A Florida Man Named Kenny: The Genius of the Neutrality Punisher in Telltale’s The Walking Dead
The adventure game genre (in the line of King’s Quest, Grim Fandango, and Monkey Island), declining in popularity through the 1990s and functionally nonexistent through the 2000s, saw a renaissance in the 2010s thanks largely to the efforts of a now-defunct studio called Telltale Games. Telltale was catapulted to popularity by riding the wave of the Walking Dead franchise, producing a modern advancement of old point-and-click adventure games set in the Walking Dead universe but featuring a cast of largely original characters.
What sets Telltale’s The Walking Dead apart from older games in this style is the emphasis on narrative. The game tells you, right from the start: “This game adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play.” Choices the player makes at key moments carry forward, and the consequences matter in ways big and small. Certain characters can die, or lose faith in you, or be heartened by your support. But there is one character who is absolutely key to the game working the way it does: Kenny.
Kenny is a neutrality punisher.
Kenny is present from almost the beginning of the game and is one of the only characters who accompanies you to (nearly, depending) the end of your journey. And Kenny is an important narrative and game design element because he imposes a specific kind of restriction on the player: When Kenny is involved, you are not allowed to be reasonable.
The primary way the player interacts with The Walking Dead is through dialogue. The player has a certain amount of time to select from a preset wheel of four dialogue choices, one of which is almost always silence. When two characters argue and put your player character, Lee, in the middle, the options almost always boil down to silence, supporting one side, supporting the other side, or remaining neutral. Remaining neutral is often an attractive option; when people are screaming at each other, telling everyone to calm down and keep a level head seems like the way to go. Enter Kenny.
Kenny is a part, if not the source of, the majority of arguments in the game. He is strong-willed, stubborn, and highly protective of his family. Once he gets his heart set on an idea, he will accept no quarter in taking pains to retrieve it. And if you’re in Kenny’s good graces, he treats you with the same fierce loyalty he expresses toward his most beloved people. But these are the narrative reasons that Kenny acts the way he does. I’m more interested in the genius mechanical design of Kenny.
Throughout Season One of The Walking Dead, Kenny is at odds with Larry, an older, angry guy with a heart problem. Larry is, to put it frankly, an asshole. But whenever he and Kenny get into it, if you attempt to remain neutral, Kenny will mention it afterwards. He’ll say you didn’t have his back, that you didn’t support him when it counted, and technically, he’s right. Kenny punishes sitting on the fence.
Given that the game only offers options to the player of what to say, and the player’s responses cannot be created from scratch (such a system is only theoretically even possible), the player will never be in full control of the narrative. The designers have to consider what kinds of things the player would want to be able to express, and when it comes to an argument, it makes sense to include the options mentioned above. If cooler heads always prevailed, the onus would be on the designers to fabricate scenarios where neutrality is impossible. There are a few ways to do this, but none seem very exciting when given even a bit of thought.
For example, one could simply take the option away from the player and not allow them to attempt to be neutral, which rings hollow unless your character is supremely unreasonable. One could make the arguing characters incessantly demanding, forcing the player to choose by bringing the player character into the conflicts unfairly. This would wear thin and would make all of the characters seem to have the same personality type, always looking to the player to solve problems rather than ever attempting to solve them themselves, leading to an empty sort of characterization. Or one could restrict the choices the player makes to only being circumstantial and action-oriented rather than dialogue-based, which also restricts the number of choices the player gets to make and the narrative fabric the developers have to play with.
Telltale solved this problem with Kenny and set forth the blueprint for the neutrality punisher.
As a tool, the neutrality punisher has a few inherent pitfalls. The first and most obvious is that the character who serves that purpose runs the risk of becoming extremely unlikable. If they always demand that you side with them and punish you with admonition when you don’t, they will seem unreasonable and impossible to please. Telltale solves this problem in some interesting ways:
One, they make Kenny likable outside of these moments. He cares deeply for his family, he is kind to Lee’s surrogate child, Clementine, and he’s funny when things are going well. These things go a long way toward a player forgiving his harsher qualities.
Two, Kenny is one ride-or-die motherfucker. If you back Kenny, he will back you, pretty much no matter what. He tells you early on that he always has his friends’ backs. This is true, and it’s a signal to the player that the decisions they make can be rewarded as well as punished, usually by different characters. If the player is going to be punished for neutrality, they should also be rewarded by the neutrality punisher for not remaining neutral. This is a necessary counterbalance and softens Kenny’s edges quite a bit.
The second pitfall is that a character always behaving in one specific way often makes them seem flat. You mean Kenny never gives ground, never forgives you for not siding with him? Well, not exactly. Telltale’s The Walking Dead keeps track of lots of decisions, and they all sway a sort of compass of how much a character likes/trusts your player character. Certain decisions also mark permanent flags within a character’s programming, things they will never forget no matter what. The decisions not to side with Kenny are of the second type, but they are not the only thing that determines how he acts toward you. It is still possible to have Kenny accompany you to the end of the game even if you never backed him in key moments as long as you’re kind and encouraging toward his family throughout the rest of the game. The complexity of the system driving Kenny (and all NPCs in the game) allows for character decisions that are surprising, but are able to be traced back to interactions you’ve had with them.
Whether or not Telltale recognized that Kenny’s role as a neutrality punisher is key to why the game works so well, they definitely knew that something about Kenny was important, because they brought him back in the second season of The Walking Dead game to serve a very similar function. The third season of The Walking Dead game is widely regarded as the worst of the four, and I think a large reason why is the lack of a neutrality punisher. I found myself wondering why Javier, the player character, couldn’t just explain certain things in a reasonable way, and I think it’s because the writers had to manufacture tension because there wasn’t enough in the NPC interactions. The lack of a neutrality punisher hurts the game.
Other modern adventure games have made use of this archetype as well. Supermassive’s Until Dawn features a character named Emily, a “mean girl” archetype who essentially demands that her new boyfriend, Matt, agree with everything she says. In fact, there are disastrous narrative and gameplay consequences, including Matt’s death, that can occur if you don’t agree with her in some instances where she is being unreasonable. For this reason, Matt is often considered the most difficult character to keep alive and most players lose him on the first playthrough. Until Dawn, despite being a game with a radically different tone and goals compared to The Walking Dead, makes use of the neutrality punisher to reinforce its own system of actions and consequences.
The neutrality punisher is a key reason why certain modern, narrative-driven adventure games succeed where others fail. These games often generate tension by creating scenarios with no “correct” answer and forcing the player to choose anyway. The neutrality punisher ensures that this is possible without curtailing the options available to the player. Telltale, through Kenny, established an important structural element that allows narrative adventure games to be tense and character-driven while maintaining a strong marriage between the mechanics of the game and its story, and in doing so created one of the most compelling videogame NPCs of all time. God bless Kenny.
