for … [view original content]
Well it's taken some time, but I've read through all of it. Yes, all of it.
And I'm not going to place a huge wall of text but I'll sum it up a few words. Don't take it such a big deal, it's only a video game. Don't think to yourself that the series can't work because simply you can't assume the role of Clem, I'm pretty sure you've seen it by now but many, many people disagree with you. And not simply because Clementine is such an adoring character, but because people actually enjoy playing as her. I'm more invested than ever before in the series thanks to taking over as her. And I can't wait to see where Telltale take her next.
Only thing I'm afraid of, is if Telltale listens to people like you and change the protagonist. And no, I don't mean to sound rude by saying that, but it's blatantly obvious that the Telltale TWD was always intended to be Clementine's story. Even back in Season One when you were Lee. Changing the protagonist would just be silly now that we're 2 episodes in too.
Mate, that's heavy Stuff. How long have you sat on this? Normally i appreciate Users who can made up their Mind way off from the average Post's but this seems to be a giant personal Ranting about lack of Things. I'm sure you know that most of it leads to nowhere. That's how it is in the Internet. But hey maybe Telltale noticing some of it.
Mate, that's heavy Stuff. How long have you sat on this? Normally i appreciate Users who can made up their Mind way off from the average Pos… moret's but this seems to be a giant personal Ranting about lack of Things. I'm sure you know that most of it leads to nowhere. That's how it is in the Internet. But hey maybe Telltale noticing some of it.
I'm not expecting anybody to read through all this, much less process it and start debating finer points from each paragraph. It's not ther… moree to be directly responded to, but as food for thought alongside discussions already started before in older threads. It's a compilation of individual posts for reference only. If anybody is interested in the topics in question here that have been poked to death already in several threads, consider this a final burial ground. These are the most fleshed out and comprehensively worded thoughts on the subject so far; they might as well just have a thread in which to sit, whilst people continue to discuss their own points between each other. Wade through what you like or no need to bother if you're not inclined. The idea isn't that the wall of text above is waiting for a rebuttal from anyone. Consider this thread as a re-invitation to an already open topic, where people can have those smaller discussion… [view original content]
I'll second that! As in, I really like your analysis and your passion for reading beyond the surface details and basic plot events of The Walking Dead. :D
Comments
Yes, it's the section you mentioned, not the full third post.
The same trajectory? That's much the point in what's written there. I argue that she hasn't exited the first game on the same trajectory with every player because her lessons and experiences have been unique in every playthrough, presenting different possibilites as to how she might next evolve and into what. Also, the loss of her surrogate father marks a critical point of transition for her where the time and set of experiences immediately following will test her considerably for the first time and have her develop and relatively solidify her views and personality and advance her arc to a noticeable degree until it plateaus by the time she's 11, which is where we've now taken up her story once more. I simply do not recognise who the girl is anymore save in the way I define her for myself.
Because the circumstances and possible results of change are many, and because those changes are expected to accelerate after she loses Lee, that intermediate stage is a crucial, shaping one that leaves me unable to start off or identify where we are now as if she has just emerged from a logical, pre-set path from Season I. The game tries to accommodate by having you plug in for yourself the character you think she has become, with the game unable to have Clementine explain this in the context of a past of which we barely know (or in the context of Lee's influence), and the result to me is rather abruptly forced and unengaging.
Why is it crucial her thoughts and actions (those that convey a certain conviction at any rate) should be independent of our direct dictation? Simply because it shatters her individuality and renders her evolution frustratingly artificial and unsatisfying. Riadon I think said it best in a few sentences:
http://www.telltalegames.com/community/discussion/comment/1032641#Comment_1032641
I'll add to those reasons and say that despite his death, I still see my role in this game as that of Lee, and not Clementine's. In fact, my motivation of concern for Clementine largely exists because Lee vicariously bound me to his own motives. (Notice, incidentally, how even my relatively blank-slate protagonist Lee whom I approached with the full intention of making my avatar was able to draw me in to his own goals, cares, and purpose, whereas Clem, a protagonist in whom I was hoping to realise a strong, cohesive NPC component as I played her, cannot even do what that fully protagonist Lee could; I have to define her emotional drives for her, such as any interest to locate Christa.)
