Design of Revolutionized Choice-driven Mechanic for interactive storytelling in Life is Strange
Life is Strange, a thought-provoking modern-episodic-adventure game, was created with the intention to tackle real world problems like loneliness, domestic violence, cyberbullying, teen pregnancy, euthanasia, drugs and a lot of others. [1]
With the main theme being, “As an adult, you have to stop looking into the past wanting to fix everything and accept that life cannot be perfect and move on”, the game touched the above mentioned problems briefly at different points in five episodes of the game.
Revolutionized Story-based Choice and Consequence Mechanic
The game lets you rewind and replay parts of the game until you are satisfied with your decision rather than asking the player to make hasty decisions like those in Telltale Games.
Telltale Games hasty decisions Time Bar Example
Telltale games keep you on your toes by placing a bar of time on the screen while presenting you with choices. They don’t necessarily give you time to reflect upon your decision either. Not responding at all leads to negative consequences. The game mechanics heavily relies on instincts, and after a while, you just accept this and start making decisions on autopilot. Life is Strange would be in a whole lot of trouble if they followed the same mechanic as it would lose the effect the directors were aiming for. The directors of Life is Strange wanted the players to experience the life of a teenager who gets the opportunity to rewind time and change the outcome until they are happy with their choice. So the director’s decision to revolutionize the existing choice and consequence mechanic may have transpired from the need to foster this “teenage” effect.
You might ask - how is that captivating if you get to carefully weigh your decisions to carve out the perfect outcomes for your character?
I believe these are the reasons the creators had in mind for revolutionizing the choice-driven mechanic:
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The game’s main mechanic of rewind is basically what a person would ask for when they instantly regret making a decision in real life. Some teenagers would want to redo their first impressions, some want to be portrayed as heroic, some want to completely erase their embarrassing moments and some may just want to be perfect. The creators of this game identified this want to “redo” to change the course of events, as some teens make bad decisions, and it fits well in a high-school environment.
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The choices provided to the player cannot be explicitly placed into a right or wrong category, like Good Karma or Evil Karma in Infamous where distribution is universally accepted, but lie in shades of grey. Any decision you make will have consequences for you to deal with. These choices reach out to each individual’s understanding of what is more important to them at the time or what can be sacrificed to achieve things that are more desirable to them at the moment.
Max's monologue when she leaves her classroom.
Max trying to fit in.
Good Karma and Bad Karma in Infamous.
What does the player feel is more important? Getting the security guard David on your side or defending Chloe?
The opening song in the game, “To all of you” by Syd Matters, is to bring forward the fact that we already know:
Maybe these people who seem spectacular and glamorous or even just fine, have their problems too. There is something inspiring about their carefree and perfect lives and he wants to be a part of it. But the truth is, nobody is untroubled and we just tend to hide our worries behind this facade.
The game does a good job of building the non-playable characters personalities around this concept. It also nudges the player to believe that just like every other superhero out there, you have the ability to save the people you want to. It is always accompanied by a warning that says your actions have consequences and you do not understand the implications of those until a few good hours into the game.
If you haven’t played the game before, here are a few things you need to know to better understand the rest of the blog post:
Statistics:
At the end of every episode, the game displayed statistics that were the combined percentages of choices made by PC/Steam players.
Heavy Tracking of information in branching narrative
While making games, it is often desirable to have low tracking complexity, Tracking Complexity refers to the task of mentally keeping track of multiple things at once. Choice-driven games are inherently heavy on tracking as you need to fully absorb and retain information to make meaningful choices for the desired outcomes. Imagine on top of that, you had to keep track of information from multiple non-overlapping encounters at once. In Life is Strange, throughout the game, you interact with different characters and the choices you make are sometimes independent of each other. Example - Your conversations with Chloe and Kate do not overlap at all but both interactions are prominent and individually tell poignant stories.
So how did the directors ensure that you could keep track of multiple stories at once?
In Life is Strange, this would mean keeping track of your relationship with other characters and how these characters portray themselves to you. Despite having multiple characters, each character is idiosyncratic and personify each of the real-world problems discussed above, for example - Kate personifies cyberbullying, Dana personifies teen pregnancy, carefree Chloe and Frank personify drugs and sick Chloe personified euthanasia. Their traits were heavily exaggerated and you knew exactly how you felt towards a character after your first encounter with them.
