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*I click “play”. A title card appears:
<img alt="title" img src="images/03.jpg" style="max-width: 75%">
This isn’t the first time I played [[the game]]. During my first playthrough, I was terrified even small decisions would have a “butterfly effect” (Lorenz, 1972), and replayed scenes over and over until they were what I considered to be “perfect”. Achieving the ‘perfect play’ satiates my perfectionistic thirst. If only I could [[rewind and replay my own life.]]
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A mother’s brain physically changes during pregnancy and continues for two years after childbirth, reducing their gray matter (Hoekzema, et. al, 2016) and increasing empathy, anxiety, and interpersonal communication (Lafrance, Jan 8, 2015; Barrett et al., 2011). While fathers and adoptive parents’ brains have the potential to change somewhat as a result of consistent, attentive care (Abraham, et al., 2014), there are certain changes, such as the reduction of gray matter in areas of the brain responsible for social cognition, that are unique to biological mothers (Hoekzema, et. al, 2016). While the effects of this are largely unknown, researchers noted a correlation between pronounced brain changes and higher emotional attachment, therefore they hypothesize that it aids women in their transition to becoming mothers, the brain changes to increase “a mother’s ability to recognize the needs of her infant, to recognize social threats or to promote mother-infant bonding.” (Hoekzema, qtd. in Belluck, Dec 19, 2016).
I’m told that my incessant worries and heightened emotions are normal to new parents. “It means you’re a good mother”, a doctor said, as she confided about her own irrational fears, “I write a letter to my children every time I’m about to go on a flight — just in case. The last letter was two pages long.” I think of other mothers in my life and their burdensome worry. I note my mother-in-law’s cyclical obsessions which drives her son mad, and my own mother’s deep-rooted fear that I would be snatched or run-over as a child — “Don’t go near the street!” she would yell. She told me a tale of a little girl who got her head chopped off because she opened the door to a strange man while she was home alone. Her fears became ingrained in my behavior and thoughts.
My mom believes that [[passing down anxiety]] generationally is a necessity – “that’s what keeps you safe”, but I had nightmares as a child of a bearded man stealing me away from my home. When I would go two houses down to visit a childhood friend, I would run. A car would pass and I ran faster, body tense, my heart pounding in my ears. The pounding fades. “There is medication if you feel your anxiety is a barrier to your life”, my doctor casually mentions. I immediately shake my head no, a quick end to the conversation, and we [[move on]].
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*I return to playing. The first shot fades up, a dutch angle of a city skyline.*
<img alt="Black hands in cuffs" img src="images/06.jpg" width="800" height="450">
The sky is bright and blue, but the diagonal lines of the grey skyscrapers, half consumed by fog make me uneasy. It is a reflection of one of the most notable themes of the series — the struggle to maintain hope and survive in a world of dark tragedy and despair. Words appear — “A New Day”, an episode appropriately named; this beginning marks the start of a new world and a new life for our main character, Lee Everett. It is also a new world for me. Not one filled with zombies and despair, but the beginning of something wondrous and scary, a world of motherhood. I am (re)playing this game series, which explores parenting through difficult times and includes themes of sacrifice, hope, fear, secrecy, and forgiveness to contemplate and explore my relationship and experience of motherhood, in hope that my play will enlighten and heal, and my subsequent [[autoethnographic reflections]] may aid others who are adapting to having been reborn.
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I am playing Telltale’s The Walking Dead (2012), a choice-based narrative-driven adventure game about a Black American man, Lee Everett, who struggles to protect and prepare a little Black girl, Clementine, from zombies and desperate survivors in the American South.
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<img alt="venn diagram" img src="images/17.png" width="500" height="400"
Autoethnography is a systematic approach to examining personal experience as a means to understanding the intersections between identity and the larger social, political, and cultural influence (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Goodall, 2004). The ethnographer performs a dual role, acting simultaneously as observer and participant. I seek a balance between ethnographer and participant, player and mother, through this exploration of The Walking Dead game world and my concurrent experiences within the physical world. This work documents my interactions and choices, notates my interpretations, distractions, limiting agents, and evoked memories surrounding my play, and analyzes the phenomenon through a theoretical and informed lens. In essence, this autoethnography is a “performance of self” (Goodall, 2004); it allows me to explore the “doing” (Butler, 1990) of my situated identities through consideration of my actions, choices, and internal dialogue. I seek understanding of the intersections of identity and gameplay through autoethnographic analysis of co-constructed play, therefore, I adopt a lens of “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988), an awareness of historical/cultural norms and practices surrounding technology, a critical awareness of our own interpretations/experiences, and scientific observations and analyses. My analysis is informed by the work of feminist science and technology studies (STS) understandings of technology (Cockburn, 1992; Wajcman, 2009), which explores who has access to technology and the various gatekeepers that limit/permit technological use and mastery, and postmodern feminist analyses of media representation (Crenshaw, 1989), which looks at the effects of media representation while considering the audience’s interpretation and experiences.
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*A patrol car is driving away from a city. The camera cuts to a close up of Black hands in cuffs.*
<img alt="Black hands in cuffs" img src="images/04.png" style="max-width: 75%">
I think of Philando Castile, an unarmed Black man who was unlawfully murdered by police just two days ago, but mostly I think about [[his mother.]] She appeared on CNN mere hours after his murder, poised but — angry — as she recalled the last moments with her son. A conversation between her children about the fear of carrying a registered firearm, Philandro leaving to get his hair done. “Black in the wrong place,” she says (Castile qtd. in Richmond, July 7, 2016). I think of the mothers of all Black boys and the fear they must carry every day. I think of how we perceive Black boys to be older than what they actually are (Goff & Jackson, 2014) and are less likely to stop for them at crosswalks (Goddard, Barsamian, & Adkins, 2015). Black men, historically, have been represented and perceived by White folks as being aggressive criminals; [[this is evident in video games]] which portray them primarily as gangstas or athletes (Leonard, 2006), and could contribute to White officers seeing them as “demonic” and like “Hulk Hogan” (Sanburn, November 25, 2014).
I think of the fact that because I am a White, middle-class woman with considerable privilege, it is [[extremely difficult to write about the experiences of people of color]].
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Very few games include characters beyond White male; a 2009 content analysis of 150 games found that only 14.77% of all characters are female, and all non-White racial groups were underrepresented (Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009). When Black characters are included, they are rarely portrayed outside of the stereotypical athlete/gangsta binary (Leonard, 2006; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009); showing young Black males that their only options are to pursue athletics or crime (Leonard, 2006, Higgins, 2009). When they are portrayed in sports games, Black male characters are portrayed as more aggressive than White characters; they are more likely to trash-talk and push other players (Leonard, 2003). The majority of games with Black characters allow an opportunity for players to perform “racial tourism and minstrelsy” (Leonard, 2003; Higgin, 2009); players may dive into the life of the stereotypical dark “other” within a co-constructed space that results from ambivalent feelings of White superiority and a love/idolization of Black’s coolness (Kendall, 1999 & 2002).
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*The camera pans up to the playable character’s downtrodden face; Lee Everett’s shoulders are slumped and his head hangs low. The music is slow and somber. The officer driving is an older, southern, white man.*
<img alt="close-up" img src="images/05.png" style="max-width: 75%">
I think of how it must feel to be a Black man in a car with a White police officer, but yet, there is *no* way I could know how to have dark skin and be viewed as a criminal just for existing. While [[the game helps me empathize with Lee]], it is not possible to implant centuries of generational memories of racism and injustice into my being. As a White woman who could walk the halls of her high school during class without being questioned while people of color were corralled into the principle’s office, I can never truly know what it’s like to be perceived as guilty before a fair trial.
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As I move through the game and [[react to various situations and characters]], I note that my decisions are partially influenced by Lee’s identity, that of a middle-aged, male, Black, history professor, but they are also influenced by my own identity and preferred communication style. Through my play, I tend to slip in/out of states of identifying with Lee (and acting through him), and acting as an omniscient third party member who is free to learn from and judge Lee’s actions.
My shifting of perspectives is consistent with prior research that shows that identification is not automatic, nor is it required to experience enjoyment during gameplay (Taylor, Kampe, & Bell, 2015). When a player experiences identification, it is not typically constant, but rather the player slips in/out of periods of identification. During reflection, players use the playable character’s name and “me” interchangeably. During some moments, they will say the character performed an action, and at other times they will take credit for a task (Taylor, et. al, 2015).
This affiliation is affected by their background and perspectives, as well as the game’s design. Moments of significant choice (i.e. who do you save?) will more likely result in a player recalling their agency in the scene However, when the only choices available are ones that do not ring true to the players’ belief system, it may cause players to detach from the remembered event. Gameplay produces a character that is co-constructed between player and game; a hodge-podge of the beliefs/values and desires of the player, mixed together with the backstory, history, and limited options of the game’s design.
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[[I portray Lee as calm, cooperative, and nurturing.]] I mother (father? parent?) the little girl, Clementine, and prioritize her health and safety above my own. I am hesitant (at times) to take sides and instead spend quite a bit of time managing relationships and try to consider everyone in the group when I make decisions. I am proud, when, at a moment of need, I manage to convince the entire group to declare their support and follow me on my mission. In another gameplay moment, a character who is short-tempered and erratic while demanding unwavering loyalty, assures me of our friendship, despite our previous differences. I feel accomplished.
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The previous research has shown that women typically show cooperative collaboration, a sensitivity of others, and an avoidance of criticism, created and maintained in childhood through encouraged gendered play (Wood, 1994). This assumption is based off many studies, [[both on White middle class and Black low-income children*]]. Researchers believe girls establish these skills through unstructured, imaginative games, such as make-believe scenarios. Cis-gendered males, who tend to value assertiveness, competition, and attracting attention, likewise establish their patterns through structured, rule-based play, such as sports.
Starting in my childhood and continuing throughout my life, I’ve found myself in a constant flux between a feminine and masculine style of interaction. I criticize myself when I am not assertive enough, yet I feel shameful when I come across as too dominate or speak too much during a meeting. But the ability to shift has some benefit; it allows me to switch between a leader and respectful subordinate as needed. I showed evidence of masculine and feminine communication styles and preferences even as a small child, possibly influenced by my family life and exposure to “Free to Be You and Me”, an album of songs and stories that questioned gender norms and broke stereotypes. I idolized female heroines that were “tomboys” like Punky Brewster and Little Orphan Annie. I hated Barbies but loved stuffed animals and My Little Ponies. I loved Thundercats and He-Man but had no interest in cars, soldiers, or Transformers. Relatives would give me Barbies for Christmas and I would respond by dismembering them and stuffing them in a drawer. In a recent conversation with my mom, she mentioned that she’s surprised I’m such a good mother. When I asked why — she said, “You used to pull your dolls’ heads off!” My parents' acceptance of my slight gender-queering behavior opened a door towards exploration and mastery of [[masculine technologies.]]
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When I was a child in the 1980s and 1990s, video games were primarily made by, play-tested by, and marketed towards boys (Fron, et. al, 2007). My love of technology was exclusively shared with male friends and relatives, but this masculinization of gaming technologies did not deter my interests. I owe most of this to my father, whose mission was to raise a little girl that was tough enough to fight against sexism. He would tease and pull pranks on me, not to be cruel, but to teach me the importance of shedding naivety. He used to love to wake me and say, "It's snowing" on a September morning, and laughed when I ran to the window, excited. He once asked me to bet him on the outcome of a boxing match. I agreed, not realizing it had been previously aired the night before.
He loved to goad me. He was proud of my toughness and wanted to help equip me to handle the monsters. He would test me, over and over. “Boys are best”, he would taunt.
I would smile and stand up tall, chin jutting out. “Girls are best".
This would continue for quite some time. We would argue over and over. Slowly my arguments became more sophisticated. Eventually, I changed my response altogether, "Girls and boys are equal”. To this day, my mom still calls me her "little Susan B. Anthony”.
His methods may seem unorthodox, but the lessons were learned.