My motive for following through with Clementine's story is that I see her story as in fact still being Lee's, which has a post-mortem continuation of its own that will reach its conclusion once his pedagogical role is either vindicated or condemned in the course of Clementine's story. After all, when she reminisces about him, I am meant to feel she is talking about me. I wish to see the role my mark on her plays in how she independently acts and thinks and copes as well as how she comes to respond to and ultimately regard what I have taught her, and that goes beyond seeing her able to shoot a gun. Clementine may be the protagonist, but I would like to approach her as I play not as somebody with whom I mind-meld, but as somebody to whom as a player I can still react and towards whom I can direct my feelings as if she were her own person. If that is even possible in the context of her being assigned a protagonist role is an issue of discussion on its own, and a difficult one pertaining to game design and mechanics as well as writing I would think.
That being said, I agree with your point about the fear of losing control and the tension it presents. The control I've in mind however is not direct control. It is the exertion of influence, what we exercised in Season I in respect to Clementine's mind, and influence is a two-party affair where the person I work to influence reacts accordingly, with her reaction in turn being a source of anticipation and suspense for me. Direct control wrests me of the independent object of my focus and implies reacting to one's own behaviour and can at best have me indulge in a forced satisfaction akin to one engaging his own fan fiction. That's the issue for me, but I'm with you that having my influence ultimately fail could prove to be quite satisfyingly tragic and cathartic. Aside from Lee's imprint, I would like to exercise an influence, no doubt, even manipulate the course of events to have her tested in various ways, but the right mechanics for that are tricky to figure out if the aim is both to preserve Clementine's individuality and grant us agency in the game. It's a tricky son of a bitch, that one, I'll grant you.
Okay, I think I get what you mean. The game is trying to get you to fill in the blanks of Clem's recent past yourself based on what your Lee has taught her and what you imagine her going through. But having to craft even a rough outline of a 16-month period of character development puts a lot of demand on the player, especially since that crafting has to be done while the game progresses. The approach doesn't work for everyone and the result can be fairly jarring.
However, there was a similar sort of thing going on with Lee, wasn't there? The game gave you a basic description of his character as a starting point but left much of his recent past ambiguous, including the motives and details behind the crime he committed. To turn him from a foreign entity into a coherent character with whom you could identify, you had to fill in different aspects of his history and personality as you went along.
The difference here, I suppose, is that for the Season 1 protagonist to "work," players had to define Lee in such a way as to be able to identify with or at least empathize with him. In Season 2, players had to do this while also bridging the gap between Clementine's S1 and S2 personalities. This requires a lot more finesse from both the game and the player and it may simply take more time for things to click into place this time around.
You say that Clem’s evolution is "artificial" and I would agree in the sense that it is something that we as players build for ourselves. But to me, the change from S1 Clem to S2 Clem doesn't feel forced or feel as though it were completely manufactured from nothing. So far, I think the game has done a fairly good job of providing us with choices that reflect a natural progression from different versions S1 Clementine to different versions of S2 Clementine. For every exchange I've encountered so far, I could point to at least one of the options and say "That's what my Clem would have done/said." That's enough for me.
All of this isn't to say that I don't have my own gripes and concerns about Clementine's progression as the protagonist, of course. The game's primary shortcoming, I think, is in Clem's lack of a clearly defined, long-term external goal, something you alluded to in your post. With Lee, even if you couldn't identify with any other aspect of his personality, so long as you could could share in his drive to protect Clementine, you could empathize with him.
The equivalent motivation for Clem this season, I think, is supposed to be a desire to find a group of people whom she can trust. But this is a fairly abstract goal compared to Lee's "I have to protect Clementine" because there isn't any particular person who seems essential to that goal. The game gives us the freedom to say "I need to find Christa" or "I'm sticking with Luke and the Cabin group" or "I want to stay with Kenny" but none of those people feel absolutely essential to Clem's goal the way that Clementine felt absolutely essential to Lee's goal. As a result, her character seems lost and unmotivated. While that may be an intentional design choice to reflect her psychology at the current time, it does cause the player to be less engaged in her story this season.
the last episode of amc series the walking dead was killer when can we see episode 3 of the game telltale takes for ever
A good post, and I appreciate the effort in trying to summarise the positions of another.
Jarring? Yes. How jarring I think depends on the level to which a player places value on continuity especially.
