A Punch in the Gut
April 22, 2015 4:59 PM   Subscribe

Anyone else could have saved her: Life is Strange gave my personal tragedy a score
What I do want to suggest, however, is that far more than any other form of media, creators of video games need to be aware that this medium not only increases engagement but also increases the emotional burden on affected players in a unique way. I have watched films and read comics in the past that dealt with themes of unprevented suicide and, while difficult for me to get through, passive forms of media have never left me this distraught. By giving me control of the situation in Life is Strange, developer Dontnod Entertainment suddenly forced me to inspect my own agency in my life. That has an emotional price attached. This is the power and beauty of games; what feels like an echo of pain in other art forms feels like a punch in the gut when the same topic is explored in a well-made game. (emphasis added)

Warning: the article contains frank descriptions of teenage suicide, as well as spoilers for the game Life is Strange.
posted by Frayed Knot (27 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
The dialog script in this game is SO bad... and yet I find it incredibly compelling. It manages to effortlessly avoid a lot of the technical/design issues of the Telltale games, the environment design is really good, and the way it plays with the ideas of responsibility and regret is unique.

The power that Max has is kind of a curse. It makes you really consider and agonize over every decision because you have the power to see their immediate effect, but not their eventual outcome. So you make decisions without the ability to see which is really "best" but with the responsibility of having the ability to always carefully select your response.

I think it's always very tricky when games deal with sensitive topics because even if there's a desire to portray them respectfully, you are still constantly rubbing up against the cold logic of a game system where the player is trying to get the best outcome. So having what is basically a memory puzzle determine whether you can save this character is both really fascinatingly unique and pretty disquieting.
posted by selfnoise at 5:17 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I really enjoy Life Is Strange, and I think when the end of the year comes it has a good chance of making my list of top games of 2015.

What Laura Dale saw in that second episode, though, is what I saw too—not through the lens of traumatic personal experience, but only slightly askance, a lens into a very near possibility. And I worried about the same thing she worries about: what responsibility does a video game have when it implies agency where we tell ourselves and each other, in similarly traumatic times, that we have none? Dale doesn't come up with any better answers than I did, which I expected. I'm not sure there is a good answer.

(Obviously I've tip-toed around the actual subject so as to avoid spoilers.)
posted by chrominance at 5:21 PM on April 22, 2015


Oh, though I guess the pull quote says "suicide." So I guess we all know what we're talking about here.
posted by chrominance at 5:24 PM on April 22, 2015


--Over Marzu Grande?

--No, I don't think I'll ever get over Marzu Grande.
posted by Earthtopus at 5:38 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


what responsibility does a video game have when it implies agency where we tell ourselves and each other, in similarly traumatic times, that we have none?

Art can make people ask uncomfortable questions about themselves. I don't think the game bears any responsibility per se, any more than a good book, movie, painting or song would.
posted by dazed_one at 6:32 PM on April 22, 2015


I suppose that implicit in my above comment is a disagreement with the final line of the quote in the FPP. I've experienced so many other forms of media and art that have made me feel strongly that I couldn't say that games do so to a greater extent. I wouldn't say they do so to a lesser extent either, I'd just put all those forms of expression and art on equal footing.
posted by dazed_one at 6:39 PM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


Art can make people ask uncomfortable questions about themselves. I don't think the game bears any responsibility per se, any more than a good book, movie, painting or song would.

Oh, I don't dispute that at all. It's more that by allowing for "a right choice" that always works if you just follow the recipe, the game implies a certain method to how the world works that I fundamentally disagree with. And it's not clear to me that was a dimension intended by the developers, that it might just be an emergent property of the game mechanics.

Or to put it another way, I guess I don't like the possibility that people might play the game, think there's always a way to save people from themselves, and then beat themselves up needlessly when it turns out there isn't. Maybe the game shouldn't bear any responsibility for that pain, but it's not obvious to me other way.
posted by chrominance at 6:46 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Miss Dale's answer to video games being an uncomfortably effective art form that once made her feel bad is to shit up the immersion with trigger warnings.

Yep. The problem is obviously with games, not gaming journalism.
posted by clarknova at 9:43 PM on April 22, 2015


Miss Dale's answer to video games being an uncomfortably effective art form that once made her feel bad is to shit up the immersion with trigger warnings.

