The Game of 2015: Life is Strange

A break from my pseudo-academic blogging to talk about one of my other past times, computer gaming.

I played a few games through to completion in 2015. Assassin’s Creed: Rogue ((I really must write up my notes on the conspiracy plot lines of the Assassin’s Creed games.)), Pillars of Eternity, Batman: Arkham City, Invisible, Inc., Broken Sword 5 – The Serpent’s Curse ((If you play one game about the Catholic Church suppressing dualistic heresies this year…)), Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald, The Stanley Parable, Steamworld Dig, Alpha Protocol, Consortium, The Walking Dead: Season 2, D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Legend of Grimrock 2, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars, and Life is Strange.

Let me talk a little about that last one, since it is my favourite game of 2015.

Life is Strange (there’s a TM which is meant to go at the end, but I can’t be bothered trying to render that) is an adventure game in which you play Max Caulfield, a 18-year old who discovers she can rewind time to a limited extent (and, later on, use certain objects to travel back to points in the past). Plagued by visions of an impending catastrophe, reconnecting with a best friend she left behind five years, and fascinated by the disappearance of a girl from the swanky school she is attending, Max’s story cribs, borrows and expands upon such tales as Twin Peaks and The 12 Monkeys. (as well as feeling like a weird-but-spiritual sequel to Deadly Premonition, my favourite game ever). Aside from a slightly clunky first episode (and it’s not as if the writing in the first episode is in anyway terrible), Life is Strange ends up being one of the best pieces of fiction I devoured in 2015. It is also a story which could only have been told in a game, and here’s why.

Adventure games, particularly modern adventure games, place a lot of emphasis on player choice. If you decide to act in particular way, for example, the game will track that decision, and it will have consequences. So, if you ferret around someone’s room and get caught, then that character will act suspiciously towards you from that point onwards. Adventure games also tend to lock off options depending on your chosen actions; if you are rude to a character early on, they will returns the favour, and thus you might not be able to get some crucial bit of information out of them later in the game. Life is Strange, however, lets you rewind time; you can ferret around someone’s room, get caught, then rewind and escape the room before being spotted. You can also be rude, find out someone will react, and then rewind and try being nice instead.

The effect of the rewind mechanic is satisfying for two reasons. The first is purely psychological; gamers such as myself often like to find out how different options resolve, and then decide which avenue to take. Traditionally this has meant constantly saving and then reloading the game, and in some cases games do not make that easy. In Life is Strange, I can simply rewind and choose again, and again, and again. Whilst there are limits to Max’s power (more on that in a minute), in most cases you can play an event over and over, explore all the different permutations of your actions, and then decide how you want things to play out.

Sometimes the rewind mechanic even becomes part of the puzzle solving which makes up the bulk of the gameplay in most adventure games. There is a particular conversation in episode four where it’s far too easy for a character to die, or at least get seriously hurt. It’s a long, convulted conversation, and it is very easy for it all to go wrong very quickly. I must have spent half an hour rewinding just trying to pick out a set of responses which ensured no one got hurt. By the time I worked out how to respond to the various issues that came up, I was well pleased with myself. No one was going to die on my watch. ((Ironic, really.))

The limit to Max’s power is that she can really only rewind time by a couple of minutes. That means whilst you can fiddle to your heart’s content with events here-and-now, eventually your decisions get set in stone. This leads to the second reason why the rewind mechanic is satisfying: you can’t go back and change everything, so you what decisions you decide to let play out you know will have consequences later on. For example, early in the game you can decide to take a certain matter to a person in authority, or keep quiet about it. The consequences of this action reverberate throughout the game in a variety of quite interesting (and sometimes quite unpredictable) ways. You, of course, had as many rewinds as you liked back at the time to decide which choice was best, but once that decision is made and the plot moves on, it’s fixed in time and place. As such, every consequence of a decision you made in the game is one you feel you have to take responsibility for. Did you pull a gun on someone? It’s likely you also rewound to find out what would have happened if you didn’t. So if you chose to pull that gun in the end, surely it’s your fault what is happening now…