My father was obsessed with “get rich quick” schemes and loved to talk about missed opportunities and future possibilities. He lamented over the piece of property he passed up at Myrtle Beach in the 1950s and the McDonalds he refused to purchase in the 1960s. He convinced me that he had invented the touch-tone phone. His mistake was to take it to AT&T in an attempt to sell it. They "borrowed" it and returned it to him after two months. A few months later, touchtone phones were available in all the local stores.
He was convinced computers were the ticket to a financially successful future, which he lectured me about that in great length and often. He was a community college instructor, starting back in the days before *A Dead Poet's Society* and *Mr. Holland's Opus*, when teachers were expected to drone on in the front of the class for hours and students were expected to listen, their mouths shut and their hands grasped around their pencils as they took furious notes. I did not prove to be his ideal student and most lectures dissolved into frustration and reprimands. But he spent hours teaching me binary code and DOS commands and always supported my love of gaming. He used to bring home copies of Sierra games circulating around colleagues at his office and was a well-known game and software pirate on various BBS's (bulletin board systems). I always had an endless supply of new games to play.
I was the only little girl who would read Nintendo Power magazine during our class's weekly visit to the library. I would talk about video games with the little boys, and I would [[regularly outperform my male friends and relatives]] during play sessions. The majority of the games/media available on Nintendo featured male heroes, and I had no interest in playing the victim, so I would transgender the heroes during make-believe play. I pretended to be the ninja turtle “Raphaelette” and would develop romantic side-stories during our imaginary play. The boys would largely ignore me and focus on fighting invisible warriors, much to my chagrin. My earliest memory of transgendered play was when I was quite small - 3 or 4. I put on a pair of green socks and pretended to be a female version of Disney’s Robin Hood, a cunning and charming fox in green booties. [[Why pretend to be Maid Marion, the princess, waiting to be rescued, when you can be the hero?]]
Not all children share my fortune and are able to queer themselves with so little conflict or pushback from family (my father was more upset with my veganism than my tom-boyishness); transgender children typically experience stigma, family rejection, and discrimination and violence, but the risk is much higher for transgender women of color. Families of color are more likely to identify with traditional religious beliefs that enforce rigid gender norms and associate anything outside of cis-gendered heterosexuality as being immoral, therefore transgender children of color experience more family rejection, bullying, violence, homelessness, and depression (Sevelius, 2013).
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*Wa-Wah. Wa-wah.*
It’s another day, and I begin another game in the series. As I play, [[I am connected through tubes to a machine that milks my breasts, simultaneously providing relief and pain.]] The volume of my speakers is at full blast, allowing the swell of music and zombie screams to muffle its continuous drone. My game playing has significantly dropped since giving birth. As my son’s primary caregiver, I seldom have long periods of time in which both hands are available. I’ve resisted against playing games during the rare times I am not responsible for him. I can’t quite shake the persistent cultural belief that [[games are counterproductive and unnecessary.]]
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Video games are part of a long line of entertainment technologies that have been touted as brain-numbing or a waste of time. In the early 1900s, critics warned that film was frivolous and morally suspect. Educational films, they suggested, should not be too entertaining (Orgeron, Orgeron, & Streible, 2012). In the 1960s, the head of the FCC referred to entertainment television as a "vast wasteland" and many social scientific articles were devoted to the negative effects of television viewing (Orgeron, et al., 2012). Video games have been suspected of killing motivation and drive and have been associated with laziness (i.e. the adult male who lives in his mom's basement surrounded by his own filth, playing video games all day). They have also been extensively researched out of a fear that they contribute to hostility and aggression. The first person shooter Doom (1993), has been blamed for encouraging the violent actions of the Columbine mass shooters in 1999.
The cultural belief that entertainment is frivolous impacts girls more than boys. Girls are encouraged, starting at a young age, to devote much of their time to household chores and emotional labor. On average, 10-14-year-old girls across the world spend 50 percent more of their time on housework than boys (UNICEF, 2016). This division of labor provides boys with more time to play games.
This labor divide continues into adulthood; women are still primarily responsible for domestic, emotional, and childcare tasks, even if they work full-time. Worldwide, women spend 2 to 10 times more on unpaid labor than their male counterparts (Ferrant, Pesando, & Nowacka, 2014).
While my husband's extra-curricular activities have certainly been limited since the birth of my son, and while he is responsible for more cleaning duties than me, I shoulder much more of the child-care duties. Because child-care involves a great deal of play, it feels unreasonable for me to take a break from playing with my son to play a solo video game. Because of this, I have limited my gameplay primarily to times that I must play for work or research. I suspect that as my son grows older and can play games himself, my play will increase, although not necessarily involving the types of games I primarily enjoy.
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Much of my early media consumption during the first year of my son's life occurred solely when I was nursing or pumping. In the earliest days, my son would sleep through dog barks and zombie snarls; he would lay on the breastfeeding pillow on my lap and suckle for hours while he slept, tugging and wearing my nipple raw. I followed the advice of my lactation consultants and allowed him to breastfeed anytime and for however long he wanted. No one taught me how to determine when I was allowed to retract my body from his. My nipples stayed raw and painful, and I suffered from multiple bouts of mastitis and clogged ducts from his inconsistent nursing schedule. I turned to medicine for help, nipple balms, thrush medications, antibiotics, but the problems kept recurring. To distract myself from the pain while nursing, I watched television, comedies, mostly, but then the television kept him up, so I switched to playing games on my mobile or reading books on my kindle, which allowed me to interact with the digital texts with only one free hand. But then, the light grew too much for him and he would wail, so I lay with him in our cool, dark bedroom and fell asleep, with one arm wrapped around his tiny, warm body.
Pumping was awful, painful, and embarrassing as I have always felt a strong need to hide my body. I had a close call, a male colleague who unlocked and began to open my office without my permission, and I awkwardly fumbled through many conversations with students who would knock on my door and try to shout to me over the sound of the machine. But pumping did allow me something that nursing did not; I had two free hands, and I could play games on my computer in brief 20 minutes spurts, hopefully just enough time to get to a save point.
Despite the pain and sickness associated with breastfeeding, I recognize that my ability to nurse is a privilege for us both. I am thankful I have been able to nurse as long as I have (I am still nursing once a day at 25 months), and while I know that nursing is not required or necessary for a baby's health or happiness, I am proud of my persistence and my ability to solely sustain and soothe him through nursing.
But in contrast, while I am thankful for the existence of the breast pump, designed to satisfy one of the many [[needs of mothers]], I do not ascribe any fondness or affection to that bulking machine of tubes and flanges.
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TWD: Michonne focuses on the experience of a Black woman, who presents as strong and infallible as she battles with psychological demons as the loss of her two young girls become unbearable. As I play through/with her character, I note a difference in my communication style in comparison to my actions as Lee in the previous game. I am more secretive, violent, and assertive through my choices. As Michonne becomes more unhinged, I disclose less and fight more in a desperate attempt to help her maintain her disguise of sanity. I chose to kill a murderous character while playing as Michonne, but I let two cannibals live while I was Lee Everett. There are likely various factors that influence this shift in my gameplay. Michonne is a character I know well, she is featured in the comics, some of which I’ve read, and is a primary character in the television show, which I watch religiously. She is portrayed (mostly) as hard, strong, independent, and one of the best zombie killers in the group.
<img alt="Michonne poster" img src="images/08.jpg" style="max-width: 75%;">
Telltale’s representation of her is similar. In the game’s promotional art, she is shown as muscular, determined, with a furrowed brow, wielding a machete and makeshift leashes connected to two jawless zombies that scuffle behind her.
Lee is typically drawn connected to the little girl, Clementine. He is often portrayed as grasping her hand or wrapping his arm around her shoulder, holding her close.
<img alt="lee and clementine" img src="images/09.jpg" style="max-width: 75%;">
It was Clementine’s gasp of horror that likely prevented me (as Lee) from dealing the fatal blow of the St. John cannibals in episode two. Lee’s toughness is read as paternal. Michonne’s is read as angry. While Michonne’s character is more nuanced than the art implies, at first glance, she could be interpreted as contributing to the angry Black woman trope which originated with Amos ’n’ Andy’s character Sapphire (West, 2008). This stereotype gaslights Black women by portraying any expressed anger as a character flaw opposed to recognizing that an oppressed group may have a valid reason to feel angry.
[[Of course, my prior gaming experiences may also contribute to my interpretations and co-constructions.]]{
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Growing up, I didn’t see many female characters and none with a Black female protagonist. The first game I played through as a woman was Sierra’s King’s Quest IV, a narrative-driven adventure game created by Roberta Williams, about the young Princess Rosella who must save her father from an evil green witch. This game inverted the “damsel in distress” trope that was so commonly found in other computer games from that time period (Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, etc.)
<img alt="Princess and unicorn" img src="images/15.jpg" width="620" height="400">
I was only seven when my father and brother taught me how to play it. I remember staring at the screen, completely entranced by the pixels and beeps emanating from the taupe computer monitor, made of plastic and glass. There was a unicorn you could tame, a dolphin you could ride, and several fairy tale characters you could meet and befriend. It was very complicated and I was quite small; I was able to find some artifacts and solve some simple puzzles (and drown in the water a lot), but never made it very far.
Still, this introduced me to the world of adventure gaming. I went on to play other games with female characters such as the young journalist Laura Bow, and made by female designers, including Lori Ann Cole, Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, & Lorelei Shannon.
<img alt="Laura" img src="images/10.jpg" width="620" height="400">
The first game I remember playing with a Black character was One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird (1983). The first time I saw a Black woman or a mother in a video game was in 1992's Quest For Glory III: Wages of War. Uhura was an African warrior and mother of a small boy who taught the White male protagonist how to throw spears and balance on a beam.
<img alt="Uhura" img src="images/16.jpg" width="620" height="400”>
The first game I played with a Black female lead, however, didn't come until 2013, when I was well into my thirties. [[The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
Or explore more on my [[earliest memories of gaming]].
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<img alt="Clementine" img src="images/11.jpg" "max-width: 75%;">
In season two, the player acts as [[Clementine]], a character I, in part, identify with during my play. By the end of season one she is dressed in a baseball hat with a hooded sweatshirt over her dress. She is one part masculine and two parts feminine; just like me. When it came time for me, as Lee to choose whether to cut her hair short and teach her how to use a gun, I did not hesitate. I raised a tough, independent girl. I can continue to guide her and watch her grow stronger in this post-apocalyptic world — but this time, in season two, I parent through control of her.
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Clementine has suffered tremendous loss. She dreams of Lee back from Season One, her brain trying to process the complexities of this new world. *Lee is sitting on a couch in their old mobile home. Clementine is cuddled next to him. She looks much smaller, more fragile than she does in Season Two. They talk about Duck, a young boy who was bitten by a zombie, and Lily, a woman who murdered another member of the group. Lee tries to rationalize the devastation and breakdown of humanity. “Clem, people don’t always make sense. Because bad things happen to everyone and it’s hard to keep being yourself after they do.”
Clementine looks up, her voice high pitched and small, “I’m scared Lee”.
Lee nuzzles into her, his forehead crinkling, his gruff voice soft. “What can I tell you to make it better?”
Silence.
“That I won’t have to hurt anyone”
“that it’ll be okay”
''“that you won’t leave me.”''
My Lee promises to never leave her. Clementine sits there, frozen, hanging onto the weight of her future loss. She crumbles and sobs into his chest until she falls asleep, cradled in his arms, exhausted.
The dream ends.*
[[“Adversity builds character”, my mother always tells me, “you’re my tough girl.”]]
[[Go back.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]{
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Years of chronic pain, prescription pain medication and a [[bout of alcoholism]] changed my father. Like Lee from The Walking Dead, he started off as something wonderful and ended up as a monster.
Scuffle, Scuffle. Scuffle, Scuffle. My Dad’s feet slid across the kitchen floor as I hid in my attic bedroom. Even though his arthritis made it difficult for him to climb stairs, I was never safe. Whenever the floorboards would creak and his feet would shuffle, I would put down my book and tense every muscle, like a deer, wide-eyed and still.
