Towards a More Complex Form of Moral Choice in Video Games: ‘The Wolf Among Us’

And I’m back in my Tuesday slot with my PopMatters column, looking a little in depth on a single choice from The Wolf Among Us.

On the podcast all three of us have been a little down on the choices in The Wolf Among Us as they don’t feel as debatable or as in depth as we would like. I’ve heard this sentiment echoed elsewhere on the internet. And for the most part it does seem that The Wolf Among Us isn’t providing the same if not quality then style of choice we quickly became accustomed to in The Walking Dead. However, The Wolf Among Us isn’t trying to be another The Walking Dead. It’s narrative and character needs are very different and the choices reflect that.

But on the other hand, I don’t necessarily agree that the choices in The Wolf Among Us are lesser. I feel that because they don’t deal with the fulfillment of baser needs in a crumbling infrastructure, the choices need far more set up to interweave the complexity that we’ve become quickly accustomed to. That requires a lot of set up. This one choice I decide to focus on comes near the end of episode 3 and requires nearly all of the preceding scenes to fully make sense.

I explain the complexity of the choice and several different compounding elements that lead into it and how that complexity makes a better moral choice in part because it ends up being such a rare thing in the game itself. Incidentally, I did not come up with that title.