The game then abuses our ability to retain knowledge on the basis of our preconceived notions about a trait to throw in a twist.
The game copiously exploits our assumptions about these characters by using the “Evil All Along” trope and the good guy turns out to have always been evil. I am talking about how Mr. Jefferson turns out to be a potential murderer.
In episode 2, principal Wells asks you to point your finger at who you think was responsible for Kate’s suicide attempt.
Statistics Episode 2.
According to the above statistics, only 7% of the people blamed Mr. Jefferson being the only people who identified this trope and saw it coming. Both Nathan and David are portrayed to be the obvious candidates on the basis of interactions you have with them. It makes me think if the statistics would have been the same if it were a movie and not a game.
In fact, the game taunts us in a very subtle and sinister way at the beginning.
Episode 1 (No knowledge of Jefferson being the antagonist)
Seriously though, I could frame any one of you in a dark corner, and capture you in a moment of desperation. And anyone of you could do that to me. Isn't that too easy? Too obvious? What if Arbus chose to capture people at the height of their beauty or innocence?
Episode five is playing through Max’s nightmare which is a reflection of all events and her decisions. It portrays Max's feelings, especially her fears, insecurities, and guilt. Every important location is revisited, and all characters Max met are featured in some twisted way. Max is confronted with the consequences of her choices that she made and is accused of doing the wrong things by all appearing characters. It also emphasizes on Max and Chloe's relationship.
In a particular nightmare, you revisit the classroom location from episode one. The same scene plays around you but the environment is far more disturbing.
Episode 5 (Jefferson is revealed to be a murderer)
You now interpret these words differently and cringe at the thought of it having happened to so many of Blackwell’s female students who disappeared in the past.
So how did such a common trope pull a fast one on us?
Firstly, I believe that while watching a movie, because you are a passive audience whose personal opinions about a character do not have consequences on how the movie ends, you are much more comfortable with stating a firm conviction. Whereas in a game, your actions have consequences on “your” character and you tend to make decisions based on what information the game provides you with, in this case, your character sees an altercation between David and Kate where she is being harassed, Nathan Prescott is clearly depicted as the antagonists and Mr. Jefferson only responds poorly when you bring up the subject of Kate Marsh. I don’t know a lot many people who would choose Mr. Jefferson on a hunch when faced with these scenarios. Because you’re controlling Max and if you’re unable to save Kate from committing suicide, this is your chance to make things right.
Secondly, because of heavy tracking complexity (tracking so many characters at a time), you immediately segregate characters into what you portray as good and bad. You’re not just an observer, you have several decisions to make, absorb so much information and at several moments, you find yourself feeling the same emotions your character goes through. And just like in real life when you’re emotional, so many times our decisions are not rational but heavily influenced by how we feel.
There must be more factors as to why most of us didn’t see it coming, but I wanted to focus on the ones mentioned above as a way to initiate a discussion around it.
Where did the interest curve lie in terms of Gameplay mechanics?
This was done by pushing the player outside their comfort zone and showing them that they had bigger responsibilities and this supernatural power was not just something to have fun with.
Let me explain to you how -
At one point in the game, you have to convince your friend Kate to not jump off the roof. A lot of the previous gameplay focused on building a strong relationship between your character, Max, and Kate. Her signs of depression were heavily embedded in the environment of storytelling, for example, drawing of nooses and the word “waste” scribbled in Kate’s diary, her viral video posted online, harsh anonymous messages and graffitis targeted at Kate. The game makes sure you understand that Max is the only little ray of hope that Kate has. At the end of episode 2, the player gets hit with the information of Kate jumping from the roof and Max is the only one who can save her. Until now, the pacing of the game was slow and no major decisions had to be made. But now, it was crucial to save Kate. You knew you had your “rewind” power to rely on if things went wrong.
But when you needed your “rewind” ability the most, the directors decided to get rid of it. This is the only time in the game where you freeze time and because of this, every action around you, like other students taking pictures of this event, colder music score, lights and particles to make you uncomfortable and David running to help her, is exaggerated.