I sat there, frozen, and listened for the sound of feet on wooden stairs, the creak of the handrail. Nothing. And then — a pour. A rich splash of vodka hit the ice and then a sizzle — Sprite. (This is drink #3, it is still early.) He clears his throat, slowly, almost purposefully. Was it a warning? I waited. Scuffle Scuffle, Scuffle, Scuffle. The sound fades away. Not yet.
My mother thinks that the years of abuse I faced made me resilient and strong. It’s possible she is right. Those that survive some obstacles and trauma become more resilient; they report better mental health than those who have faced no challenges (Seery, Holman, & Silver, 2010). However, those who have suffered greatly, have long-lasting negative effects. A lifetime of tragedy exhausts their ability to cope and increases chronic stress and those that experience high amounts of stress at a young age, experience more anxiety later in life. While some stress is good, too much can be detrimental. It’s difficult to look back on a lifetime of laughter and tears and determine whether the tears weigh more heavily than the laughter.
[[Go back.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
[[Jump forward.|Back to pumping (and playing).]]{
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<img alt="Lori's death" img src="images/12.jpg" width="620" height="400">
*The Walking Dead* game and larger franchise tells the stories of several characters who become pregnant after the end of modern civilization and are forced to carry and deliver a baby without any (or limited) medical interventions and tools. These are truly 'natural' births that, for the sake of drama (but not entirely atypical to births before hospitals and hospital reform) typically end in disaster.
During my pregnancy, [[when someone would encourage me to give birth outside of a hospital setting]], I would think of Christa’s loss and Rebecca’s death during the game. My thoughts would linger on the death of Lori Grimes, a character in *The Walking Dead* graphic novel and television series whose television death made me sob and heave and shake. During a perilous moment, surrounded by walkers and isolated from the others, Lori went into labor with only her young son Carl by her side. Having needed a previous c-section, she could tell when the labor wasn’t progressing and forced Carl to slice open her belly and save the child. Without the ability to stitch her organs, she bled out and died.
The Walking Dead series often uses motherhood to heighten suspense and drama. The pregnant mother and newborn baby are viewed as vulnerable, weak, and incapable of self-sufficiency; they must rely on fathers and medicine to survive. But these mothers, and all mothers who die in childbirth are the antithesis of weak: Lori's character embodies strength and courage as she hands her young son a knife and forces him to slash open her uterus and save her child, and Michonne shows great strength and resilience as she copes with the death of her daughters by fighting: fighting for her own survival despite her loss, and fighting to prevent similar loss and suffering in those around her. These are not damsels.
[[on Lori's death in the comics]]{
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I had several pregnant (or previously pregnant) friends and acquaintances that were passionate about delivering their babe(s) ‘naturally’. A term that causes me to wince, because it represents a [[privileged and arguably hypocritical perspective]] which assumes that the inclusion of particular tools into the birthing experience is bad or dangerous, while others are ‘natural’. The distinction between natural and artificial focuses on biological determinism and limits progression (Latour, 2004), and is largely mislabeled; privileged modern humans are already “cyborgs” (Haraway, 1991), creations of the natural and culturally/technologically crafted.
A birthing ball, a heated bath, placenta encapsulation, and particular types of heart monitoring, all of which are tools used by humans, are classified as natural, but anesthesia, the one tool consistently eliminated from “natural birth” is not. While the word ‘natural’ refers to things that are not created by humans, in the context of birth, it primarily refers to the absence of pain relief. This perspective is inherently privileged and practiced by White, middle to upper-class women in Western countries such as the United States and Canada (Johnson, 2008). As Johnson (2008), argues, only those with sufficient access have the ability to reject it. Furthermore, the natural birth movement privileges those who are fertile and heterosexual; people that are single, in queer relationships, or suffer from infertility are less likely to have a birth without medical assistance.
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The motivations behind the natural childbirth movement are likely varied and layered. Its tendency to favor midwifery over modern medicine is a resistance to the dehumanizing ‘medical gaze’ (Foucault, 1963), and midwives’ tendencies to reduce medical interventions and provide more holistic care (Johnson, 2008).
The movements’ rejection of anesthesia likely has roots in historically sexist perspectives that believe pain is essential to good mothering and feminist rejections of male-dominated medicine that previously prescribed dangerous drugs like Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Thalidomide during pregnancy. Despite that epidurals carry little risk and do not harm the fetus, some natural birth proponents over exaggerate the dangers and overemphasize the benefits of a natural birth. Dr. Denis Walsh, a senior midwife and associate professor of midwifery at Nottingham University told The Observer that epidurals are dangerous and women should endure the pain of childbirth, even though they don’t “fancy” it: “Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.” (Campbell, July 2009). This perspective ignores the father or adoptive parent’s responsibility in nurturing and caring for the child, and the philosophy and larger movement places a great deal of pressure to conform to a particular standard which may contribute to feelings of guilt, self-doubt, anxiety, and post-partum depression if the birth does not go as planned.
Rowe (2016) in her autoethnographic examination of forgetting traumatic childbirth, felt shame and loss when she shared her C-section birth story with her Bradley-Method coach. A friend of mine admitted that she can’t help but feel like she “pussed out” because she elected to have an epidural after excruciating post-Pitocin contractions. Another friend, who compared the pain of childbirth to the fatigue one feels after hiking (and whose husband dutifully agreed it was a perfect analogy), scoffed at women that choose to lay [[on their back]] and not allow themselves to physically feel the birth of their child. {
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My son is now 13 months old. While some may say my fears regarding childbirth, SIDS, and choking were unsubstantiated, others would say it was my diligence and worry that kept him alive. Still, I worry. I've learned how to manage it; how not to let it consume my thoughts at night, but despite my efforts to squelch and suppress, it's lying in wait to be triggered, by a [[harrowing moment]], a headline in my newsfeed, or by a [[video game]].
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*Lee looks up. You see his face clearly for the first time through the plexiglass separating the police officer from the accused criminal. He is a handsome Black man; his skin is smooth and his arms are strong. His eyes are large and expressive, and the wrinkles on his forehead crinkle as he evaluates his surroundings. The officer is a greying, balding, White man. He adjusts his rearview mirror and studies Lee brooding in the back. They look at each other, the two men are juxtaposed in the rearview mirror side by side, White and Black, old and virile, free and accused.
“Well, I reckon you didn’t do it then.”
1. “Why do you say that?”
2. “You know what they say about reckoning.”
3. [[“Does it really matter?”]]
4. Silence.*
<img alt="Lee in police car" img src="images/18.jpg" width="800" height="450">
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*“I left so many people that I loved behind.” The screen is black - I stare at the void, pondering her words, thinking about the timbre of her voice - soft, spoken in almost a whisper, but with an undeniable strength. The next cut is quick — startling — a flash of colored foliage, the sound of a machete hacking bushes, exhausted, strained breath. The camera swings up unsteadily, at a dutch angle for a brief glimpse of the narrator, a woman with dark, warm brown skin and hair in neat dreads: Michonne. It fades to black. “So many I can hardly remember them at all.” Back to Michonne, exhausted, frantic, cutting. Then it cuts to black again. “But there are two — just two — that I can never forget.” We see the backs of two children, small in the center of the frame. Playing with dolls, their heads lost in darkness. She is lost. Fighting, unhinged both trying to escape from and run towards a vision of her lost children, lost in the darkness. She is simultaneously a mother and unmothered.*
<img alt="Michonne" img src="images/07.jpg" style="max-width: 75%;">
It’s another day, another game, and another writing session. I’ve switched to playing The Walking Dead: Michonne, [[a game that flips the damsel in distress trope]] commonly found (Sarkeesian, 2013) in all forms of media, but most notably in video games. {
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*Wa-Wah. Wa-wah. I rub my neck to release tension and click the mouse. I’m playing the last episode of TWD: Season Two. A baby is crying. Clementine sees him swaddled, laying in the snow. He looks so small, so vulnerable. I hold down W, hard, the key digging into my finger. A shot whizzes by my head. “What are you doing??” Luke screams at me. I don’t hesitate. I grab the baby.*
Clementine, in this moment, transforms from orphan to mother. [[Motherhood is a reoccurring theme in the game]], which is notable because it is an identity typically symbolically annihilated in media (Tuchman, 1978). When they do exist, mothers are often portrayed as catalysts to protagonists’ character development or dangerous behavior; their deaths may force independence (Bambi), their coldness may cause instability (Ordinary People), and their over-protectiveness trigger breakdowns (Carrie). When games [[portray fatherhood]], they do so in the absence of motherhood (The Last of Us; Beyond Two Souls; Bioshock) (Voorhees, 2016). With a few exceptions, (*Shelter*, *Life is Strange*, *Richard and Alice*, *Night in the Woods*, the only mothers typically found in games are monsters (*Metroid: The Other M*), dead spirits (*Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons*; *Uncharted*; *Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time* ), or unstable/evil (*Silent Hill*; *Bioshock Infinite*). The Walking Dead series is unique because not only does it include a diversity of biological and adoptive mothers, but it also portrays several different states of motherhood including pregnancy, childbirth, adoption, and in the case of Michonne, Katja, and Christa, the survival and continuation of life after the devastating loss of a child, unborn or otherwise - the process of becoming ‘unmothered’ (Chester, 2003).
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*The screen is dark. Caw! There is a cacophonous burst of caws and fluttering wings as a murder of crows burst from the trees into the sky. The camera reverses and we see Clementine, very small, isolated in the forest. The camera dollies in, slowly. “Episode One: All That Remains". The camera hangs there a moment, before cutting away to Omid and Christa, two characters from last season. Their stay with Clementine is brief. Christa’s belly is round and her breasts are full; their conversation is jovial. They argue over the name of the baby: “Come on, Christa, What’s wrong with Omid?”
“We’re not calling our baby Omid. One of you is enough.”
Clementine is quiet, somber. Within just a few minutes, Clementine’s fragility will be tested again. She will be robbed and Omid murdered.
16 months later, Christa and Clementine sit around a campfire in silence. Christa is thin, her belly shockingly flat. There are no cries or coos. [[The baby is gone.]]*
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<span style="font-size: 75%">*Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies ISSN: 1557-2935
Vol. 16, No. 3 (2020)* </span>
<span style="font-size: 150%">A New World: An Autoethnographic Telling of Motherhood and Telltale's *The Walking Dead* (2012).</span>
<img alt="ultrasound photo" img src="images/01.jpg" style="max-width: 75%">
"Having real choice is not the issue, humans don't feel too strongly about that, but having the feeling that you have a choice makes a difference.” (Kazdin qtd. in Khazan, March 28, 2016).
The following story contains audio, video, and images. It is best played with your volume on low.
<span style="font-size: 150%">**[[START A NEW GAME|the beginning.]]**</span>
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<img alt="Lori's death comics" img src="images/13.jpg" width="403" height="640">
Lori's death in the comics is much more tragic. While she and her daughter both survive labor, they are both brutally killed in front of Lori's husband and her young son, Carl.
[[Go back.|The baby is gone.]]
[[Move forward.|when someone would encourage me to give birth outside of a hospital setting]]{
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American mothers are masters of technology. In our arsenal, we have motion-controlled monitors that track baby’s breathing and heart rate, high-resolution cameras that record in night-vision, rubber duckies that measure water temperature, weighted swaddles with velcro that soothe baby to sleep, vibrating bouncy chairs that entertain and comfort, and breast pumps, bottles, and bottle warmers to feed in our stead. These tools are designed to extend or substitute for a mother’s care, automated swings replace the gentle rocking of a mother’s arms, white noise machines substitute her shushing, musical mobiles replace her singing, baby carriers and strollers replace her loving embrace, blenders replace her chewing, and formula replaces mother’s milk for those who cannot or choose not to breastfeed.
For the cultures and families that lack access to these technological tools, it ‘takes a village’ to raise the baby. Relatives, neighbors, and friends come together to share childcare responsibilities, but for American families who idealize independence and self-sufficiency, technology allows us to keep baby happy and fed while giving us time to maintain our careers and other relationships, providing some semblance to our lives before birth. But while these tools have the capability to move women out of biological deterministic childcaring roles, freeing up male partners to feed, and helping those with physical limitations rock and shush, these tools (and their respective nurturing task) are still primarily associated with motherhood/femininity.
