T w e n t y S i d e d

So we’re trapped in a freezer. Larry is having some sort of unspecified heart trouble. He might die. Me might already be effectively dead. If he dies, then after some unknown (but short) interval he will rise again as zombiehulk. Lilly is performing CPR on him and wants help. Kenny wants to bash his brains in with one of these salt bricks.

So… what do you do?

The problem here is that the situation is constructed around a few common misconceptions regarding heart failure and CPR. Abnaxis posted a comment in Episode 9, which I will quote here:

[…] you also need to understand that the purpose of (civilian) CPR is not to restart the victim's heart, it is to keep blood flowing to their brain to keep them alive long enough for the professionals with defibrillators and epinephrin to show up and take over. That is why the first priority should always, always be to call pramedics, even if you have to pause resuscitating to do it (preferably you tell someone else to do it while you start resuscitating).

For my reference, I only really have my training, although the first section of this wiki article says what I am going for. Virtually every other CPR training material says the same thing: the purpose of CPR is to keep people alive for a few minutes longer, because brain damage starts after 4 minutes of no circulation, and the average EMT response time is 10-15 minutes.

As for the article you quoted, that is intended for medical professionals in a hospital setting. Doctors don't get to wait for medical professionals to show up, they are the medical professionals, with the training and knowledge required to recognize the (extremely few) cases in which CPR might have a chance to restart a stopped heart.

All of these points do not apply to the situation we are talking about. Lee, et. al., are certainly not medical professionals. There are no EMTs alive, let alone any coming. […]

For my part, I didn’t know any of this. I took the situation at face value, that the CPR could plausibly revive him and we were simply refusing to risk our lives to save his. But regardless of whether or not CPR can actually save his life, all three characters believe that it can and they don’t have access to Wikipedia. Like shocking a flatline , it’s a bit of medical nonsense that has permeated popular culture because of its usefulness as a storytelling device.

There’s no way for them to know that they’re wrong, so they react to the scenario just like most uninformed people do. On the other hand, This is made more complex by the fact that there’s some combination of actions that will result in Larry opening his eyes just as the block comes down. So in the reality we see here, Larry is unrealistically revived by CPR. This makes a mess of the discussion among the audience, since the “what would you do in this situation” is so undefined. What would I do in this situation in the real world (where CPR only staves off brain death until the paramedics arrive) could differ from what I would do in this world (where CPR revives someone with no pulse) and we don’t know the parameters of how zombification works or how long it takes.

Also worth reading is this comment by anaphysik, regarding how nitroglycerin pills work.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Okay, so we suspect something might be amiss at this farm. This suspicion is so strong that we’re willing to behave very suspiciously ourselves, to the point of committing acts that could provoke our hosts to violence. Then we sabotage the fence, which is keeping us safe from walkers. So we’re pissing off our hosts and lowering our defenses against zombies, right as night approaches. If the danger is so strong that we’re willing to risk all of this, then… why are we still here?

Because we’re hungry. Because Larry is a stupid dumb idiot and a horrible judge of character who wants to stay. Because Mark is here and we can’t ditch him.

This game does a really good job of riding that line between “this is a very risky thing to do” and “this is an obviously stupid course of action”. If you don’t go far enough as a writer, the story feels flat and boring. If you go too far then the audience rejects the whole thing as absurd. Right between those points is where you get dramatic tension.

I thought that cutting the power to the generator was a dumb thing to do, but it was plausibly dumb. I could believe that a group of people might behave this way if pushed into this situation. I did sort of resent having to do it myself, though.

In a TV show, you can have the main characters do things while the audience looks at them and says, “This won’t end well.” It’s much harder to do in a game, because the audience is being asked to perpetrate the act that they perceive to be foolish. I don’t claim that The Walking Dead never made any mistakes with this balancing act, but it’s still some really impressive work.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

As Rutskarn blabed at the top of the episode, he’s right now in the depths of the Aunty Paladin’s Kid-Helping Extravaganza, a week-long marathon of tabletop gaming and chicanery, all in the name of helping tiny baby children peoples. I’d suggest you avoid the official webpage, which is nothing more than information and a link to the stream in question where you can watch the endless cavalcade of 24/7 gaming for free. You don’t want that. If you did go to the stream, someone in the chat might be able to explain to you what a “pygmy space moose” is, how it ties into the game they played earlier, and how it relates to me.

So, again, just stay here and watch spoiler Warning and don’t bother with Aunty Paladin’s Kid-Helping Extravaganza.

Also, this post was supposed to go up yesterday but I forgot what day it was. I blame Linux.

I think a big contributing factor to my dislike of Larry was that I played through the first two episodes back-to-back. So for me this conversation at the gazebo took place about an hour after he tried to murder me. If I’d waited weeks in between episodes like most players, then maybe my irritation would have subsided a bit. Also, his whole thing about “just looking out for his daughter” actually made me dislike him more. It made him a jerk and a towering hypocrite, since he wanted to kill someone else’s kid without even making sure Duck had been bitten. And then he never owned up to just how totally stupid and wrong he’d been about the whole thing and about how his wrongness made a tense situation worse. And then the entire group was put in peril trying to get him medicine and someone died as a result. And then he tried to kill me after I saved his life.

So yeah, when I got to the gazebo conversation the whole “he just cares about his daughter” thing just didn’t work for me as an excuse. Ken left someone to die to save his own son, and felt bad about it later. Larry tried to murder someone to protect his not-in-harm’s-way daughter who can take care of herself, and never regretted it.

In short: Larry is a good character but a horrible person.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.