LIFE IS STRANGE
Much has been written about the elusive concept of choice in video games. It makes sense that this topic warrants so much discussion. The single most defining aspect of a piece of interactive fiction is that it is interactive, and interactivity behooves choice. That choice has manifested itself in video games from the earliest options of moving Mario right or not (still struggling with that one), to making Squall say “(whatever)” or “…………” to the current landscape of sprawling game worlds with branching plots all affected by your choices.
Life Is Strange, the new episodic adventure from Dontnod Entertainment, presents itself as a game that grapples with the mercurial subject of choice and consequence, and on the surface, it does. But its awkward handling of narrative design robs those choices of their poignancy and reduces them to simple mechanics.
The story follows a young girl named Max Caulfield, a meek 18-year-old photographer, the new kid at a prestigious academy and freshly moved back to her hometown. After a terrifying and possibly prophetic vision of a storm destroying the sleepy seaside village, Max learns that she has the ability to rewind time.
The story is told in an episodic narrative format with emphasis on choice and narrative over action and traditional skill-based gameplay. The comparisons to Telltale Games series such as The Walking Dead are warranted: The game takes almost its entire structure from Telltale’s successful mold. But what it lacks is the Telltale writers’ understanding of how choice can be an effective storytelling tool and not just an interesting mechanic.
Telltale’s Walking Dead series is a constant stream of chest-tightening decisions followed by endless self-doubt and regret. When a grief-crazed survivor is seconds away from blowing a friend’s brains out, a decision must be made. When dead men’s clawing hands are seconds away from two characters and there’s only enough time to save one, a decision must be made. When a scared little girl is seconds away from tears, wondering if she’ll ever see her parents again, a decision must be made. Telltale only gives the player moments to decide, and in those moments lives the game’s success. The pressure of time doesn’t allow for leisurely examinations of each option; the player must act on instinct.
Conversely, Life Is Strange has plenty of moments when the player is presented with a choice, but precious few of those choices are followed up by a specific musical cue, a visual effect around the edges of the screen and a large message telling you: “This action will have consequences.” The implication, then, is that the rest of the player’s actions will not have consequences. Sure, Telltale has its famous “Carly will remember that” reminders when making a big decision, but after the first time that message pops up only to have that character be cruelly killed seconds later, it can never be trusted again.
Max’s rewind power also allows her to go back and redo every major decision, ensuring that the player always has the chance to change his or her mind and “get it right.” Life Is Strange is determined to let the player know exactly when choices do and do not matter and gives players ample time to flip-flop until they achieve the desired outcome, robbing those moments of their gravity and turning them into puzzles.
Once I realized only certain choices were important, I lost interest in the rest. Why bother being nice to the girl who just had paint splattered all over her rather than ignoring her when the game has already told me this makes no difference?
The first episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones, its newest and most stressful series to date, ends with the shocking death of a beloved character. (It is Game of Thrones, after all.) It is such a pivotal moment, and Telltale is still such a relatively small company, that there is simply no way it has the time or resources to write, code, animate and playtest two entirely different storylines based on whether this character survives. No matter what you do, this character will always die. But I was so wrapped up in the story, so hung up on making the right choices, that the death hit me like a knife in the throat. It was my fault. I should have done something, should have made better decisions. It didn’t matter to me at the time that, from a realistic viewpoint, there was nothing I could have done to change this. I still felt responsible because the game never let on which events were influenced by my actions. Every narrative twist and turn felt like a direct consequence of the story as I shaped it.
Life Is Strange is so concerned with the idea of choice as a gameplay mechanic that it loses its power as a narrative device. It expects the player to get the ideal result by experimenting, while The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones force players to make decisions based on desperation, anger, sympathy, fear and love — things people base real decisions on. The choices and consequences made are never governed by what is the “correct” answer.
The most powerful video game choice I’ve ever experienced was in Irrational Games’ Bioshock Infinite, and it was because it only offered an illusion. Early in the game you are given two options: participate in a cruel and sadistic festival game by throwing a baseball at a captive interracial couple or throw the baseball back at the smiling face of the racist ringleader who handed it to you. Both are compelling in their own way. Players might choose to play along with the act, ugly as it might be, to keep up with appearances and not let on that they are an outsider. Or they might risk their personal safety to help another.
But no matter which choice is made, a third character interrupts before the action can be completed. The choice has absolutely no bearing at all on the plot. Instead, players are left with a deeper knowledge of themselves. The only consequence of choosing to throw the ball at the couple is that the player now knows that he or she is the kind of person who would do that. This is when the interactivity of video games truly shines.
Player input can be so much more than choosing the right option or branching narratives; it is a powerful tool of self-reflection. The most powerful choices a game can offer a player are not the ones that cause the most drastic plot difference or the ones that are the most difficult to get “right”; they are the choices that reveal to the player some new truth about themselves. What matters is not what you choose to do, but who you choose to be.