Even baby showers, a ritual in which technologies associated with parenting are bestowed upon new parents, are largely female-driven affairs. This is not surprising, considering that there is no mandated paternal leave in the United States; when given the option, most men take leave, but the majority only take it for 10 days or less (U.S. Department of Labor, 2015). This is unfortunate, because the benefits of paid paternity leave are numerous; there is an increase in bonding between fathers and babies which makes for healthier, better-developed babies; domestic duties become more equally shared, there is a reduction in work-family conflict, mothers are more able/willing to breastfeed, and there is an increase in mothers' salaries and overall employment (United States Department of Labor, 2015; Burtle & Bezruchka, 2016). Other countries such as Iceland, Norway, and Sweden offer partially paid father-only leave; Iceland provides the mother with 3 months, the father with 3 months, and an additional 3 months that the family can divide as they choose. This parental leave helps push fathers to become co-partners, equal managers in domestic care; countries like the U.S. with less progressive parental leave policies force men into subjugated positions of assistants to the mothers.
During those early newborn months, even my own husband occasionally criticized me for failing to tell him to bring/do something for my son i.e. "Why didn't you tell me we need more wipes" or "why didn't you ask me to pack some Tylenol?" I respond with "Why didn't you remind me?", but the truth is that I am indeed the "manager" of my son's life. I entered into this role at the very beginning with my maternity leave; my husband took one week off and I took off 9 weeks and most of my summer break. I took my son to his doctor's appointments and did the majority of diaper changes and nearly all of his feedings. I also did all the research as I sat nursing him, therefore, my husband relied on my knowledge for every new challenge/milestone. I was the manager, and my husband and various technological devices were my assistants.
As our bumps grow larger, we spend hours over a period of months registering for items and our house soon overflows with devices that blink, flash, gurgle, and play digital renditions of classical lullabies. When I received my new high-resolution video baby monitor in the mail, I experienced the same joyful ‘high’ that comes after purchasing a new computer or video game console; a feeling, in contrast to our cultural assumptions, is absent when I purchase new shoes. I did not, notably, experience any sort of high when receiving a breast-pump device in the mail - a mothering tool that many consider to be an essential and embarrassing torture device, illustrating that not all technologies should be examined as the same.
Despite the inextricable link between mothers and domestic technologies, technology in Western culture is associated as being inherently masculine (Cockburn, 1992; Wajcman, 2009, Uotinen, 2010). Western culture labels the tools of ‘work and war’, which are historically used by men, (Wajcman, 2009) as technologies, but does not label domestic tools predominately used by women (the blender, vacuum, or iron) as technologies. Because of this, there is a [[presumption that men are more technically advanced than women.]]
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There are several factors that may contribute to this presumption. There is a lack of representation of women within STEM fields, including video game production (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2006; Fron, Fullerton, Morie, & Pearce, 2007), and a study of high school students in 1996 found that even though the majority of students believed boys and girls were equal in terms of computer competence, when asked to draw an image of a computer “whiz”, 71% drew a masculine character (de Castell & Bryson, 1998). There is no evidence that men are biologically superior at technology, and in other countries, women are much more represented in technological fields (Wacjman, 2009). The presumption that men possess more technological prowess likely has roots in the industrial revolution; men were given higher positions as technicians while women worked as operators and were not permitted to learn additional technological skills (Cockburn, 1992). Printers resented and fought against women who wished to work within their industry. This stereotype persisted despite women’s contribution to technological fields during the World Wars, and the rise of domestic machines in the 1950s onward. During the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, women addressed this divide in different ways. While some women worked to teach themselves and others ‘masculine’ technologies, other women rejected technology altogether.
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Young Horses. 2014. *Octodad: Dadliest Catch.* [Video game]. Chicago, IL: Young Horses Inc.{
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I gave birth on my back, in a hospital bed, without pain. Still, as I laid in bed, waiting for my son, I trembled. They told me it was a side effect of the epidural, but the shaking became violent and uncontrollable as I prepared myself to push. My doctor made jokes between contractions and I laughed whole-heartedly; my son came into the world as I simultaneously shook and laughed and exclaimed “holy cow!”. But once he was in my arms, it was quiet and still. I no longer trembled and I was struck by the seriousness of the moment and his sweet intoxicating smell. Unlike the dramatized TWD deliveries, his birth was blissfully uneventful, and I did not require additional medical interventions. I spent months before the birth, anxious and worried, preparing for the worst.
[[And the worst never came.]]{
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When I lay in bed feeding my son with the curtains drawn and the house quiet, I ruminate on what I would rewind. I try to divert my thoughts — to practice mindfulness and focus on the hum of the fan and the soft snores from my son as he suckles. To only feel the love pouring out as his warm body snuggles against mine. But the destructive what if’s keep creeping in. [[My chest starts to feel tight, my muscles go tense]].
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I wasn’t aware that we had a computer until I was two years old. The Apple II+, in all its beige glory, sat on a table in the dining room for years until it was eventually moved to my bedroom. I had memories of it being gifted to us for Christmas when I was two, but those memories were false; it had always been there. My mother and brother confirmed it was purchased for the family before I was born.
The reason I did not remember the computer was because, until that day, it was of no relevance to me or my life. It was just a box that held nonsensical numbers and symbols. But in 1983, all that changed. I remember pulling off the silver bows and unwrapping the red and green paper, revealing three brightly colored boxes, all illustrated with a large teddy bear wearing a bright blue suit and a red bowtie. Games. For the computer. *Stickybear ABCs, Numbers, and Bop*.
<img alt="Stickybear ABC" img src="images/19.jpg">
I was embraced into my family's computer “club”. My membership card was a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk with my name on the white label on the top - KRISSY, written in all in caps. I could barely write, so I had drawn the R as a circle with two lines coming out the bottom. I mostly toyed with the computer with my father and brother. While my mother didn’t show much excitement towards computers or games when I was a child, she was quite competent and comfortable with computers and used one often at work. I was told that she played a large role in starting our family’s computer obsession; when Pong came out in 1975, she stood in a long line at Sears so she could buy it for my brother who was 4 years old at the time. The family would play it together on the living room television and my mother was the undefeated champion of the family.
When my father bought another computer, IBM XT 286, the Apple II+ was moved to my bedroom. I started to explore several of my brother’s role-playing games: The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, and Ultima IV. I was drawn to The Bard’s Tale’s colorful drawings of its characters, but Wizardry and Ultima’s lack of graphics disappointed me. Their boxes and booklets, however, were absolutely tantalizing. Ultima IV came with a colorful, detailed cloth map of the game world, Britannia; a book explaining the world’s history; and a gold-embossed book of magic spells and potions. I would play for hours in the yard with the map and books, pretending to make potions with items from my parent’s garden and use them to accomplish various tasks and quests; the game I created surrounding the game’s world was so much better (to me) than anything I could play on the screen.
When I was eight, I desperately wanted a Nintendo. My parents, who were supportive of my computer gaming, were not convinced I should own a gaming console. At the time, you could buy a Nintendo for $99.00, so I worked out a deal with my parents: if I made straight A’s all year, they would give me $100.00. The following summer I spent playing Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt and I began to build my video game library. This lasted until the mid-1990s when [[I stopped playing video games|the "death" of adventure games]].
[[Go back.|Of course, my prior gaming experiences may also contribute to my interpretations and co-constructions.]]
[[Continue.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]{
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Growing up, I regularly listened to “Free to Be You and Me”, an album of songs and stories that questioned gender norms and broke stereotypes, and idolized female heroines like Punky Brewster and Little Orphan Annie. I didn’t seem to notice that video games were marketed primarily to boys (Fron, Fullteron, Morie, & Pearce, 2007), and I owned and played with toys marketed to both genders. I hated Barbies, but loved stuffed animals and My Little Ponies. I loved Thundercats and He-Man, but had no interest in cars, soldiers, or Transformers. I would get frustrated every time a fast food restaurant offered boy and girl happy meals. When my mom would drive through the drive-through, I had to make a choice - do I deny my gender and get a better toy, or do I tell the truth and be stuck with something I hated?
I also despised playing gendered games like “boys chase the girls” at school, and [[would try to flip the tables by chasing (and terrorizing) the little boys]]. In a recent conversation with my mom, she mentioned that she’s surprised I’m such a good mother. When I asked why — she mentioned that she once found a drawer full of disembodied Barbie parts, a response to my frustration of being gifted unwanted toys by well-intentioned relatives. But, she had a note of pride in her voice — she too had been labeled as a 'tomboy' as a child.
Despite our similarities, my mom, for a brief period, tried to make me wear dresses and saddle shoes, and put barrettes in my hair (which I would pull out, hair and all); it was likely that she wanted my life to be easier than hers. She wanted me to be accepted by the same types of kids who teased her for being poor. The only dress I would willingly wear was a red sweatshirt dress with a dinosaur on the front. My older, Republican father, who has since passed away, tended towards more traditional values. He also suffered from very painful medical conditions, undiagnosed mental illness, and a bout of alcoholism in my teens that contributed to abusive behavior. Surprisingly, he was the one to put an end to these early squabbles between my mom and me by convincing mom to let me wear whatever I wanted (this would change during my punk phase during my teens as we had many fights over blue nail polish and Sex Pistols shirts). Others, however, were less understanding. One aunt became convinced that I would become gay because she knew a tomboy who “grew up to like women”. A “friend” of mine, convinced I must be gay because I never spoke of liking boys, decided to rip off my shirt and pretend to seduce me in front of two other little girls to “prove it”. I’m not gay and despite my perceived gender-queering, I have always felt as if my body and gender were in unison. I cannot imagine the trauma these experiences would have caused if I were not so privileged.
[[Back.|Continue.]]
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[[Continue.|Return to playing.]] {
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I fell out of love with video games in the late 90s/early 2000s when adventure gaming “died” and the hyper-masculine, violent first-person shooters dominated sales. It was during that time I became obsessed with watching movies; I went to film school and worked as a film and sound editor. My tom-boyishness came in handy because while on set, I was able to “be one of the guys” and carry just as many sandbags and brush off their inappropriate jokes. After a bit, it became too much to bear and I returned to academia, where the sexism is at least more subtle. While I would play my old games occasionally, it wasn’t until recently — when [[adventure games became available again]] — that I started playing frequently again.
[[Go back.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
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I credit the rebirth of adventure gaming to Telltale's *The Walking Dead* video game and the rise of indie games. While some amazing adventure games (including *The Longest Journey* games) were made (primarily overseas) during the 2000s, The Walking Dead's success and numerous best game of the year awards brought adventure gaming back into mainstream consciousness.
[[Go back.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
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My dad became an alcoholic when he was in his 60s. I was in high school. He had relied too much on pain-killers to numb his chronic pain and became addicted; he could only rely on his personal prescriptions and would run out of his medication very quickly, so he turned to alcohol to self-medicate. While he wasn't diagnosed, I now suspect he was simultaneously battling some sort of mental illness or brain damage from lack of oxygen from nearly dying during one of his many surgeries. He would keep me up all night with his power plays and bizarre, cruel behavior, and wake up the next morning fresh-faced with no memory of the previous night's events.
I kept a lot of anger for years after his death, but [[all of that dissipated when I became a parent.]] I have a lot of gratitude for the things he taught me: storytelling, ferocity, equality, logic, persuasiveness, and an appreciation of photography and computer technologies. My father was a loving, devoted, amazing father for many years. Age, pain, and problems with his brain transformed him at the end of his life into something altogether different.
[[Go back.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
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I choose “Does it really matter?".
I feel like I know Lee Everett. No matter what he did, I know he will redeem himself and prove to be a good man, at least in the eyes of Clementine and myself. Since that is all that matters (to me and Lee), I downplay the importance of any actions that happened before the game begins — before he is introduced to Clementine, and before I have influence over his body and decisions. I may have chosen this decision out of a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement and the fatalistic recognition that often times it does not matter whether a Black man is innocent before he is arrested. But this time, my choice will have no impact. After an exchange, the car crashes. This time, it is the officer who dies.