The author actually wrote:

If a trigger warning isn't for you specifically, you'll likely regret having read it; what would have allowed me to avoid a situation that I found painful would just read like a spoiler for most people.

...

Ultimately I do not know the right solution here. Video games have a unique ability to touch players and alter their emotional state, but that power comes with a duty to ensure that players whose emotions are affected are properly supported afterwards.


So, no, that's not at all what she was advocating, and she explicitly noted that trigger warnings, as you so eloquently put it, "shit up the immersion."
posted by dubitable at 10:45 PM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sure. In the first section she drops the token platitudes, insisting that in no way would she ever suggest artists have a responsibility to anything but their art and blah blah blah.

But her second section draws a very clear conclusion: the power these artists possess is a problem that requires a solution.

Defend that cognitive dissonance, and its authoritarian implications, with as much eloquence as you can muster.
posted by clarknova at 11:16 PM on April 22, 2015


Is there anything wrong with her saying it's a problem? I think it's fairly self obvious - with great power comes great responsibility etc. She suggests several solutions, but acknowledges they're all flawed: so the takeaway from this is, well, hey developers, this is a real issue, so it would be great if you took that into account when building games. An action doesn't have to 100% solve an issue to count as a solution.

Anyway I think that this problem is probably self limiting: if your games make your customers feel bad, soon you won't have any customers left. This is especially a problem in, say, competitive games, where by pure statistics some players will lose more than half the time. Losing makes players feel bad. Say the bottom 10% leave: now the 10% above them are suddenly now the worst 10%, and now they decide to leave as well.

The most memorable games I played had the most emotional impact. Made me turn off my computer and curl up on the couch and do nothing for the rest of the night. And great, if you like that sort of thing, go back for more, if not, don't play anything from them again.
posted by xdvesper at 11:39 PM on April 22, 2015


Now that's the reasonable conclusion, and I happily agree with you. If you don't like it, don't play. If it's too much for your sensibilities, find some other form of entertainment.

I'm just pointing out that the author's conclusion was something very different. She wants authors of such games to either shit them up with trigger warnings, or to find some other bowdlerization to make them more palatable for folks with her specific brand of personal problems.

I'm also pointing out that there's an entire class of game journalists who make these sorts of self-important arguments. They don't like what some games are saying, or how they make them feel, and they want the games to change. The fig-leaf disclaimer that comprises the first half of this piece is par for the course.
posted by clarknova at 12:06 AM on April 23, 2015


It seems to me that generating strong emotion in the viewer/participant is one of the signs of good art, rather than a problem as the author of the article sees it as. Being able to take this emotional effect in stride might be a sign of being a good audience.
posted by dazed_one at 2:14 AM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


She wants authors of such games to either shit them up with trigger warnings

Someone else directly quoted the author in question saying that trigger warnings were not a good solution for this particular problem, and you're still accusing her of that. I don't think your problem is with this article as written but with some sort of straw man.
posted by Sequence at 5:28 AM on April 23, 2015 [6 favorites]


I suspect that some part of the 80% that saved Kate (including me) "cheated" and paused the game to look up a critical piece of information so they could give the correct response. Failing probably means you were playing "fair" more than anything.
posted by ymgve at 6:12 AM on April 23, 2015


I also think the "problem" with trigger warnings could be solved in the same way as spoilers - just mark them as such, and make the user explicitly click to reveal the warnings.

(Though this doesn't do anything to solve the problem that the first game that puts trigger warnings on their game's store page will get relentlessly attacked by Gamergaters)
posted by ymgve at 6:17 AM on April 23, 2015


I tried playing life is strange but the pc version did not play nice with my computer.

Now I think I'll try making it work. That instance of choice or rather choices leading up to something seems a lot better than other games trying to do similar things with agency in video games (Bastion comes to mind, which even though I loved that game and did feel the emotional weight of it, it did feel kinda messily executed).
posted by KernalM at 6:38 AM on April 23, 2015


Now that's the reasonable conclusion, and I happily agree with you. If you don't like it, don't play. If it's too much for your sensibilities, find some other form of entertainment.

