Nora N. Khan

I have been thinking about truth-telling and honor quite a bit, lately. Honor, compassion, sacrifice, and integrity. Old World values, values we are hard-pressed to find around us. I wanted to explore what we give up when we choose to lie or deceive another, even in the most harmless fashion.

How do we know a person is telling the truth? What about his or her face tells us? How do we process the words of our interlocutor, then construct our understanding of reality based on their words? What happens to our world when they lie?

Since game characters are nearly always talking, I explored these ideas through a play through of “A New Day,” the first episode of the Walking Dead series. This piece is up at Kill Screen.

Game reviews are a real thrill for me. The game medium itself is made by world-collision: the worlds of art, music, writing, technology. We get to actively role play imagined characters. The critical writing on games out there in the virtual world is still very new, fresh ground. This newness allows for both experimentation and exploration of ideas that are more difficult, I find, to explore naturally in fiction. I get to linger on my favorite topic: how we speak to one another and why we speak the way we do.