[[Continue.]]
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I turn on my computer and click on the magnifying glass in the corner of my screen. A flash of keystrokes: "The Walking Dead". And I wait. Nothing. "Thewalkingdead". Nothing. I go to finder, then applications. I double click the game's icon and -error-. I double click it again, and again. I restart my computer and then repeat the process. Nothing. I look at the clock. My husband and son will be home in 30 minutes. I Google. I read through message boards, but find nothing. I go to Telltale's site, re-download the game and double click to install. 20 minutes remaining. The dishwasher hums in the background. I go online, check Facebook, email; I read a news article about the Manchester bombing. My feed is full of posts about missing children and dead mothers. Installation is complete. 15 minutes remaining. I click. —error— "unidentified publisher". I right click, choose open. —error— but I've unlocked another option. I click open anyway.
And finally, the game loads. "Click to Continue". Click. I wait. Nothing. I force quit, reopen it. Freezes again. I leave, install it on my laptop, but only get a black screen with sound once opened. I restart my desktop, open it, and walk away. I come back. There is less than 10 minutes remaining. I click "play". I watch the flashback of prior episodes and finally receive control over Lee. I play for a few minutes and then *tap tap tap*. They're home. I hadn't yet made it to a save point; I will have to replay the beginning of the episode again.
As I walk to the door, I feel frustration and disappointment, but it melts away. My son is waving, smiling, a little ball of energy and joy. I open the door and he reaches out to me. We hug.
Later, my husband takes my son on an adventure so I play a little more. I enjoy our family walks, but I have a deadline - I *need* to play. While I enjoy exploring a new world as Lee, it does not provide the same experience as it did pre-motherhood; playing a computer game is no longer a means to fill the time; it is a distraction, a hindrance. While cell phone games are easy, simple; quick to load, easy to end, computer games are full of technical issues and problem-solving; things I used to enjoy, but now seem like another responsibility. Save points are a hindrance; if I play during a nap or in the night, a cry requires I abandon my game and I often lose several minutes of progress. So I play less and less because [[time is now a commodity.]]
But, after many days, I make it to [[the end of the last episode]].
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Last week, my family attended a grand opening of a friend's new store. The small space was packed. we were surrounded by women in silky patterned off shoulder dresses holding tall thin glasses of champagne and men in khakis holding brown beer bottles, uncomfortable and stiff. We found a small group of my husband's coworkers, women holding beer and men inappropriately dressed with unkempt beards and baseball hats, all jubilant and laughing, seemingly unaware of the people and items surrounding them.
I set my squirming bundle down so he could sit, turn around, and pull up on my legs. He couldn't yet crawl so I was not concerned. My attention was divided as I smiled and nodded politely to those around me.
I sensed my husband pick up our son, but I did not turn to look. I kept smiling and nodding and talking about things that did not matter. But then, someone asked where my son was. My husband was eating cookies at the buffet, alone. "Where is our son?" I asked, a bit too loud (maybe not loud enough). He shrugged, "I don't know." I began turning, frantically, scanning the ground. My heart raced, the world blurred, I couldn't think clearly. I pushed through the crowd, looking and calling. I ran towards my husband, confused, — no angry — about his dismissiveness. But then I saw him, our lost child, happy, gleeful on the shoulders of a woman with long straight hair and a kind face.
My husband stood beside them, eating chocolate cookies, occasionally feeding our son crumbs that he happily gobbled up like a little baby bird perched in a nest. In a rush of confusion, relief, and anger, I grabbed our son off the shoulders of the stranger, a co-worker of my husband's, and held him tightly against me, shutting my eyes and focusing on our duel heartbeats, no longer concerned with politeness, awkward jokes, and small talk.
I turned to my husband, eyes narrowed. His smile faded, his eyes widened. "You believed me? You think I would just say that and walk away? Like I didn't care?"
My husband was confused, hurt that I would believe he could lose track of our son. While I view him as a loving, devoted, and responsible father, there must have been a little piece of doubt that still lingered. Despite our shared feminist values and equal domestic divisions of labor, our relationship is affected by cultural gender norms and stereotypes. There are the mama bears and the deadbeat dads.
[[Go back.->And the worst never came.]]
[[Move forward.|video game]]
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When my son was about 10 months old, I started playing Season 3: *[[A New Frontier]]*. This time I played it on my phone, laying on my bed, the monitor gently playing in the background and my husband watching *House Hunters* in the next room. Mobile games are much easier for me to play now; they are portable, playable with my son asleep in my arms, and easily stopped/started. It's no wonder that while female players, many of which are moms (74% of moms play video games), play on a variety of devices, the majority plays on mobile devices <a href="http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/NPD-Mom-Gamer-Fact-Sheet-8-8-13.pdf">(ESA, 2015).</a>
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[[Go back.->Back to pumping (and playing).]]
[[Move forward.|Motherhood is a reoccurring theme in the game]]{
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In [[Season 3: *A New Frontier*|protected his children and prioritized their safety and happiness.]], I play as the teen Clementine, who is being taught to drive a stick by Kenny, a combative father who lost his son and wife and was subsequently and temporarily driven mad by his loss and grief. He recovered and became a devoted, adoptive father of the orphaned baby, AJ, who is sitting happily in the back seat.
<img alt="driving" img src="images/14.jpg" width="720" height="400">
During the end of Season 2, I was faced with a difficult decision: I had to choose between sparing him or Jane, a loner who was a strong fighter but did not work well with others, particularly Kenny.
Jane had done a malicious, unforgivable prank; in order to reveal Kenny's instability, she hid the newborn, AJ, and made it appear as he had been eaten or murdered. Kenny was furious and accused her of killing him. After a struggle, Kenny penned Jane to the ground, his knife at her throat.
I had to choose: should I shoot Kenny, or let him kill Jane? No matter what I choose, one of them would die.
I chose inaction, which spared the unstable father. This prevented Clementine from murdering someone she cared for, but also left her with (I believed to be) the best possible caregiver. Kenny, as unstable as he was, was devoted and loving; he would give his life to protect Clementine and the baby. Jane, who was stable and a fighter, had no love or responsibility to either of us. But in retrospect, I wonder how much of my decision was based off my history with my father, and how much weighed on the fact that our culture respects a quick-to-temper father and crucifies a [["detached" motherless woman]]. {
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The last thing Kenny ever did, was teach Clementine how to drive a stick. They sat in the car together, chatting and bonding. The light was warm, tinted with a hint of sepia. Kenny was in good spirits, fantasizing about better times in Florida when he could teach AJ, now a toddler, how to swim and fish. But then, moments of happiness are brief and fleeting in this world.
"CRAP!"
It's a walker, right in the middle of the highway. I (Clementine) swerve the car. I miss the walker and hit a tree. Kenny is thrown from the car. He is paralyzed. Walkers are coming. He is screaming.
"You gotta help A.J. Clem! I ain't letting you watch those fuckers chew me up".
In the easiest decision of the game series, I agree; I choose my response in a fraction of a second: I'll take care of A.J.
"A.J. will be safe with me.", Clementine cries, "I'll take great care of him, I promise."
"I know you will, Clementine. I wouldn't trust A.J. with anybody else. Now, GO!"
Clementine runs to the car and grabs the toddler, his chubby arms wrap around her neck. He is about the same size and age as my son, I realize, and I think about the feel of my son in my arms, his warmth and smell. His fragility. They run as Kenny is being eaten in the background. I am now crying *no* sobbing.
As the flashback fades, I reflect upon the past three seasons. I know I was right to save Kenny, who, despite his many misgivings, died a loving father, a hero.
And then, [[I Google]].
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If a player chooses Jane and shoots Kenny, Clementine's future is bleak. We first see Jane, angry, lecturing Clementine to not to trust others. A.J. is swaddled and small in Clementine's arms, suggesting it has only been a brief time since Kenny's death.
Later, Clementine discovers Jane hanging from a noose, turned, growling and grasping the air, a positive pregnancy test at her feet.
To Jane, motherhood is a punishment worse than death.
Kenny, even in the last moments of his life, [[protected his children and prioritized their safety and happiness.]]
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I'm concerned about A.J., I realize that he is no longer shown with Clementine outside of flashbacks. Could he be dead? A zombie? I can not handle losing him; I decide that if he is dead, I will not finish the game.
So I Google. I scour his Wikia and message boards on Steam and GameFAQs. There is nothing. His fate is unknown and will be revealed in Season 4. But for now, I can finish the season, knowing I will not witness another child's death.
This is one example of the many ways my [[media preferences]] have changed since becoming a mother.{
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Before having my son, my favorite shows and games were rich of drama and tragedy; *Game of Thrones* with its Red Wedding, *Downtown Abbey* with the heartbreaking loss of the feminist Sybil who died from childbirth, and *The Walking Dead*, with loss after heartbreaking loss. I've tried to continue to watch all that I used to love, but find these moments are much too hard for me to endure.
Before motherhood, I would cry and sob freely, blowing my nose, and hugging my husband; but there was always an understanding that this was fantasy — escapism. I would watch *The Walking Dead* and escape from my piles of grading and graduate work looming over my head, and experience what it was like to just focus on survival — food, water, protection, and shelter; forgoing complicated theories and imminent deadlines.
But since becoming a mother, I can't watch a child die without thinking of my own. While my tears are fewer in an attempt to stay strong, a mama bear, in the face of danger, the internal pain, is so much worse; my insides twist and my legs go weak. My immediate instinct is to cut the source, turn off the television, stop the game, shut my computer. Silence the danger. I wonder, is this how men, who are [[taught to repress their tears and anxiety]], feel all the time?
For similar reasons, I don't play games as much as I used to. So instead I read and listen to books and podcasts more often, although I do explore pieces of interactive fiction packaged in apps my phone. I think about other women who play games and understand why the majority of them prefer puzzles (Yee, 2017), and social games (Phan, Jardina, & Hoyle, 2012); games without death and heartbreak. It seems as if I needed stories to help me empathize and understand the human condition when I was younger, but now that I am a mother, I need entertainment to help me relax and forget about the dangers lurking in the human condition. I now understand the hordes of women who meditate through pixels forming gems and hard candy (Chess, 2012).
When I do play the dark video game dramas that I previously enjoyed, I find [[I play them differently.]]{
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[[Go back.|media preferences]]
[[Move forward.|I play them differently.]]{
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Congratulations! You've unlocked the chapter guide.
This game is meant to be played (somewhat) nonlinearly. Some paths are forced/controlled, but there are asides you are free to explore or ignore. Like in the Telltale series, this is designed to create an individual experiences for the player.
In the creation of this narrative, I started with clear, separate threads, but as I began knitting everything together, they started to tangle and overlap. This imperfect guide can help you discover unexplored threads and tangles.
If you would like to see (any of) the avenues you missed, here is a list of all threads/topics.
**I. Gameplay**
A. TWD: Season I
1. [[the beginning.]] The Walking Dead (TWD) Season I
2. [[the game]] About TWD
3. [[move on]] Return to playing Season I.
4. [[Lee looks up...]]
5. [[“Does it really matter?”]]
6. [[Continue.]]
7. [[react to various situations and characters]]
8. [[the end of the last episode]]
9. [[I've made a choice.]]
B. TWD: Season II
1. [[Return to playing.]]
2. [[The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
3. [[Clementine]]
4. [[Back to pumping (and playing).]]
5. [[Motherhood is a reoccurring theme in the game]]
C. TWD: Michonne
1. [[Continue playing.]]
D. TWD: A New Frontier (Season III)
1. [[A New Frontier]]
2. [[protected his children and prioritized their safety and happiness.]]
**II. Theoretical, Political, or Historical Asides**
A. Thoughts on unarmed Black Boys
1. [[I return to the game.]]
2. [[his mother.]]
3. [[I continue playing.]]
4. [[extremely difficult to write about the experiences of people of color]].
B. Feminine and Masculine Socialization
1. [[I portray Lee as calm, cooperative, and nurturing.]]
