Superposition: The Genre of Life is Strange
Added 2017-07-06 12:36:31 +0000 UTCHey team!
The new video is live. I went with the title Superposition - this wasn't one anyone suggested, but the suggestions everyone made helped me think along the right lines to come up with this one, so thank you! There are a few minor tweaks from the preview version - adjusted some audio levels, fixed some footage, tweaked the pacing, re-recorded some distorted audio - but it is mostly identical to the early access version. Share it with everyone you've ever met!
Cheers,
-I
Comments
I decided to play this because of this video (I stopped watching a few minutes in and immedietly got the game). So now I've finished it and watched the video in its entirety. I've not seen or read any other critiques but a key issue I had is that Chloe isn't particularly likable in the beginning. She's entitled and arrogant, as if the world revolves around her, and never takes personal responsibility. She's also manipulative and displays classic abusive patterns so often Max can't say ANYTHING right. Somehow, Chloe uses it to throw back at her or hold against her as a 'bad friend'. I get that Chloe's dad died and shortly afterwards, Max moved away. But Max was fifteen. And it's a modern world. Relationships take two. It was terrible Max never called or wrote, but neither did Chloe. And when Chloe berates Max for not visiting all I'm thinking is: Well, how? She was a teenager. She couldn't afford a plane ticket or just do a road trip on a whim, could she? But then, things shift. Because I repeatedly didn't put up with Chloe's manipulative crap (Dealt with that enough with actually people I've chosen to cut out of my life), she starts taking personal responsibility. She starts thinking about how HER choices affect people around her, instead of always complaining as if life is personally out to get her. And it works really well because, at the end, when faced with the choice that isn't a choice, it's truly Chloe who makes it. Which is so interesting because if you choose NOT to sacrifice Chloe, it's like the two characters have swapped roles and Max has become the selfish entitled one who chooses what she wants with no regard for how it will affect others.
Kait Hatch
2017-07-31 16:47:35 +0000 UTCDefensible.
Ian Danskin
2017-07-10 15:40:41 +0000 UTCThanks for this. Definitely a more insightful analysis than most I've seen, which seem to limit themselves to complaining that they didn't get the ending. Still, you evidently didn't get the ending. ;-) Or at least, you see a dichotomy between the bildungsroman and the "psycho-drama" that I don't. I should note that I base my analysis on the conclusion that "Sacrifice Chloe" is the only correct ending. (The "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending being Dontnod going, "Wait, what? You chose to save Chloe? Even after we showed you how that choice would brutally kill everybody else you care about in the town? Even after we had Chloe beg you to save the Bay? Didn't you learn _anything_ from the disastrous consequences of trying to save Chloe's dad? You're the worst bildungsroman protagonist ever! But alright then, have it your way...") Some have critized this, saying that if there's only one valid answer, it's pointless to ask the player – but fuck that. Not every game has to be Mass Effect with its equivocating paragon/renegade "there is no wrong answer" decision wheels. (But yeah. Reasonable people may disagree.) As you note, LiS is a game about living with decisions you can't undo. I'd say you miss the mark when you say this happens "four episodes in", given that even the second episode literally features life-or-death decisions that you can't undo. And I'm not just talking about the "flavor text quiz", but about the several seemingly unrelated prior decisions: do you intervene when David harasses Kate, do you tell her to go to the police, and do you answer the phone when she calls? Let me stress the latter: _not picking up your phone can mean the death of your friend_, echoing a key decision that Max can't undo, and must learn to live with... a decision that happens before the game even begins. Let's review the chronology at the beginning of the game, or equivalently, at the end (after sacrificing Chloe). Most of the events of the game have been erased from the timeline – but not all. We're left with the story of Max and Chloe, BFF... until the day Chloe's dad is killed in an accident. The game doesn't detail the immediate aftermath, but we can make an educated guess at how (sweet, but also awkward and introvert) Max dealt with it. What the game does tell us is that shortly after the accident, Max moved away with her parents, leaving Chloe alone with her grief. Over the next five years, as Chloe's life slowly unravels, Max doesn't call, she doesn't write. When Max finally returns to Arcadia Bay, she still hesitates to reach out to her once best friend – a month passes and she still doesn't pick up the phone. So yeah. Max let her friend down when she needed her the most, and now she's dead. What follows is five episodes of Max working through her guilt, repeatedly saying "I can fix this!" even as it becomes ever more clear that, no, there's no fixing it. You hit the nail on the head when you note that the game mocks the very concept of in-game choices having consequences. The game's central mechanic is the ability to rewind time, but the game vehemently rejects the idea that you can achieve anything by going back in time. You spend the entire game repeatedly trying to save Chloe, only for the game ultimately pulling the rug out from under you and going "Get it into your head, already: There is no saving her!" The game cleverly aligns the player's escapist fantasy with Max' escapist fantasy, before ultimately (and gleefully) destroying both. Life is Strange is thus, in the end, a deconstruction of player agency. (In this vein, it stands next to Firewatch, another beautiful deconstruction of player agency with a similarly divisive ending.) "In real life, people have to live with their fuckups. Even the big ones." Indeed. Also in real life, there's no such thing as time travel. The game is all about Max – and the player – taking this to heart.
Søren
2017-07-10 01:25:31 +0000 UTCLove these long form distillations of interesting titles best. On paper LIS is right up my alley but I'm pretty sure (I know from watching videos) I would not keep punching in that time card. (It's definitely one of the most interesting efforts.) The two endings seem so simple. Clearly you walk away together as if the only people in the world that matter are yourselves. If anything the whole time-travel conceit communicates that reality is fungible and so responsibility so ambiguous to be functionally without meaning. My first reaction was, <i>time-travel?!</i> Timeline manipulation? Why? Why inject something so promising with the most base concept to video games conceivable? But the presentation really doesn't work does it? I find it very tedious. Whereas That Dragon, Cancer (for example) transfixes me. LIS tries to wow us with the medium's weaknesses as its weapons of disarmament. TDC deploys only its strengths. And does so more professionally than big budget studios can even conceive of. Apparently. Ultimately the time-travel may be a kind of life-saving injection into an otherwise flailing effort. It's certainly a strange choice. Donnie Darko did not really touch on agency. It's high-concept created ambiguity that makes its experience unique and difficult to pin down. Maybe LIS wanted to do so also. But its time-control seems like so much prestidigitation compared to Darko's. These are different mediums. Video games like this should not play to their medium, because it's very hard to say if this medium is or can be relevant right now. So much of LIS seemed to me like open questioning of the medium's present state. But maybe that is just my desires. Maybe people working in this medium are very self satisfied with what they've wrought.
Michael
2017-07-07 00:26:29 +0000 UTC
