Superposition: The Genre of Life is Strange

[Music] maybe you knew this already but life is strange is a weird-ass videogame one that is by turns a naked Lee honest point in clicker about teen girls and a psychosexual freakout on the nature of choice and it doesn't exactly marry these two themes painlessly and frankly unconvinced it's trying to mechanically life is strange a game by don't nod is a mostly faithful iteration on the tell-tale adventure game model a lot of mid nineties LucasArts design several recent innovations and a heaping dose of heavy rain like a telltale game you navigate a 3d world and interact with your environment using context-sensitive button presses and like a telltale gameplay consists of simple adventure game puzzles plot branching decisions and a whole lot of dialogue like a telltale game it's released in five episodes where choices you make in one will alter the contents of episodes down the line and it has the same notifications that your choices will have consequences the same frequent autosave to keep you from replaying too much of the game and the same breakdown at the end of an episode that compares your choices with the choices of other players but one hallmark of a telltale game that is conspicuously absent is the thing that makes Telltale's choices so meaningful the timer a timer at the bottom of your screen ticking down every time you make a decision enforces a particular type of play see telltale doesn't want you to deliberate on your choices telltale wants you to act on your gut which sometimes means making a choice you come to regret and having to live with it for the rest of the game don't even think about it you just couldn't keep your [ __ ] mouth shut could you had to tell her everything but in life is strange players are given the ability to rewind time letting them see all results of just about every choice every puzzle every line of dialogue before making up their minds and proceeding so players can deliberate forever so if you were to keep two saves going so that you could see all outcomes of your choices that would be playing against telltale design philosophy which is about living with your decisions but here save scumming is a core mechanic now I don't know what the developers thought process was but I like to imagine them coming up with this idea and then asking okay say a person could actually do this could see every possible future stemming from their actions and pick the one they think is best what would the logical endpoint of that story be okay okay all right the plot mechanics of life is strange our [ __ ] bizarre it is in essence two entirely different stories rolled up in the same package these two stories contain all the same characters and all the same plot points but exist in wildly different genres and have wildly different themes for the first two and a half ish episodes you appear to be playing a tender coming-of-age story while the second two and a half-ish are a lynchin psycho drama that seems designed with the express purpose of complicating then rejecting and ultimately attempting to devour the coming-of-age story and erase all records of its existence and then in a truly bug [ __ ] climax the game point blank asks you the player which of these two stories you want an ending - boy I can't make this joy no you're the only listen why don't we start at the beginning max Caulfield is a student at the prestigious Blackwell Academy in her hometown of Arcadia Bay Oregon like a lot of people her age she's a little awkward a little shy she's on her own for the first time several years earlier she and her family moved to Seattle and her parents are still there while she's moved into the Blackwell dorms max hasn't maintained any of her local friendships and while she gets along with everyone who doesn't actively hate her she doesn't have a group or any close friends except maybe the boy who has a crush on her she's also devoted to photography it's what she's here to study and greatly admires her photography teacher but she's too nervous to submit her work to the big photo competition despite her teachers encouragement one day after an intense vision in her photo class max bears witness to the school bully pulling a gun and shooting a girl in the bathroom and in that moment she as if by instinct discovers that she can reverse time by up to a minute or two after a bit of trial and error she manages to prevent the girl's death and that strangeness aside she steps back into her normal life with these newfound abilities this is the setup for a very particular genre of story I'll be at one with a more fantastical bent than usual this genre has a name but I'm only gonna say it once because it's long and German and when Americans start dropping long German words into their sentences they come off as seriously pretentious and even I have limits but the word is bildungsroman now English speakers often use this term interchangeably with coming-of-age story but it's actually a specific genre with specific themes the novel most often referenced as the first story of this kind is Vil hen Meister's apprenticeship and other notable examples include Jane Eyre the class speed game and a portrait of the artist as a young man classically these are stories about indecision about a youth pulled in many directions trying to decide what kind of adult they're going to be the tension isn't between protagonist and antagonist traditionally there is no real antagonist but between protagonist and society the adult world has expectations of the main character and that character needs to decide to what extent as a grown-up they one to satisfy those expectations and to what extent they want to pursue their own happiness the usual emotional art of such a story is accepting that maturity means taking on the world's demands shouldering your share of society's burdens and learning to fit your happiness around that responsibility bill hem Meister leaves the theatre to become a doctor Jane Eyre marries but on her own terms Joseph necked leaves cast alia to become a teacher in the larger world though sometimes the battle between personal happiness and social responsibility is not resolved simply the early going of life is strange fits snugly into the genre there are even subgenres that are coming into one's own as a student and coming into one's own as an artist which revolves around mentor characters so you can take those off the list as well after discovering her powers max runs into the girl from the bathroom in the parking lot and realizes it's her best friend from childhood Chloe and the two become nearly inseparable when Max reveals her abilities Chloe enlists her in the hunt for Rachel amber a friend of hers who vanished recently and what follows is bless a traditional plot then typical of the genre a string of vignettes this one loosely structured around a search for the missing girl these various episodes give max many windows into the lives she could lead stick it to the mean girl or turn the other cheek down-to-earth boyfriend or maybe unpredictable girlfriend reach out to the girl being mistreated by a security guard or take a photo for art these are all hallmarks of the genre questions of ethics the wholesome love versus the wild love dedication to others versus dedication to art you might think the ability to call do-over on any decision would make these choices easier but you'd be wrong time travel makes them all harder dedicating yourself to photography means breaking a hurting girl's heart kissing the wild love means devastating the wholesome love at one point max changes history so dramatically that she actually visits an alternate timeline where she's popular with the girls who had previously mistreated her but isn't friends with Chloe at all this only drives home that no matter what life she leaves there will be a cost she can't have everything there is no right answer no matter what she chooses she's doing wrong