Life is Strange tells a story which really only works in the domain of interactive fiction, and it’s unique mechanic – the ability to change your decisions by rewinding time – is what makes the story work. The final episode – it is safe to say – deals with the consequences of constantly changing time to get the things you want. It’s a remarkable final act, filled with false endings as you desperately try to prevent ther worst of all outcomes coming true. Whilst some found the outcome of the game predictable, I found it enthralling. A game about choices is always going to propose there are consequences to said choices, and the way in which the story concludes proposes an interesting moral. ((One I cannot go into because it really gets in spoiler territory, which is unfortunate, because the moral is not one I am comfortable with))

Life is Strange is, then, my favourite game of last year. It’s by no means a perfect game; there is a bottle fetching quest in episode two which is truly awful, and some of the side characters end up being less central to the story than they could have been. ((Brooke, in particular, could have had a much meatier side plot with Warren.)) Still, overall, Life is Strange is the only game last year which I thought about for a whole week afterwards, rather than condemned to my Steam list of “Completed Games.”

Well done, Dontnod (the creators). Looking forward to whatever season two is going be about.

01/04/2016

Episode 81 – The Best of the War on Christmas

…in which the festive season gets into conflict.

12/25/2015

Xmas Morn Musings

So, I’ve been listening to the first season of Serial. Yes, I’m a year late to it, but still, I’ve been engaged in a quite rapid catch-up session with the show, and it’s… interesting? Frustrating? Manipulative? All three? Or just interesting, with a lot of post facto justification of my own going on. I don’t know.

First, I know how it ends. That ending – the one where the key witness admits to things which would likely have changed the verdict of the second trial – made the news, so even if you hadn’t been following Serial, you knew where it ended up. Knowing that ending makes the first two thirds of the show very weird. It seems obvious in retrospect that everything is leading up to that reveal, and its hard to imagine the show’s producers aren’t actively manipulating the listener. After all, that witness is – arguably – the real star of the show, even though he doesn’t make an actual appearance until episode 8 or so.

Now, the obvious rejoinder to this is that this only seems to be the case because I already know the ending. It’s like reading the last chapter of a murder mystery first and, having discovered who the murderer is, reading the book to work out whether the author is being fair to the reader. I know the witness is going to be made out to be very unreliable indeed, so I suspect the show’s producers of manipulating the story to get me on their side early on. Yet, it’s quite possible that the story they told was simply the best way to get their points across, and it just seems manipulative after the fact.

Second, there’s the other side of the coin. It’s obvious fairly early on that the entire case against the defendant is predicated on the story of one key witness. Yet no one on the show tries to contact him until half a year into the investigation. They chase all sorts of leads, try to verify all sorts of angles on the story, but they don’t try to speak to him until very late in the game? That’s just weird. It almost seems sloppy. It is as if the producers are stringing along the audience, building up a case against said witness, rather than impartially looking into the case.

Yet. Yet the show is gripping. The way in which they grapple with the swings of “Did they? DID THEY?” you get when investigating a story is a joy to listen to. Whilst at times everyone just seems a tad too credulous, this gets mediated by the fact that experts come in and then say “What you’re feeling is perfectly natural”. Indeed, it’s a lovely example of “Showing your working”, which both speaks to how messy conducting such an explanation is, and the way in which views shift and change as new evidence comes to light.

However, there is a feeling that whilst Serial is the product of a lengthy investigation, the show itself was made at the end to feel like you were with them from the very beginning. It reminds me quite a bit about the documentary Operation 8: Deep in the Forest (which inspired a chapter in my PhD thesis), which similarly plays with evidence to advance an agenda (an agenda I agree with, I might add). In both cases the story is told chronologically, but it is obvious that the end was were the story really started. In the case of Operation 8, you can at least excuse the documentarians, because the nature of a feature-length documentary is “Well, we’ve filmed all this material, so here’s a through line for it…” However, in the case of Serial, the episodic release structure suggests an evolving case, even though the narrative looks utterly fixed… Although that might just be an artefact of my “foreknowledge” in this particular case.

12/25/2015

Conspiracy Round-up – End of 2015 Edition (Part 3: Bataclan Round-up)

We covered the events at Bataclan on the podcast, but here are a few of the articles we consulted in prep for that episode.