There was a similar thing going on with Lee, yes, but Lee was a newly introduced character with no past we could relate to by way of our own direct experience as players, whereas Clem is a pre-established character newly re-introduced whose character traits, lessons, and story the player had acquainted himself with intimately well, and whose place the player would find himself trying to understand in reference to the line connecting to and leading up from that point of origin.
In each case, my approach or stance towards ambiguous backstories would be coloured differently because I approach playing the two as protagonists entirely differently. Ambiguity in the first case attracts and has an allure to it. It is intriguing, but not so in the second case where it becomes a chore, a fracture in the flow of narrative and evolution to be repaired. Not just a chore, but an opportunity cost. I could be doing something else, exercising an agency of a different kind in the space it takes me to try to discover and assemble and input my character.
I understand that other players have warmed up to the idea of seeing Clem as their avatar and that they are satisfied enough with being able themselves to project through dialogue how they believe Clem would have now become in the context of their playthroughs last season, and if they've made their peace with that, then I'm happy for them.
The thing is even without the objections to plugging in a personality manually, I can't say like you 'that's how my Clem would ultimately behave, speak, or think' because, for one thing, Lee's influence and Clem's personality are separate--it's a two-dimensional affair. What I want her to be and what she is are distinct things. Initially, she might have a stronger chance at leaning towards the orientation I've impressed on her, but I do not see my Lee as having re-programmed Clementine's personality outright, such that in this game I can simply bring myself to choose behaviour and dialogue that comports to his ethics and outlook and christen the result Clem Version 2 (especially if we assume that my Lee taught her things utterly contrary to her original personality). That is far too one-dimensional for me.
As she faces challenges and reflects further, she can ultimately regard or disregard, embrace or become disillusioned with those lessons, if you recall the concrete examples given in that third critique. There is a wealth of nuance to be explored in those. That is why I've stressed on distinguishing between influence and control. The first adds another layer and dimension to the dynamics involved in character building that I'd like to see. I cannot fully anticipate, and therefore recreate, the form in which she should emerge from a time gap of that magnitude that sets in very soon after Lee's death severs the umbilical cord.
Yes to your last two paragraphs. Goals, motives, and relationship depth are general story issues that will concern all players irrespective of their different approaches to her as a player character, and the pace of plot events has given less time to devote to these, and I notice as well that it's even endowed the game with a certain cavalier attitude in how it will treat scenes of danger.
I'll let it wind down here for now. I think it would be good for others to carry on their own exchange of ideas more often about these particular topics because they are worth the discussion. Domewing, a cordial, sincere 'thank you' for being an overall good sport, for offering the benefit of the doubt in starting a discussion and helping by way of that to have ideas put forward more clearly in more summary form. It has at least salvaged this thread somewhat rather than having it remain a piss-pot for blinkered twats on this forum (leaving out those who offered respectful criticisms).
Thank you for putting in a good word. I appreciate it.
By the way, Domewing, I've taken a look at your videos. 'Scream instead of holler': you should have placed Ben in there somewhere as that line played. :-)
The opening notes to the second reminded me of Monkey Island on the spot.
If you're interested, try these re-scorings of mine of last season's final scene. They have good emotional payoffs towards the end.
http://www.telltalegames.com/community/discussion/comment/921516#Comment_921516
Well it's taken some time, but I've read through all of it. Yes, all of it.
And I'm not going to place a huge wall of text but I'll sum it up a few words. Don't take it such a big deal, it's only a video game. Don't think to yourself that the series can't work because simply you can't assume the role of Clem, I'm pretty sure you've seen it by now but many, many people disagree with you. And not simply because Clementine is such an adoring character, but because people actually enjoy playing as her. I'm more invested than ever before in the series thanks to taking over as her. And I can't wait to see where Telltale take her next.
Only thing I'm afraid of, is if Telltale listens to people like you and change the protagonist. And no, I don't mean to sound rude by saying that, but it's blatantly obvious that the Telltale TWD was always intended to be Clementine's story. Even back in Season One when you were Lee. Changing the protagonist would just be silly now that we're 2 episodes in too.
Are you trying to do a filibuster on this forum?
Mate, that's heavy Stuff. How long have you sat on this? Normally i appreciate Users who can made up their Mind way off from the average Post's but this seems to be a giant personal Ranting about lack of Things. I'm sure you know that most of it leads to nowhere. That's how it is in the Internet. But hey maybe Telltale noticing some of it.
Thanks for that image, I've been looking for that picture for a long time. xD