Interactive Narrative Week 5

For this week, I decided to play "The Wolf Among Us" and during my experience, I was constantly thinking about what morals I followed and what kinds of choices they lead me to make.

The Wolf Among Us is split into five different chapters and mainly involves the point and click mechanic for players to investigate around the mysterious death of a character named Faith at the beginning of the game. There are also quick time events along with conversational choices when interacting with other characters which can impact the player's narrative varying from slight to vast lengths.

The player controls Bigby who was previously known as the Big Bad Wolf along the Fables and because of his dark past, he now acts as the Sheriff of Fabletown to reconstruct his bad image. Being shown this fact alone made me consider how I would make my decisions from both my own morals along with where the character stood within society. Because the other residents of Fabletown have a hard time believing Bigby stemming from his aggressive nature, I found myself following my "no violence" policy, holding back when it came to violence in an attempt to prove Bigby had changed as an individual. Even though this killed me once during the beginning for not hitting the Woodsman with an axe, the majority of the events afterwards awarded my decisions with characters remembering my small acts of kindness during the narrative progression. Brandon Perdue mentioned, "There is plenty of reason to try to quantify a player's moral choices somehow in the game system. It allows rewards for certain kinds of activity. Non­player characters can react according to a player's reputation." Even though there is no clear mechanic gauging your reputation implemented within the game, the clear variety created for character relationships and narrative paths made it feel as if the player's moral choices made an impact. The game offers many choice situations, both small and large, to challenge the player with what they believe is correct, and also has times to test the player's patience when interrogating other characters: how long will you hold back until you bring back the wolf's claws?

Overall, The Wolf Among Us is a game which I consider a more compelling one because of its strength regarding how it incorporates the player's morales along with the gameplay and narrative. From this fact alone, I intend to continue my experience until the end with this game. :)

References
Telltale Games. (Developer). (2013). The Wolf Among Us [Video Game]. United States: Telltale Games
B. Perdue. (Author). (2011). Ethical Dilemmas and Dominant Moral Strategies In Games [Article]. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6460/ethical_dilemmas_and_dominant_.php