by someone this sets up the classic arc where she's going to have to make some big decisions about what maturity means to her and those decisions will involve sacrifices at least that's how it works on paper didn't practice the game only sometimes strikes that balance where all options have merits and drawbacks and no one is empirically better than the others more often it's like okay you're trying to get into this RV but there's an angry dog inside do you distract the dog by throwing a bone into the parking lot or kill the dog by throwing the bone into traffic and that's a fake choice no one kills the dog why would you kill the dog and then there's the small mercies like keeping someone from getting splashed by muddy water which okay that isn't a sacrifice there is no reason not to do that so let's say the time travel works as an imperfect metaphor for youthful indecision and what pleasures can be drawn from this section of the game are to do with how much you enjoy earnestness there's a commitment by the designers to tackle subjects that are very uncommon to video games from teen suicide to euthanasia to budding queer romance and it's hard not to respect their willingness to well go there real effort has been put into addressing these subjects seriously and these sequences can be very affecting even as none of them entirely hit the mark the scene where you talk a suicidal Kate off a rooftop for all its intensity is mechanically Kate quizzing you on how much flavor text you read in her room earlier the sequence we're all universe Chloe wants to die takes great pains not to be able as towards paraplegics while still being kind of ablest towards paraplegics and the budding queer romance often seems about two sentences away from turning into a late-night Showtime erotic drama that is obviously written by middle-aged men but I want to be clear it's not crap the game wears it's hard on its sleeve and the writers clearly mean everything they say even when they don't entirely know what they're talking about if you can appreciate sincerity even as you acknowledge its failings then you can appreciate the game for what it is it's like Mac's awkward but well-meaning naive possessing a good heart and still kind of ignorant and that slice is strange until the second half happens huh there is so much to be done [Music] in this story time-traveling teenager max Caulfield and her best friend Chloe price hot on the trail of the missing girl Rachel amber discover that her story was not a tragic one of a wayward youth getting in over her head with a drug dealer boyfriend but one in which she was sedated photographed and murdered in an underground facility straight out of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in trying to track down the boy they think is responsible max suddenly drops to the ground with a needle in her neck and watches helplessly as her best friend dies from a bullet to the head then wakes up tied to a chair by the real killer her photography professor mr. Jefferson this is a story about regret choice and loyalty full of serial killer monologues and hallucinatory imagery a story where people look in the sky and see the moon doubled and the beach fills with the bodies of dead whales after two and a half episodes of vignettes life is strange has decided it has an honest-to-goodness plot one that bears a striking resemblance to the designers want me to say Twin Peaks but honestly the greater debt a--does is to donnie darko max is guided by an animal figure only she can see and who is probably the spirit of a dead character Chloe is a teenager who's only alive due to the interventions of a time traveler and this is causing a number of supernatural events to occur just before the climax our hero is up on a hill coming to a difficult conclusion after watching her girlfriend die as a curious weather pattern descends on the town below Chloe realizes that maybe the only way to set things right is to go back in time and die like she was originally fated to and then none of this awfulness will have ever happened and multiple episodes end with tracking shots of all the major characters montage together while melancholy pop music plays underneath [Music] as you can imagine going from Jane Eyre to Donnie Darko is a bit of a tonal shift in fairness the game does set all these threads up in the first half and it's not like the coming-of-age story disappears the euthanasia subplot actually happens past the midpoint it's just that things that used to be background texture have become subjects in their own right and they make the coming-of-age story look pretty out of place like the love triangle between Chloe Max and Warren made sense in a coming-of-age story but it's just ridiculous when your relationship with Chloe is tearing apart the fabric of reality and Warren is just a dude in this story the antagonist is not society but the very literal villain II thought was the mentor figure the narrative tension is not about max finding herself but about fixing mistakes and hopefully not getting murdered in the process Chloe is not a wild love but the possible instigator of the apocalypse and Max's powers are not a metaphor for indecision but appointed meditation on what it means to be a protagonist but more on that in a minute this half also has some ideas about choice that complicate what choice meant in the first half there's a scene where you try to get information from Rachel Amber's ex-boyfriend and thanks to Max's powers you can see it play out a lot of different ways but you start to realize that possibly the only way that nobody gets hurt is if you killed the dog earlier in the game or episodes in and life is strange decides it actually is a game about living with decisions you can't undo so when I started this video talking about telltale that wasn't just an easy point of reference what originally seems like an interesting take on the telltale model now seems as though it has a bone to pick with games of that type the complaints though often lobbied against telltale is that it promises your choices will have significant impact on the story lots of people criticize them for not delivering on that promise but life is strange seems to criticize telltale for having made the promise in the first place why the game asks should you even want that responsibility I mean let's look at how Maxis escapes mr. Jefferson's studio earlier in the game max discovers that she can travel to any point in the past that is captured in a photograph so through the photos Jefferson has on hand she starts leaping back to different points in the game's continuity adjusting her decisions trying to tweak the timeline undo mistakes she's looking for a scenario where she is free Chloe is alive and if at all possible no tornado is bearing down to wipe Arcadia Bay off the map in case you forgot that the thing that's happening as when she first used her powers to save Chloe it takes some trial and error but she pulls it off mr. Jefferson's in jail Chloe is safe and hey she even got her photo in that competition and what do you know she won instead of tied up in a murderer's photography studio she's in San Francisco with a new and better mentor figure and her art is up on the wall and she's the toast of the show this is a hyper idealized ending to the coming-of-age story after making up her mind and taking decisive action max has come into her own as a student an artist and a young woman you did it max you're a real artist it was for today and then she checks in on Chloe what Oh Chloe where are you calling can you hear me hello hello stories about teenagers who develop superhuman abilities often frame themselves as coming-of-age stories it's not a coincidence how many fall back on the old puberty metaphor even without time travel or gamma rays growing up means gaining power and independence one didn't have as a child so everyone is expected to learn let's all say it together now but however