C. Gendered technologies
1. [[masculine technologies.]]
2. [[presumption that men are more technically advanced than women.]]
D. Gender & Games
1. [[games are counterproductive and unnecessary.]]
E. Technology and Motherhood
1. [[I am connected through tubes to a machine that milks my breasts, simultaneously providing relief and pain.]]
2. [[needs of mothers]]
3. [[when someone would encourage me to give birth outside of a hospital setting]]
4. [[privileged and arguably hypocritical perspective]]
F. Comparison of TWD 1 and Michonne
1. [[a game that flips the damsel in distress trope]]
G. Motherhood as a theme in TWD
1. [[Motherhood is a reoccurring theme in the game]]
2. [[The baby is gone.]]
H. Adventure Games
1. [[the "death" of adventure games]]
2. [[adventure games became available again]]
I. Lori's death in the comics
1. [[on Lori's death in the comics]]
J. Mothers' postpartum media consumption/habits
1. [[video game]].
2. [[the end.]]
3. [[time is now a commodity.]]
4. [[You have to shoot me.]]
K. Boys and emotions
1. [[taught to repress their tears and anxiety]]
L. Race and video games
1. [[this is evident in video games]]
M. Fatherhood and video games
1. [[portray fatherhood]]
N. Autoethnography
1. [[autoethnographic reflections]]
O. Gender biases in research/medicine
1. [[both on White middle class and Black low-income children*]]
**III. Personal Asides**
A. Anxieties in new motherhood
1. [[rewind and replay my own life.]]
2. [[My chest starts to feel tight, my muscles go tense]]
B. Early experience gaming
1. [[Of course, my prior gaming experiences may also contribute to my interpretations and co-constructions.]]
2. [[earliest memories of gaming]].
3. [[Why pretend to be Maid Marion, the princess, waiting to be rescued, when you can be the hero?]]
4. [[regularly outperform my male friends and relatives]]
C. Coping with an alcoholic father
1. [[“Adversity builds character”, my mother always tells me, “you’re my tough girl.”]]
2. [[bout of alcoholism]]
3. [[all of that dissipated when I became a parent.]]
4. [[always known you loved me.”]]
D. The birth of my son
1. [[on their back]]
E. My son at 13 months
1. [[And the worst never came.]]
F. A scary moment in motherhood
1. [[harrowing moment]]
G. My postpartum media consumption
1. [[video game]].
2. [[I Google]]
3. [[media preferences]]
4. [[the end.]]
**IV. Videos**
A. TWD Season 1 [[the game]]
B. [[That Dragon, Cancer]]{
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My dad died 6 years ago.
For a few years after he died, I would scream in my sleep. I mourned the father he was and was angry at the father he became. All of his transgressions were reawakened and flooded my brain: the spray of spittle on my face, the rich thick syrupy oil covering my mom's hair and nightgown, the sticky soda and broken plates. The dark house without power and the slow, discordant bangs from the piano as I shivered behind an unlockable door. The slurs and the scuffles and the words — the words that ate through me and shaped who I became.
Thrice my choices could have led to a different path. In the beginning, my parents fought on the floor, a tangle of hair and legs and screams. My father pulled out chunks of my mom's hair while she screamed for me to call 911. My father bellowed at me, forbade me to dial the numbers. I stood there frozen, 11 years old, holding the phone, and crying.
Another time, my mother packed her suitcase and told him she was leaving. I was 13. She did not offer to take me. On her way out the back door, my father collapsed on the couch, clutching his chest and moaning. I ran to him, crying. "He's dying mom, call 911! Call 911!" My mother refused, claimed he was faking. I sobbed and pleaded. She did not leave.
Years later, at 16, I called a friend of mine in the middle of an episode. She called child protective services who pulled me outside of class as all the kids stared and wondered. My face was hot with embarrassment, out of fear of the unknown, of abusive foster parents who could be worse because they do not love me, out of the acknowledgment that I can not afford college on my own, my choice was clear. "I am not being abused."
14 years later, I received a phone call from my mother. I was standing in our den and crumpled like a rag doll when I heard her voice. "Your father has had a heart attack. He's gone." I had just seen him a week before. I had hugged him in a loose, casual embrace. He videotaped my dog playing with water. When I replay the video, I focus on his chuckles and jokes, a voice from a body hidden behind the camera.
He had died while helping me. He had bought a hard drive as a gift and was copying over family photos. My mom stepped out of the shower and heard him calling for her. "I'm dying." He said. And then, "I need to turn off my computer". He reached over and pushed the power. He was gone.
As I drove to Fayetteville, waves of relief and despair came over me. It was over. But [[he was over]].
[[Go back.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
[[Jump forward.|Back to pumping (and playing).]]{
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To progress in the story, click on the [[blue hyperlinks]] to move forward in the narrative.
Go ahead. Click on it.
Can you not see it? Here it is again: [[blue hyperlinks]].
Do you not like the name? I can fix that: [[**CLICK HERE**|blue hyperlinks]]
Alright, I give up. Just stay here forever.
Seriously, why don't you want to read the story? Do you hate reading about babies? Do you hate me? Am I unlikable already?
If you promise to continue, I'll show you a picture of my dog reading *The Walking Dead*. Everyone loves dogs.
*Alright?*
Alright. Here he is:
<a href="https://imgur.com/VlBTjvQ"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/VlBTjvQl.jpg" title="source: imgur.com" /></a>
You can barely see him? FINE. [[ONE MORE.]]
What? You're a cat person? You're out of luck. SCROLL UP.
YOU WIN. YOU WIN THE GAME. HAPPY?
<a href="https://imgur.com/uMvA1zz"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/uMvA1zzl.jpg" title="source: imgur.com" /></a>
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My senior year of college, my father was hospitalized again. He had been in and out of the hospital for most of my life with surgeries and subsequent infections. My mom used to sleep in the hospital every night, refusing to leave his side. Once, he had stopped breathing because the thick paste of pneumonia filled his lungs. It was my mom who noticed, who alerted the doctors and saved his life.
This time, he had fallen down the basement stairs, drunk at 10:30 in the morning. He always drank when he cooked and had gotten up early to prepare a soup in a huge pot that he planned to take to neighbors and old friends.
His femur snapped when he fell. He laid there for hours, the extreme pain causing him to fall in and out of consciousness until my mom came home during her lunch break and dialed 911.
A mix of alcohol withdrawal and an allergic reaction to the morphine they pumped in his veins caused his mind to break. In the middle of the night after a few days in the hospital, he unscrewed the metal bar hanging over his hospital bed and scuffled down the hallway screaming and swinging the heavy weapon at nurses' heads. **"WHERE IS MY WIFE?" "WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?" "WHERE IS MY STUFF?"**
He believed the nurses were burglars and had kidnapped my mother, who he referred to as "a little girl he kept in a box." When I visited him, he was tied up and confused, chewing his tongue, doing complex math equations. He whispered, in a hurried voice, to untie him before they returned. At one point, he asked me to bring him a bowl of strawberries that we had picked from the backyard. He was washing them, he said, when they disappeared. I cupped my hands and walked over to him. "Here they are, dad." His eyes bulged and his mouth fell open in shock. "THEY'RE ALL GONE! WHERE ARE MY STRAWBERRIES?"
"Mom ate them, dad." My mother sat behind him, silent, head in hands. He struggled to turn to her, eyes wild with fury, hands pulling against the straps. I began to shake.
Later, as I put chapstick on his peeling lips and helped him to sip water, He turned and looked directly into my eyes. The room stopped spinning and I froze, water cup in hand. “I’ve always known you were one that truly loved me", he said.
That night I cried and heaved, curled on the bathroom floor.
[[Go back.->The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
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When I play tragic dramas now, I enjoy them less than I did before. In the past, I viewed drama as a way to live another life, to learn and transform with a character through their suffering. Dramas would tap into my endless empathy like a faucet, it would flow and I would relish in the escape from the ordinary.
When I first began watching *The Walking Dead*, my father was still alive, and I was applying for doctoral programs. While there were a few horror films I loved, I much preferred period pieces, fantasy, and whimsical, quirky independent films. I viewed zombies, however, as campy fun. In my early twenties, my friends and I would dress up as zombies for birthday parties and Halloween. We would stomp around and groan for brains.
The show, however, contained no campiness or whimsical characters. It was bleak, stark, but captivating. Possibly because of my father, I appreciated complex characters who were never truly evil or good, and I had a yearning to understand the factors that propelled people to become monsters. As I started my doctoral classes and grappled with the death of my father, I appreciated the escape the show gave me; I fantasized about what it would be like to only be concerned with survival: food, water, safety, opposed to theoretical complexities and impending deadlines. I envied their connection to the natural world and their avoidance of technology-induced migraines and eyestrains, along with their freedom of not being able to check Facebook and email every hour.
But after becoming a parent, the show, along with the game series, became another responsibility. The episodes filled my DVR and my inbox pinged with notification about game releases. I would watch/play in short bursts as I pumped, preventing me from fully becoming invested in the narrative. I would google plot twists to fully prepare myself for any potential heartbreak/anxiety triggers, and I would face moments of tragedy with a wall of strength, reminding myself "they are only characters, this is not real." Eventually, I stopped watching the series altogether.
During my postpartum *The Walking Dead* play I noticed a change in the way I interacted with the game. Like a young teen whose heart has been broken before, I am much more emotionally detached from the non-playable characters; I have built a wall that is impossible to break. In addition, I am more likely to respond to threats of violence with aggression and Mama Bear Rage. While part of this is likely due to the characters in the later seasons, I do sense an unwillingness to become fully absorbed in the story; as if there is a part of me that must always stay functional/alert in case of a real-life emergency. Previous to my pregnancy, a moment of tragedy would flood my body with emotions and I would relish the empathetic tears. Now, I do not cry, and I leave the game with a bitter taste in my mouth, angry that the game attempted to "trick" me into feeling things I did not want to experience.
This change within me suggests that not only are games experienced differently by different players, but different life experiences trigger different responses to the game. Narrative choices may prove to be effective or ineffective depending on a person's life and emotional state. I fought to save Larry, the racist father, and Kenny, the emotionally unstable adoptive dad, because of my love for my imperfect father. I cried when Larry died because it triggered my own feelings of loss, but the tragic death of the playable's character's niece/adoptive daughter in season 3 did not bring tears, instead, it made me angry and motivated me to turn off the game, a game I have not played since.
I found it very hard to replay season one; particularly [[the end.]]
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Games can test and influence our morality. Games, like Telltales' *The Walking Dead*, provide an "arena" (Flannagan, 2014) for us to play out our beliefs, values, and ideas. The games, however, are not free of politics; games provide instantaneous feedback, revealing consequences for our decisions. These consequences are written and constructed by the designers, relying on their understandings of human nature, their personal beliefs/values, and the larger cultural norms that the game belongs in. Games can serve as an extension of a morality tale; a fable that teaches us one person's (or culture's) perception of right from wrong, an extension that is much more persuasive than a simply told story because it responds to player input. Many players are motivated to achieve the "perfect game" with the best ending or the maximum number of points and will make those "right" decisions even if it goes against their natural instincts/beliefs. Players change their style of playing and the manner in which they interact with the gameworld and other characters based on the game's input and reward system.
[[Back.|I continue playing.]]{
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Lee's portrayal in *TWD* breaks from normative hegemonic representations of masculinity (Bell, Taylor, & Kampe, 2015) and typical portrayals of father/daughter relationships (Voorhees, 2016) in mainstream games.
Games with prominent father/child dynamics such as *The Last of Us* (Naughty Dog 2013), *BioShock Infinite* (Irrational Games 2013), and *Beyond Two Souls* (Quantic Dream, 2013), feature fathers who are dominant: controlling, and often emotionally distant (Voorhees, 2016; Cruea, 2017). While *The Last of Us*'s protagonist and father-figure, Joel, shows sensitivity at the beginning of the game and does allow his adoptive daughter Ellie some agency, he is largely an emotionally distant and militarized hypermasculine figure (Voorhees, 2016).