After you reach the roof, you still have to deal with the fact that your ability won’t work and the outcome completely depends on the decisions you make without do-overs. This is similar to other choice-driven games but severely magnified only because you need to step out of that cocoon your ability had built for you and face this decision head-on.
This is the only part in the game where time is frozen and you get to experience all emotions in slow motion. You are liable for your past actions (whether you decided to answer or ignore Kate’s call when you were with Chloe), you have a narrow window to mend the situation.
It was definitely a high point in terms of story but the new Gameplay that assisted it made sure you knew that you were not going to come out of this episode unscathed.
Can Life is Strange be more than its Ending?
Lastly, I want to talk about the most debated topic that is its ending which prevented the players from reflecting upon the intense emotional challenges the directors were hoping to convey through these real-world problems.
If you haven’t played the game, the easiest way to understand why fans reacted to the ending the way they did is to apply the same logic as why fans exploded over the ending of the TV show “Dexter”.
Now, if you haven’t seen Dexter either, let me enlighten you on this hot topic.
The TV show started off strong with the protagonist being a blood splatter analyst in the day and a serial killer who targets murderers in the night. Pretty cool right? Through most of the series, the viewers enjoyed the storyline where it keeps you on the edge of your seat when he either escapes other serial killers or avoids getting caught. However, the ending invalidated this intense journey it takes to get there.
For Life is Strange, the fans were upset because it felt like the choices given to you at the end of the last episode were inevitable and all your choices throughout the game did not matter at all. After spending countless hours on trying to save Chloe with your ability, turns out that using this ability caused a storm in Arcadia Bay (the town where this entire story takes place).
You are now given a choice between “Sacrificing Chloe” or “Sacrificing Arcadia Bay”.
A lot of players had to pause the game at this moment because this was more than just making a choice between which one to sacrifice.
The players were faced with a dilemma. If you strip down this decision, by removing the entire game and decisions you made to get there, to just a question, the logical answer is to save the town and sacrifice one person.
Let us look at what the statistics were for this decision.
I believe this is a successful decision, on the director’s end, on branching the narrative because of how close the percentages are to each other. If we could predict what the players would choose, it means that the freedom of choice is merely an illusion and that is not much of choice, is it? But here, we see a good distribution of selection of the offered choices.
I am going to go ahead and make a bold statement (bear in mind, I belong to this category and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it) -
Players who choose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay did not want to deal with the fact that they went through these intense episodes for nothing and saving Chloe was selfish and liberating. Saving Chloe from getting shot, from getting euthanized, getting shot again by Jefferson, dealing with Kate’s suicide if you couldn’t help her, investigating Rachel Amber’s disappearance being a dead end, all these factors made this decision all the more obvious for some of us. But being faced with a moral dilemma (One person over Arcadia Bay, really?) made us pause the game and reevaluate our decision.
I wouldn’t know if I fully understand why the rest of us chose to sacrifice Chloe. Again, there is no right or wrong. It is the most rational choice to make.
But were there also bits of the game that made them more attached to everybody else in Arcadia Bay?
Were there people who saved Kate wanting to keep her alive and that incident had a more emotional impact on players than the strong bonding between Max and Chloe throughout the game? And choosing Chloe meant invalidating that decision?
I wish I had answers to these questions but as I write this today, I realise the next time someone tells me they have played Life is Strange, I would like to know what ending they chose and why.
Even though the ending was not what the audience hoped for and definitely not the reactions the director’s hoped for, it did reveal an interesting distribution of the population.
Having played this game a few months ago and analysing it now I realise that it's the journey of the game that I enjoyed the most. It was those decisions that I made and thought were locally optimal at the time, rather than focusing on the bigger picture of the game. Those little victories when I made Kate feel a little better or that little glimpse of humanity that I was able to extract out of Victoria (typical snob). Those individual episodes and the decisions I made within them that showed good immediate consequences and temporary setbacks were what I enjoyed the most. Yes, the ending did tear me apart and it was a way to show how nothing is under your control when you have responsibilities, but the vast difference in the opinions of the population was a fascinating outcome.
References:
[1] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023468/-Life-is-Strange-Case
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What does the player feel is more important? Getting the security guard David on your side or defending Chloe?