much superpowers serve as symbols for growing up they are also wish-fulfillment like we may agree that Peter Parker should use his newfound strength with discretion but it still feels good to watch him beat up the bully and we may be saddened by Uncle Ben death but we're still glad it turns Peter into spider-man because that's what we're here to see and that's attention endemic to the genre that on the one hand power is vain and must be used sparingly and on the other hand power is awesome and we pay money to see characters wield it and law and order good and evil life and death all present not as subjects deserving of their own films but as an excuse for centering a protagonist in an interesting story compelling him to use his awesome powers and teaching a boy how to be a man this tension is at the heart of telltale games as well and most games in that model they may present as being about futility about being a miniscule player in an enormous losing game but the plot still bends over backwards to ensure the most dramatic and impactful decisions rest on the protagonists shoulders and however terrible that responsibility is implied to be players play because they want to make those decisions and players complain when those decisions are not impactful enough in life is strange max comes to realize that all the bizarre occurrences the moons the whales the tornado have been caused by her leaping through time that she can't set things right because trying to set things right has and will only ever make things worse Chloe I can't keep fixing everything if all I'm going to do is just break it over and over again I know how this is gonna turn out and I'm afraid I'm [ __ ] up all these alternate realities the Museum in San Francisco isn't just a false ending it's Anna's Visser ation of the game you thought you were playing for the first two and a half episodes max gives up her perfect ending and goes back to the studio and one last effort to save Chloe while the game there's the player down and says how dare you think this was a coming-of-age story how dare you think time travel was a neat way to work through your indecision how could you think a power like this could ever be used responsibly how could you think the consequences for your mistakes would be borne by you and you alone this sets up an arc where max will have to do what superhero movies almost never do truly reckon with how dangerous real power can be this point gets ham for the rest of Episode five I got rescued by Chloe's stepdad and when he learned Chloe was dead he killed mr. Jefferson and the game was like hey do you want to go back and change that and I was like I don't know anymore I I could but will changing things just make them go even more wrong and when I go back and save Chloe will any of this have even happened and [ __ ] there's a tornado gonna come kill all of us anyway so is there any scenario where this choice even matters then above ground the games to let me perform those small mercies but like great you're welcome hope you enjoy the five minutes I just added to your life because you're still gonna die and it's all my fault but I want my girlfriend back so I'm going to jump back one more time and make things just a little bit worse so even when you do get Chloe back the game has made you aware of the horrible cost your entire community will pay for you having used your powers to save her again and again and again your only goal has been to fix your mistakes and you're being punished for having even tried the game deposits you up on a hill as hell descends on the town below and then tells you in so many words this is the price you paid for your friend and then it asks would you like a refund seeing what's happened to Arcadia Bay Chloe says that if there's a chance it will undo everything that's occurred she wants you to go back in time to the bathroom and let her die maybe that's just the way fate wanted things to happen and it's up to you to grant or deny her wish this final decision is the game offering you two very appropriate endings for the two very different games you've been playing / the themes of the coming-of-age story of the Germanic persuasion Max's Ark is learning to sacrifice for the greater good she can't have it all she can't satisfy everyone and sometimes doing right by your society means giving up something you love in the battle between personal happiness and responsibility responsibility wins sometimes the wild love is someone you have to let go of be grateful for your time together and kiss her goodbye she knows what's right it's better this way / the themes of the Lin Chi and psychodrama have you [ __ ] lost it what about the last 12 odd hours of gameplay in which trying to change the past universally makes the present worse gave you the idea that going back one more time could possibly fix anything have you learned nothing yes you [ __ ] up and all of this is your fault but in real life people have to live with their fuck-ups even the big ones no one has the right to change history you can't keep trying to control this you have to let go that's about as incompatible as two endings can be in one all the themes of the first half of the game are thrown in a lake and Max never finds her place in society because society gets eaten by a tornado and in the other the whole psycho drama plotline and all its attendant themes are literally erased from history whichever you pick whichever plot you decide is the right one a sizable portion of the game will be rendered meaningless and we should acknowledge that these two themes sacrifice for the greater good and learn to live with your mistakes are not in real life things we get to choose between maturity means doing both if you elect to keep Chloe alive Max and Chloe wordlessly drive out of town and maybe that's meant to be an unresolved ending that sticks with you for a while I don't know T to meet Spellman Louise and that might be a pretty bold decision if the game didn't autosave right before the one choice you can't make twice which means everyone is just going to reload five minutes after they finish and watch the other ending which is just is just in all conceivable ways better the ending where Chloe dies is longer it has proper closure there's this funeral scene that is so Karthik that it doesn't even make sense you two never even met Chloe in this timeline what are you doing here and it confirms that yeah you didn't have to live with your mistakes going back would have fixed everything worse it boils the ending choice down to who do you love more Chloe or everyone else the and fans have dubbed the ending Bay or Bay but whether or not you love Chloe the mostest isn't really what all that stuff about sucking up the timeline with getting at every game needed to pull a swapper and erase your save after you make the final decision this was it and that's how life is strange ends I honestly can't tell you if this game is good I can't even tell you if I liked it but I think I think I loved it I mean that last decision is kind of [ __ ] but I got real choked up making it and now we've got word that both a sequel and a prequel are in the works and honestly I'm a prehensile there's a certain power to starting with one emotionally resonant shanwa and then ramming it headlong into a more ambitious weirder darker genre and that's a move that only works when you're not expecting it do I want to critique how effectively life is strange goes off the rails when once I was dumbfounded that it did at all life is strange was like nothing I'd ever played for good and for ill a sequel will be like at least one thing I played already and I don't even know if I should like this game when people talk [ __ ] on it I don't even disagree and yet here we are [ __ ] it I don't even know life is strange everyone wowser [Music] around late me I won't leave go be my Gus dog Oh [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Innuendo Studios