I'm just pointing out that the author's conclusion was something very different. She wants authors of such games to either shit them up with trigger warnings, or to find some other bowdlerization to make them more palatable for folks with her specific brand of personal problems.

I'm also pointing out that there's an entire class of game journalists who make these sorts of self-important arguments. They don't like what some games are saying, or how they make them feel, and they want the games to change. The fig-leaf disclaimer that comprises the first half of this piece is par for the course.


I just reread the article and it's a thoughtful piece in which the author admits not knowing what a good solution would be. You seem to have responded with some kind of boilerplate polemic. Maybe try to engage with her material on her level of good faith?
posted by selfnoise at 7:16 AM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


I just reread the article and it's a thoughtful piece in which the author admits not knowing what a good solution would be.

I think what's being questioned is whether this is a problem at all. Good art is supposed to be powerful and sometimes disturbing. That doesn't require a solution.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:25 AM on April 23, 2015


It can be not a problem that good art can be disturbing, while still being a problem that some people's lives are seriously disrupted by that kind of disturbance and would rather not have it happen. Good art can be a thing that's not for everybody, and we can want to find ways for some people to opt out without wrecking the experience for others. If you've already had big tragedies in your life, you don't need art to disturb you in that particular way. Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted, not the other way around.
posted by Sequence at 7:56 AM on April 23, 2015


while still being a problem that some people's lives are seriously disrupted by that kind of disturbance and would rather not have it happen.
Sequence

But there's already a solution to this issue, as noted above: don't play the game if your circumstances are such that it will affect you too seriously to endure.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:29 AM on April 23, 2015


And to know whether the game would affect you too seriously to endure, you'd need some kind of warning. We could even come up with a special term for it?
posted by selfnoise at 8:35 AM on April 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


There's a fairly clear solution for the specific issue here: a separate webpage you can go to called "Trigger Warnings (SPOILERS!)"

If I were writing such a game, I would never allow any player's honest attempt to prevent someone from suicide failing - because it's simply too awful. You need to allow players to deliberately do a bad job, so you'd need to detect only the difference between deliberate attempts to fail and everything else - pretty easy, particularly since you always would err on the side of caution...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:00 AM on April 23, 2015


If I were writing such a game, I would never allow any player's honest attempt to prevent someone from suicide failing - because it's simply too awful.

What if Picasso never painted Guernica because the destruction and the grief were too vivid? I can't agree with the idea that some things are too awful to be the subject of art. Surviving siege of Sarajevo was brutal and horrific, but it was a thought-provoking game. The dehumanization of people under tyrannical regimes is awful, but was also a very effective game.
posted by dazed_one at 10:20 AM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


clarknova: "The fig-leaf disclaimer that comprises the first half of this piece is par for the course."

Technically, everything dubitable quoted came from the second half of the article.
posted by RobotHero at 5:26 PM on April 23, 2015


One thing she doesn't explain that I'm curious about: how does she know 80% of players succeeded? Where did this information come from? That's only the sort of thing you'd know if the game devs are recording this data and publicly releasing it. Does it come up as a little pop-up after, "80% of people stopped this?" Is this listed on a bunch of "achievements" or something for the game?

And this ability to clearly delineate what is and isn't within your ability to control is a way that games are unrealistic. In real life, you're never going to have that level of certainty whether you could have changed what happened.

Of course, since you play Life is Strange as "a teenage girl who discovers she has the ability to rewind time at will," I would guess that's kind of what it's playing with thematically, choices and their possible consequences.

For a less traumatic example, there are dating sims and a lot of games with romance elements, where every potential love interest can be made to fall in love with you as long as you find the right things to say to them. I think this is a good illustration of how games often over-represent the player's control over other character's actions.
posted by RobotHero at 6:00 PM on April 23, 2015


One thing she doesn't explain that I'm curious about: how does she know 80% of players succeeded? Where did this information come from? That's only the sort of thing you'd know if the game devs are recording this data and publicly releasing it. Does it come up as a little pop-up after, "80% of people stopped this?" Is this listed on a bunch of "achievements" or something for the game?

After you finish each chapter of the game, it gives you the ability to see what critical selections the community made. So, 60% of the people watered the plant, 35% were nice to Chloe in the diner, etc.
posted by selfnoise at 7:36 PM on April 23, 2015


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