Riffing on Baudrillard’s work on the media spectacle of the Gulf War, Hamid Dabashi’s article The Paris attacks did not take place makes for interesting reading.

The Syrian passport found at or near the scene of the crime ended up being a major story in and of itself. Was it real? Who did it belong to? Why was it there? Marine Le Pen certainly made a lot out of it. Read about it here.

Perhaps the oddest story to come out of the U.K. was how Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a moderate response to the events in Paris were taken to be extremist in nature, whilst those who pledged to bomb Syria because of it were taken to be the moderates. Certainly, divisions with U.K. Labour certainly didn’t help that story…

And, of course, there was the perennial question one gets in events like these: Was it all a false flag? Some even argued:

It happened on Friday the 13th (commemorating the massacre of the proto-illuminati Templars) in the 11th month, in Paris’s 11th district. It’s going to be remembered as “11/13” or “Friday the 13th.” Illuminati numerology or coincidence?

which, unsurprisingly, was a Veterans Today article.

Global Research cites Herman Goering as a reason to think the event was a false flag, and talks about the “Big Lie”.

And Press TV points out the West might blame Syria for the attacks, but somehow makes out that is evidence of it being a false flag (as, say, political expediency). They also interviewed Kevin Barrett of “Veterans Today”, who said predictable things.

Perhaps a more serious take on the same issue comes from the Activist Post, which at least provides some reasons as to why the authors think the Bataclan attack look false flag-esque (even though I think many of the questions they raise merely show that reporting on major events as they happen is tricky and leads to seeming inconsistencies in a developing story).

(They also raised a similar set of issues with the Charlie Hebdo attack.)

Finally, a more interesting take than usual (one which fits in with France’s long and protracted reaction to the Dreyfus Affair): what does the national narrative about Bataclan – and the War on Terror generally – say about the role of public intellectuals in France today?

12/23/2015

Conspiracy Round-up – End of 2015 Edition (Part 2)

The “Conspiracy and Democracy” project has a series of blogposts whereby the participants in the group answer questions like “Are Conspiracy Theories a Threat to Democracy?” Some of the answers are fairly interesting but others, I must say, just seem to reiterate without question what we’re always being told about conspiracy theories: that they are bad, mad and dangerous to know. It can be a little disheartening to see people trot out the same lines again and again without asking “Is the accepted wisdom actually based on good arguments or is is just an appeal to tradition?”

Which leads me to the next piece (something I really should have appended to the bit yesterday on how it’s not clear that conspiracy theories are increasingly popular at the moment): Jesse Walker summarises the best bits from an interview between the Washington Post and Joe Uscinski. The original story can be read here.

There was a “False Flag Islamophobia Conference” in Paris at about the same time as the Climate Conference. Some might argue you didn’t hear about it on the news because the media was told to suppress it; others might argue the Climate Conference in Paris simply dominated the news cycle because most people don’t think the Bataclan attack was a false flag event. Still, the real question is “Who decided on that very ambiguous name for the conference?”

Talking about false flags and Islamophobia, here’s a local example from Aotearoa of someone importing the fear of staged attacks.

NASA has Deep Space Warships, apparently.

Lord Christopher Monckton thinks Tony Abbott was just like Ghandi, and was toppled from the premiership of Australia by a UN-backed plot. My only question is “Why is Monckton so popular Downunder?”

Did the CIA invent the term “conspiracy theory”? We covered this on the podcast a few weeks ago. The evidence clearly shows that the answer to that question is “No!” This is one of the better pieces explaining why.

Is Richard Dawkins a conspiracist? Evidence points to “Yep”, particularly his views on Ahmed Mohamed. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dawkins didn’t do an Alex Jones interview in a few years. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if I did an Alex Jones interview in a few years…

A similar take on Dawkins…

There’s an U.S. election next year, and people are still annoyed about that one time Al Gore lost to George W. Bush. Conspiracy theories abound as to how that Florida vote went in favour of the Republican, and the man whose statistical analysis was cited in support of Bush winning the election there is still haunted to this day about.