Views: 240,458

Rating: 4.9108601 out of 5

Keywords: video essay, life is strange, dontnod, telltale, adventure games, spider-man, bildungsroman, david lynch

Id: 19xgdLF5agU

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SageWaterDragon]

I'm not sure that I really agree with his assessment of the endings thematically lining up with the two different genres the game portrayed. Saving Arcadia Bay by killing Chloe is an ending of inaction - Life is Strange is, by and large, a series of events in which you save Chloe from being a dumbass and getting herself killed. Going back to where it all started and accepting that your attempts to help Chloe just make things worse seems to line up quite nicely with the idea that her powers are a bad thing. On the other hand (and/or the other button press) you have the ending where you save Chloe by killing Arcadia Bay, which just reads to me as an ending where you decide that your actions were justified all along and your powers weren't something that you needed to reckon with. That's not to say that the themes he talked about aren't there - they certainly are - but I think there are different interpretations of those same events that make it much less cut-and-dry.

I'm thinking about that a lot because I enjoy the second half far more than I enjoyed the first half. Episode 1 and 2, while certainly well-directed with compelling moments dotted about, are often the parts that I worry friends of mine will bounce off of before they get to "the good stuff." Despite the second half hitting home with me more than the first half in every way, I still find myself struggling to figure out why anybody would choose the Save Chloe ending. The alternative is far more satisfying to every plotline, IMO. Roughly 50% of the audience seems to disagree, just based on the final tally, but I can't stop wondering what others were seeing that I wasn't.