In contrast, Lee from *The Walking Dead* shows great sensitivity to Clementine. Players are given the option to show great vulnerability and care through their responses. Players can hug Clementine, tell her "I'll miss you." and bond by disclosing secrets about their backstory. The game encourages these moments of bonding by revealing "Clementine will remember that" after Lee does something particularly touching or shocking. While the players can choose responses that are a bit more emotionally distant i.e. "tough love", our prior studies found that even players who prefer hypermasculine, violent games, tend towards a softer, gentler portrayal of Lee (Bell, et al., 2015).
While there are games that portray competent father *and* mother characters (*Octodad*, Young Horses, 2013; *[[That Dragon, Cancer]]*, Numinous Games, 2016), these are small independent games that are atypical of mainstream titles. In most games, the mother is dead or absent. In *BioShock Infinite*, Elizabeth's mother died during childbirth. In *The Last of Us*, Joel's wife (Sarah's mother) is missing; it is not known whether she abandoned them or is dead. Ellie's (Joel's adoptive daughter) mother died one day after childbirth. Jodie's unsupportive and distant mother in *Beyond Two Souls* is comatose in a hospital. You can choose to kill her and end her suffering. Jodie's foster parents abandon her; her two male doctors serve as father figures for most of her childhood. In the case of *TWD*, while there are characters who are mothers, Clementine's own mother and father is dead, and Lee becomes her only parent. This suggests that in order for a father to serve a more nurturing, feminized role, the mother must be erased from the narrative.
[[Go back.->Back to pumping (and playing).]]
[[Move forward.|Motherhood is a reoccurring theme in the game]]{
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<img alt="gun" img src="images/21.jpg"”>
At the end of *The Walking Dead: Season One*, Lee is infected.
Clementine drags Lee's unconscious body into an abandoned building, the door longs behind her. He wakes, and you realize you are both trapped inside.
You reveal your bite, that you're dying. You urge Clementine to find an escape, and you walk her through the necessary steps of saving herself from a walker, shooting the walker, and securing keys and a gun. You may choose to have her handcuff you in case you turn; if you do, you cannot give her one last hug.
And then you begin to die.
As Clementine stood over me (Lee), quivering, the gun heavy and large in her small, fragile, hands, I chose my words carefully. “You’re strong, Clem. You can do anything.”
“But, I’m little.” Her voice is small. She is so young. So very, very, young.
“That don’t mean nothing. You’re going to see bad stuff, but it’s okay.”
She looks down, still shaking. "My parents. It's so horrible."
"I can't imagine, sweet pea." *My mother always called me sweet pea.* Lee's voice is soft, but his face is etched with pain and regret.
She cries, "And now...you? PLEASE...please don't be one of them. Please don't become a walker."
"There's only one thing you can do. You know that."
"I don't know if I can."
<div class="aliens">"**Leave me.**"</div>
[[You have to shoot me.]]
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As new parents, we often barter/negotiate for more time. Limited by our nation's poor parental leave policies, we need time to work, cook, sleep, clean, exercise. My husband will occasionally request time for play, specifically, to socialize with his friends. While this time is infrequent and at convenient times, I, in turn, have rarely requested time away for play. I went to a movie by myself, once, and it was a blissful, but a slightly guilt-inducing experience.
My mom visited us on mother's day and remarked that my relationship with my husband is one of the best ones she has ever seen. I suspect that my mom, who has always handled nearly all of the domestic duties in her households, was commenting less on our interpersonal interactions and more on our ability to divide and conquer all domestic tasks. My husband handles much (but not all) of the cleaning/cooking/grocery shopping while I focus on entertaining/teaching our son. This is because we play to our strengths; I'm more imaginative and engaging, my husband has an excellent memory and is a more efficient worker. Like many couples, we have negotiated and settled on specific roles that seem arbitrary but are thoughtfully divided. I clean the tub (I do it better), so my husband cleans the sink/toilet in trade. I recognize that while our relationship is reflective of a growing trend of a "growing gender convergence" (Emslie & Hunt, 2008), it is much more equitable than most households. Women, even those who work outside the home, still perform most of the household's domestic (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015; Tang & Cousins, 2005) and emotional labor (Strazdins & Broom, 2004). In a 2015 survey through the Bureau of Labor, women were revealed to spend 83% of the day on household activities, men 65%. On a typical day, 19% of men did housework, compared with 49% of women. Women spent over twice as long bathing/feeding children, and men were more likely to exercise or play; 21 percent of men in comparison to 16% of women.
There is a need for adults to engage in play; researchers theorize that children use play to conduct social experiments and simulate consequences (Erickson, 1977; Granic, Lobel, & Engels, 2014) they construct scenarios, problem-solve, and experience repercussions from their decisions (Piaget, 1962). It does not seem like such a stretch that adults can also benefit from make-believe problem-solving through video game play (Granic, et al., 2014) such as caring for an orphaned girl in the zombie apocalypse, for similar purposes. *TWD* constructs various scenarios that allow players to "test" their ideal responses and witness the consequences; they can gauge character responses and survival rates. My act of rewinding aided me — I was able to not only see my consequences but also foresee the repercussions of the other possible avenues of choice.
*The Walking Dead* showed me that it was useful to teach Clementine to be independent. If I showed her how to use a gun, she saved me in a later episode. No matter my choices, Clementine is left to fight alone at various points. She runs away, she is separated from you, she is kidnapped, she is orphaned. I did not note any consequences from being truthful and frank about Clementine's new reality, but there were numerous ones for sheltering her. This was evident in Season 2, when you meet a young girl, Sarah, who, unlike Clementine, has not been taught to fight or survive and must depend on adults (and Clementine) to protect her. She ends up falling victim to her own naiveté.
But still, in [[the end of the last episode]], when you find yourself teaching Clementine her final lessons, and you must decide what person she will become, most players are not willing to relinquish control until they are incapable. For the final act, you may choose to direct her or if you stay silent, she will make her own decision. An option that I did not even consider. {
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[[Next. ->Epilogue]]
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When my father died, they asked us if we wanted to see his body "one last time." I refused. I sat, awkwardly alone with the funeral director as the rest of my family left to view him. They came back, some mascara streaked and tear-stained, others with stony expressions. I sensed no relief, no peace.
I've seen my father in many different facets of his self, the loving, devoted daddy, the charismatic storyteller, the talented cook, the technological wiz, the vulnerable, frail, patient, the unrelenting bully. But this is one transformation I do not want memory of; the abandoned shell of the many fathers I knew and love.
While I can't imagine making an 8-year-old girl shoot a man she loves and cares for as a father, I don’t want Clementine to know me as a monster.
I wonder if Lee is scared to die, but I push the thought away and decide to suppress Lee’s (or my own?) fear in order to protect Clementine from unknown future harm, even if it risks temporary trauma.
Parents must choose how to balance our inherent desire to shelter and protect while fostering independence and resiliency from inevitable defeats. I don’t know the challenges my son and I will face in the future, but in this one, brief moment, [[I've made a choice.]]
The world is full of monsters and we must prepare our children.{
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On my way home from work, I listened to a *Hidden Brain* (NPR, 2017) podcast that explored why more police officers shoot unarmed Black boys than White ones. *Implicit bias.* Psychology researcher Mahazarin Banaji said we all have bias resulting from our social groups/culture, and in timed, instantaneous decisions, our inherent bias becomes apparent. But if we were to be given *more* time, even an additional second to think through our decision, we can fight that bias, rationalize, and make better decisions.
Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) developed a series of Implicit Association Tests that reveal to what extent we carry these biases. Follow-up research by Hehman found that in areas with a greater inherent bias against Black Americans, (as predicted by the IAT), more Black Americans were shot by police officers.
I took a few of the tests. You are tasked with sorting things, faces, and words into categories: sciences and liberal arts; men and women; Black and White faces; and weapons and harmless objects. If you are faster at sorting two irrelevant groupings over another, say, women with liberal arts, or Black men with weapons, and are slower with other groupings such as men with liberal arts, or White men with weapons, it suggests you carry a bias. My results suggested I hold no bias for Black faces and weapons. But it's impossible to unpack whether my results stem from my unwillingness to see Black faces as dangerous, or whether my carefully honed gaming skills and sharpened reflexes influenced my results.
*The Walking Dead*, with its timed decisions and challenging moral quandaries, could reveal our implicit biases in more realistic ways. The game encourages (in some players) emotional investment and our decisions are timed with high stakes. Our choices reveal whether we would save a racist over a rich money laundere, whether we would rescue a man or a woman, provide food for children or eat it ourselves, or steal from a stranger to feed our own starving child. The game reveals the consequences of our biases, but unlike real life, we can rewind and play again.
Banaji suggests that "in-the-moment reminders" can help steer us away from making decisions based off inherent bias. Because White patients are prescribed more painkillers than Black, despite them reporting the same symptoms, she suggests a little pop-up should appear in the system, suggesting that doctors typically prescribe x amount for Black men and x amount for White.
*Clementine will remember that.*
The game works to break the player's inherent bias that Black Men are dangerous by showing us a devoted father, by encouraging us to care for us, and by cutting to the character who serves as a moral compass, Clementine, and revealing, in white text at the bottom of the screen the gentle reminder that our choices shape our children. "[[Clementine will remember that.|parenting]]"
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As a white, middle-class, cis-gender, heterosexual woman with all the privilege those identities provide, I find it very difficult to write about the stories, lives, and representations of Black men and women. I will never know what it is like to walk the streets with brown skin; I have read and listened to others recount the prejudice and injustices that have been forced upon them and have seen the cold look given by racist White neighbors and relatives when encountering a Black body in their neighborhood, but the world people of color experience will always be foreign to me; it is a world I have never visited and will never be able to see. Therefore, I recognize that I am incapable of giving true justice to their stories.
And yet, I believe that it is unfair to place the burden of education and awareness solely on the shoulders of the marginalized; and that without allies, their journey will be even more sluggish and difficult. So I try. I fumble forward in an attempt to "unlearn" my privilege (Spivak, 1990), in hope that through all my spoils, my contribution brings a small piece of awareness of not only what we know as researchers, but awareness of all the things we cannot possibly see.
[[Back.|I return to the game.]]{
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If you don't make a choice or choose too slowly, Clementine decides whether to shoot Lee.
She considers everything Lee modeled and taught her throughout the season when making her decision. In my multiple playthroughs, I never considered letting Clementine choose for herself; I didn't even fathom it was a possibility. *The Walking Dead* series designer Jake Rodkin said the option is there for players who want to be a "big ass" and "poke" at Clementine. The idea makes him feel "really horrible". (Klepek, 9 January 2013).
But is it horrible to give Clementine agency? To trust that she is capable enough of deciding whether or not she could handle the burden of killing or leaving you?
I rebooted the game and this time, I let Clementine decide.
She chose to walk away.
Lee agrees with her decision; killing people changes you, he says, and only do it whenever necessary. She touches my hand in a moment of tenderness and after some final words, she leaves. The ending is quiet, much more gentle than my chosen end.
I shut down my computer and sit in the darkened room. I think about how I led Clementine to make a different decision than I made for her. I wonder whether I should trust my [[instinctual actions or my reasoning]].
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Special thanks to my dissertation committee, Dr. Sarah Stein, Dr. Nick Taylor, Dr. Chris Poulos, and Dr. Devin Orgeron. If it wasn't for your help, support, guidance, and amazing suggestions, none of this would be possible.
I would also like to thank my family for their support and love throughout my Ph.D. journey. I also hope they forgive me for disclosing some of our family's darkest secrets. My intent is not to exploit our pain, but rather to break them apart in hope that it will aid in healing our hearts and help shed light on who we are.
I'd like to begin with a passage from Poulos (2008), taken from his autoethnographic article that explored the practice of family secret-keeping and the value in setting those secrets free.
