The Butterfly Effect – Scholarly Edition

My presentation on how Life is Strange and Until Dawn let us mess around with tropes (and interrupt them in motion) is now published as a journal paper! It’s free to read here.

The Butterfly Effect: Player Agency and Trope Subversion in Life is Strange and Until Dawn

Well, I went and did it–after years of unshakable love-hate fascination with Life is Strange and Until Dawn, I’ve taken the leap into the fire and brought discussion of them into my work life. This video is a recorded version of the conference paper I presented last week in Perth, preserved for the ages and intended to be accessible to those who couldn’t be there to see it in person (which includes folks outside the academic field). I explore how branching, interactive stories give us the opportunity to mess around with tropes and genre conventions, and the weird Schrodinger’s Cat conundrum that these games can both play into historically harmful cliches and subvert them, and neither result is more “canon” than the other. Check it out if you’re interested!

Country Roads, Take Me to Hell: The Spooky Small Town, the “Returning Home” Plot, and the Coming-of-Age Story

Life is Strange, Night in the Woods, and Oxenfree form sort of a holy triangle of “young woman returns to a place from her childhood, has a complicated growing-up adventure, and has to fight a frightening supernatural force” game stories. They have common ground not just in their themes but in their wonderfully gothic small-town settings, all three of which serve as fantastic landscapes not just for the player to explore, but to heighten the tension and atmosphere and make the characters’ journey more vivid. Each protagonist is in a liminal time of their lives, caught between childhood and adulthood—Alex of Oxenfree and Max of Life is Strange being in their final year of high school, Mae of Night in the Woods being in her early twenties—and what better way to reflect this unsettling in-between-ness than placing these characters in an equally unsettling setting, where the past and the future symbolically collide alongside night terrors that are decidedly more literal?

A lot of love and work has gone into creating three-dimensional settings for these stories, places with history, complexities, and an effective dark undercurrent… almost making Arcadia Bay, Possum Springs, and Edwards Island main characters in their own right alongside the heroes navigating them. So what makes these settings work? What exactly makes them so spooky? And what makes them such good arenas for these stories about the terrors of growing up to take place?

Trailer Tuesdays: Life is Strange: Before the Storm

I’ve been hearing whispers about a new Life is Strange project for a while, though I couldn’t figure out how the developers would do it. A sequel was out of the question since the ending of the game is set up deliberately to take the story in two completely different directions, so making a direct Life is Strange 2 would surely be impossible unless they wanted to make two completely different games. Lo and behold, it turns out the new Life is Strange game is a prequel, focusing not on Max and her time powers but on Chloe a few years before the events of the original story. This is, all things considered, the sensible choice, though I’m intrigued and cautiously optimistic about how it will turn out.

Jump to Lady Geek Girl and Friends for the full post!

It’s a Metaphor, Max: The Storm

I remember the fateful day when the final chapter of Life is Strange—appropriately titled “Polarized”—came out and the internet as I knew it, even parts I hadn’t known were invested in the game, collectively exploded. The starkness of the final choice, now dubbed “save the bae vs save the bay” because you have to laugh otherwise you cry, was the main topic of discussion and/or ranting, for good reason. I’m not saying it’s a bad dichotomy to present the player with (and as I wrote about in my last post, can be interpreted to represent Max’s character development and contribute to the story nicely), it just could have been done so much better. One aspect of this, which bugs me personally the most, is the fact that the entire scenario is kind of… nonsense. Which, like last time, I’m going to try to break through using WB’s “everything that makes no sense is a metaphor” theory. Let’s take a bite out of it.

It’s a Metaphor, Max: Time Travel

Back in the day when we were first picking Life is Strange apart (you know me, if I enjoy something, it’s going to end up in pieces on the floor), WB came up with a theory that kind of solved everything: the game is being literary, and anything that can’t be explained or doesn’t seem to make much sense is there as a metaphor. The tornado? A metaphor for the encroaching storm of maturity, the climax of a story that has been all about Max growing from child into young adult. Time powers that came out of thin air? A symbolic tool to help Max learn that actions have consequences in the real world and she should embrace this. The reoccurring deer? Well, they tried to explain that away with the concept of spirit animals, but that filled up with casual racism pretty fast; so let’s say the deer instead represents Max’s youthful Bambi-like innocence, hence why they disappear from her shirts by the end of the game.

Let’s zero in on the never-explained time travel powers for today. The Butterfly Effect doesn’t actually mean “shit happens” and Warren’s declaration of Max being a wizard adds nothing, so let’s run with the idea that the time powers aren’t actually trying (and failing) to be a logical plot device but are in fact symbolism for Max and her character growth.

Ghosts with Many Faces: The Intrigue of Pre-Dead Characters

What do Rose Quartz and Rachel Amber have in common? Well, funnily enough, the first part of their names both start with R and the second part shares a name with a natural substance that can end up in pretty and inexpensive jewellery. But first and foremost, of course, they’re both dead before their respective stories begin. Does this mean they aren’t featured or aren’t hugely important? Certainly not—in fact characters that are D.O.A. serve a unique sort of purpose in the worlds of their narrative.

The fanmade visual novel/dating sim Love Is Strange has recently been completed and released (oh, isn’t it amazing what fans can achieve if they’re dedicated to and grumpy with the source material in equal measure?) and I’ve been interested in checking it out for a while, not just because it places the power to cuddle Kate Marsh in my hands, but because one of the love interests is Rachel—someone we never got to ‘meet’ in the canon game because she was missing (and later proved to be dead) before the story began. I’m very interested in how Love Is Strange’s writers will characterise her, given that there are so many conflicting versions of her.

Working out who Rachel is turns out to be as big a mystery as working out what happened to her—to Chloe, she was an angel; to fellow students she was either the coolest of the cool or the biggest and sluttiest burn-out to ever blast comet-like across the campus; to Jefferson she was a desperate plaything; to Frank she was a confident, wonderful partner. It all paints a very conflicting and confused picture.

But this is, of course, the point

Saving Kate Marsh

[TW: This post contains discussion of suicide]

This playthrough we managed to do it. I played with my sister at my side and some extra knowledge in tow, and we climbed one of the greatest emotional mountains Life Is Strange threw at me: we convinced Kate Marsh to step down and not kill herself. And it was emotional as all hell, on a very real level, the same way failing to save her the first time was.

Life Is Strange #5: Max Caulfield vs The Universe

The in-class selfie was an enormous plot point! All the selfies are crucially important! I was only joking about that! I cannot believe this!!

Life Is Strange #4: Paying the (Chloe) Price

This episode answers a few burning questions, but ultimately leaves me asking more. Chiefly: what fresh Hell is this?