Meanwhile, another mathematician is getting into trouble for exposing what she thinks is evidence of voter fraud in Kansas…

Did the NSA stop spying on U.S. citizens when it said it did? No… And yet defenders of the Establishment wonder why people continue to believe conspiracy theories…

Not exactly a conspiracy, but Jeb Bush thinks you have to step up and kill baby Hitler. Hasn’t he read Stephen Fry’s “Making History”?

A local story, about the time an anarchist blew himself up whilst trying to damage New Zealand’s Big Brother computer system.

12/22/2015

Conspiracy Round-up – End of 2015 Edition (Part 1)

I really did mean to make these round-ups a monthly thing, but I guess that did not work out. I mostly managed to write a new post on a weekly basis, and hopefully next year I’ll commit to that in earnest. Then again, prepping the weekly podcast is actually quite a time consuming affair, and I have been engaged in a bunch of projects, most of which I can’t announce at this time. Irksome, to be sure. Just like this stereotypical opening paragraph that almost every blogger is writing to mark a less-than-successful year of blogging…

It’s very easy to blame conspiracy theories. After all:

Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is their simplicity. In a complex, changing world, it is tempting to reduce multifaceted issues to the us-and-them narrative. It is a vision that meets little contradiction because reasoned facts are sidelined by emotion. It is a binary scheme, with “the people” on one side and “the system” on the other.

That’s from a piece in the Guardian, which basically wants to talk about how Marine Le Pen is blaming the Establishment, rather than tactical voting, for her party’s dismal result in the recent regional elections in France.

The topic of how people use the rhetoric of conspiracy to escape blame is an interesting one, but the Guardian article makes the typical and fatal mistake of conflating rhetorical moves with conspiracy theories themselves. No one doubts that people use the language of conspiracy to shift blame, but that tells us nothing about the merit of conspiracy theories. It just tells us that people like to sometimes allege conspiracies where none occur. So, bad show, Natalie Nougayrède.

Talking about rhetoric, what about Alex Jones and Donald Trump? In what was a minor story for some and a huge story for others, Trump made a half-hour appearance on Jones’ show. It’s pretty much what you would expect of the two men, but what’s interesting is just how little effect it’s had on Trump’s popularity. People though Trump talking to a known conspiracist would completely derail him, yet no one seemed to think that it perfectly fits Trump’s brand. Trump is – quite possibly – the conspiracy theory president the U.S.A. deserves.

And talking about Trump, theories abound that the Republican Party might conspire against their own in order to stop Trump from getting the nod. Although given his supporters, I’m not sure I’d blame them if they did. One of them, for example, is this guy:

John Captain, of Portland Tub and Tan, home of “Portland’s premier hot tubbing and tanning specialists with exclusive outdoor hot tubs year round” in Oregon, was glad that I called because he wanted to talk about his girlfriend, who he believes was a monarch mind control slave who was murdered by her family, part of the Illuminati and the New World Order.

More here.

In other charismatic leaders of the world news, someone is asking the question “Is Vladimir Putin immortal?”

This Vox article does a good job of summarising a recent paper on what motivates belief in political conspiracy theories in the U.S., but it kind of misses the point that belief in conspiracy theories itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it kind of falls into the trap of saying “Look, those dastardly people [on the other side of the political spectrum from us] believe conspiracy theories, and isn’t that just a fiasco!” Part of that kind of analysis comes from the oft-repeated (but hardly ever analysed) claim that conspiracy theories are more popular now than ever. Yet that’s not necessarily true, and it kind of ruins the analysis in the second half of the post, where David Roberts decides to go beyond what the research actually says.

A #dirtypolitics update: Cameron Slater is still up to his old tricks. An advertiser has left his site because of organised hit pieces appearing on the WhaleOil site and the #dirtypolitics crew have a newsletter out that you probably don’t need to read. Meanwhile, Comrade Giovanni Tiso tells us about the raid on Nicky Hager’s house.

Sam Kriss writes on conspiracy theories. I felt the need to respond to this piece in the comments (which, I might add, doesn’t seem to have made it through moderation…), because whilst some of it is rather interesting, a lot of it really only makes sense if you think there’s no existing literature on the topic…

12/21/2015