<a href="http://imgur.com/pz4thxB"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/pz4thxBl.png" title="source: imgur.com" /></a>{
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In episode two, Lee and his group escape from the vicious St. John family. The St. Johns pretend to nurse Lee’s friend back to health, but instead, they are harvesting his arms and legs for food. After Lee discovers their horrible secret, the St. Johns lock his group in a room. In attempt to escape, Lee takes a risk and attacks one of the brothers, Danny. Lee succeeds and is left with a choice whether or not to kill him in self defense. If Lee strikes the fatal blow, the camera reveals young Clementine, screaming “No!” in horror. Telltale revealed statistics for the episode on a video titled “The Walking Dead - Episode 3 Stats Trailer” dated August 13th, 2012. 55% of players, at that time, killed Danny, and 45% spared him. After that scene, Lee encounters Danny’s brother, Andy St. John. Lee overcomes Andy and begins punching him. In contrast to Danny, the majority of players choose to hit Andy but few actually kill him, even though he may potentially pose a threat in the future. Only 20% of players kill Andy; 80% choose to spare his life. What’s even more interesting, is that the majority of players chose to stop punching when they realize that Clementine is watching. The senior director of marketing, Richard Iggo commented on this point:
In that scene, you wail away on him until you see a wide-angle shot of the other survivors watching you including the impressionable Clementine. The camera then cuts back to a first-person perspective, and you can continue to strike, but what we see is that most people stop. They realize that they’re being watched and that people are forming an opinion of them right there, and most people don’t want to be seen as a monster even in light of what the St. John family did. Most people take the higher ground, get up, walk away, and leave Andy to his fate (para 7).
A subtle, quick reminder that Clementine is watching motivates the majority of players to spare Andy’s life. Clementine serves as a moral compass to the character; she represents compassion, empathy, and fairness.
In essence, the game is all about [[parenting]]. {
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In essence, the game is all about parenting.
*The Walking Dead* reminds me that while we live in a dangerous world with humans that can be more monstrous than the undead, we can all be a little monstrous as well. And for that reason alone, it likely increased my anxieties surrounding parenting. It made me hyper aware of our own vulnerabilities and imperfections as teachers and leaders. But it also pushed me to realize that while we must protect our children, we have to foster resilience, strength, and independence. If you choose to cut Clementine's hair and teach her how to shoot a gun, she will save you in a future episode. No matter what you do, you will abandon her. She will run away, become kidnapped, and orphaned. But what matters is whether or not you taught her the skills she needed to problem solve and survive those various obstacles.
This becomes most apparent in season two when the player is introduced to Clementine's antithesis. Her name is Sarah, and she has been sheltered; stored away from all the death, violence, and betrayal. Her father shows no less love for her than Lee did for Clementine, but Sarah has been shaped by his choices. She is emotionally fragile and defenseless and does not survive the apocalypse. She serves as a reminder of what Clementine could have been if Lee (and the player) had been a different man.
*The Walking Dead* encourages me to reflect on and critique my parenting choices. It pushes me to recognize that my actions and words will shape my son and while mistakes are inevitable, it is imperative I learn from them. It also makes me realize that while the large decisions matter as much as the small ones; a casual remark or minor interaction may prove to be more consequential than we realize.
**Congratulations!** You have successfully completed the game and unlocked the [[chapter guide]]. Click through it to see what you may have missed.
You may also check out my [[references.]]
Or, [[START A NEW GAME|the beginning.]]
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When my son was tiny and suckling, and I was scrolling in my news feed, a news article about a scientific study caught my eye. An experiment on mice raised the possibility that fear is not just taught, but inherited (Dias & Ressler, 2014). Male mice were taught to be fearful of a floral fragrance, acetophenone, by associating it with a shock. Researchers found that two generations later, their grandchildren showed the same fear response, even though neither their children or grandchildren were fear conditioned. While we are not mice and our typical traumas are more complex than shock therapy, it raises the possibility that we carry with us the trauma of our grandparents’ lives — their pain and loss from World War II, their stress, worry, and starvation during the depression, the civil injustices of people of color and women throughout history, all of which are still pulsing in our DNA, concealed in layers of tissue and blood. We may not realize the fear and anxiety is lurking, until a triggering event which stirs and awakens the cries of our ancestors.
Now I am worried that the weight I carry has in turn been gifted to my newborn son, who is so small and fragile, brought into the world with jaundiced skin and bird-like bones and inhales the world in raspy, labored puffs of air.
I slow my breathing and try to focus on the slow intake of air and the rising of my chest.
[[Go back.->My chest starts to feel tight, my muscles go tense]]
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"I can't believe I got beat by a girl!", he muttered, his long face drawn into a scowl. I stared at him, hard, silent, but only for a moment. I was not known to take insults quietly.
This wasn't the first time we had played together, and this was not the first time I had won. The adults loved to tell the story about the afternoon when they were sitting in my grandparents' living room chatting, legs crossed, sipping on ice tea in crystal glasses. He came running into the room, pitter-patter, and I, a year younger and barely out of diapers, followed, my smaller feet slapping the ground, clumsy but fast. I tackled him, *hard*; his small, toddler body hitting the floor with a thud. He cried. I walked away.
We had known each other since birth, and throughout our childhood we battled bad guys with controllers and perfected our ninja kicks in the backyard. We seemed all smiles and high-fives as we would help each other get through tricky levels and celebrate our successes, but there was always the smallest hint of tension. I liked to color out of the lines, but he insisted I had to methodically outline the black lines with strong, thick crayoned strokes. So in turn, when he visited my house, I insisted that he had to break rules and scribble beyond the markings, which he obeyed. *Only fair.*
One day, my half-sister, his mother, told us about the time she turned to him in the car and said, "You know she's your aunt, right?" He looks up, his nose wrinkling, "Don't tell her that. She'd boss me 'round even more." An uproar of laughter, but not from me.
As we grew larger, my father, proud of my accomplishments, would try to pit us against each other, stoke the competition, push me further. As we grew from pups into ourselves, we learned to present as a united front, making jabs back at my father who did not appreciate the humor.
But still, in that one moment, with his scowl and muttering, he revealed that I was just a girl. And because girls are inferior, his self-esteem was wounded when he proved less capable than the incapable. A rung below.
So in turn, it became my mission to shatter his ego over. and over. Until he woke to the truth that little girls can conquer or until he broke into a billion tiny shards of misogyny.
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Despite there being some research on low-income Black children (Leaper, Tenenbaum, & Shaffer, 1999), the majority of research focuses on the experiences of White middle-class boys and girls and do not account for race, sexuality, and class. Many post-positivistic studies ignore race altogether, citing that there is no biological differences between races (James & Tucker, 2003); this, however, prevents us from learning the culturally-constructed differences that shape the world-views and interactions of people of color (Orbuch, & Fine, 2003).
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I used to spend recesses alone, hanging upside down on the horizontal bars. I liked the way the world looked while upside-down, all sand and sky; my own unique reality. As I would dangle, the children would play: the girls would giggle and run, the boys quick at their heels. It was the same routine every day. We would walk to the playground in our little lines, our feet marching in brightly colored sneakers dulled by grime and sandy dust. Our teacher would release us and BAM — they would run, bursting out of the line like a flock of birds, circling the playground until they broke off into pairs: one boy each chasing one girl.
Over time, I began to grow more tired of their antics. The boys would always chase the girls, the girls would always run, never fight, and no matter what, the boys would *never* catch them.
It was time to intervene. I gathered the girls.
I counseled them in hushed whispers on top of the playground equipment. "You're our secret weapon", they replied.
I took off, running as fast as my small feet could take me. It only took a moment before he was behind me: a boy, small framed, pale skin, brown hair clipped into a bowl cut, quick at my heels.
But I stopped. My sneakers kicking up sand and dust all around us. I whirled around, the dust settling, my hair whipping the air. He stared, open-mouthed. I lunged, stomping the ground. He jumped back, eyes widening. "What are you going to do now?" I yelled, "You caught me!"
We stood there for a moment, at a stand-off. And then he made a move.
He turned and ran.
A smile grew on my face. I took off, my feet pounding the ground. I caught up to him as he climbed the steps of the slide. I clawed at the leg of his pants and pulled. Hard. He fell.
"See!" I cried out. "You can't just chase someone. You have to DO something."
It wasn't long before I had them all corralled to the back of the playground. I stamped my foot, lunged forward. The boys shuddered, jumped back.
"Krissy....!" My teacher called out, huddling with another teacher, a friend. Their hands covered their mouths, shoulders shaking, stifling laughter.
I crossed my arms around my small frame and nodded, turned around and walked off.
After recess, I walked into the coat closet. A popular boy twice my size scrambled away, begging me not to hurt him.
"Don't worry," I smiled warmly, genuinely. "I only turn into that monster at recess."
[[Back.|Continue.]]
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[[Epilogue|Reflections]]
This is the white card.
Click to go to [[light gray]]
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<------ Use the **back button** on the page to go backwards one page at a time. You can click it as many times as you like; if you click it enough times, it will eventually take you back to the beginning. **DO NOT** click the back button on your browser; that will take you to the start of the page.
Generally, you can tell how far away from the main story you are by how dark the background is. I'll show you. Click on [[this link.]]
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**CLICK ON THE DOG.**
[[<img src="https://i.imgur.com/CTDnDT1l.jpg">->the beginning.]]
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See how the page has darkened even more?
Let's click on [[one more.]] {
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Alright. [[Another?]]{
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[[Let's make it even darker.]]{
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Let's go back to the story. You can click the back button six times to get back to the first page.
Or, just click on this link and I'll teleport you back: [[go back.|Home]]
Or skip ahead to the next card by clicking on: [[continue.|the beginning.]] Sometimes this link may be titled [[move forward|the beginning.]]", or [[jump forward|the beginning.]]", but they will all produce the same outcome: clicking on them will remove you from the aside discussion and will push you one step ahead in the main path of the story.
[[Go back|Home]], [[back,|Home]], or [[return|Home]] will not push you one step backwards, instead it will transport you all the way back to the card that is part of the main path of the story. If you want to only go back one page at a time, you should use the arrow in the top left corner of the page (remember, do not use the back button in your browser)!
You should know that if you click on the go back or move forward buttons, you may end up missing passages which are linked in the body of the document. But this is your play experience, so explore as much or as little as you'd like.{
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Good. [[Here's the last one.]] I promise.{
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It took me 3 years to feel like myself again. Little things would trigger intense moments of grief. I broke down sobbing because a man, Jerry, from the comedy Parks and Recreation, had a "fart attack" and was hospitalized. When the father-figure from The Walking Dead television series, Herschel, was beheaded, I was inconsolable. During my play of *The Walking Dead* season one, I desperately tried to save the racist asshole, Larry, a father of an adult woman who was dying of a heart attack. I was devastated when I failed.
But the grief eased. Five years after his death, I discovered I was pregnant, with a boy. My in-laws, who knew nothing of my father's drinking, asked if I would name my son after my father. I smiled, wistfully, "The world can only handle one, I think."
I was determined: my son would be different. But still, as my bump grew, I missed my father. I thought of how he used to speak of my future children. Before every surgery, and after every piece of bad news, he would look me in the eyes and promise he would stay alive long enough to meet my children. There are some things parents can't promise.
Once my son was born and I experienced the sleepless nights, the frustration, and the intense, all-consuming love, I began to understand the inevitable fallibility we face as parents. I remembered the father that visited me towards the end of his life, the one that had stopped drinking but still struggled with paranoia and memory loss. He was frail and tender and had looked up at me with fear and regret.
“Now, your mother said something to me, and I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but she said that I said something to you when you were in high school, something about killing you or wishing you were dead, or something like that?"
My instinct was to protect him from his own monster, but I stood firm, out of a selfish need for vindication. "You did."
He asked if it had happened in my bedroom, as if the context mattered, or maybe it was to jog a memory. "The livingroom", I told him. He began to cry. “Honey, I am so sorry I said that to you.”
“It’s okay Dad. You didn’t mean it.” Hot tears rolled down my face.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, I don’t remember, but it’s no excuse, I should've never said that.”
“Things were different then, Dad, you were drinking, and besides, I’ve [[always known you loved me.”]]
[[Go back.|The Walking Dead, Season Two.]]
[[Jump forward.|Back to pumping (and playing).]]