I finished Life is Strange a while ago, although I spoiled myself about lots of details of the game before that. Anyway, I wanted to comment on it....
I really like this game and liked playing it. However, after finishing chapter 3, I encountered something that bothers me a bit.
Without going into much detail, at the end of this section you discover you can go back in time lots of years to certain moments if you have a picture of it, and you use that to save someone's life.
Of course, the moment you do, someone else's life in that family gets completely screwed and ends up in a wheelchair.
This bothers me in some games and stories. I understand that stories were everybody is always happy are boring and you need some type of tension or drama...but in some stories it seems some people are predestined to have shitty lives and they can only choose between shitty outcomes...that's especially true in time-travelling stories. In reality, most time travelling stories should be boring because you can just jump back and forth until you fix all the little details, but plenty of such stories don't do that, even if it makes no sense...most of them just jump between drama 1 and drama 2...Stein's Gate is another good example, I loved the anime but the predetermination was very annoying because it made no fucking sense.
If your time travel story is fixed and you cannot change facts, that's fine. It gets annoying when you can actually change facts but there's personal people that get screwed always no matter what.
I mean, if the point was to stop a war (the let's kill Hitler scenario), I understand a certain predestination level because such things are never caused by single events, it is an accumulation of them...but someone getting killed or in an accident? not that many variables...
Seems to me a lot of time-travel stories have these lazy moments where something "cannot be changed" and everything is like "dramatic" and "sad" and all this.....and well, it sounds ridiculous because as said, usually the solution is stupidly easy and it's so clear this is done for the drama of it, it takes away value in the end.
Seems to me a lot of time-travel stories have these lazy moments where something "cannot be changed" and everything is like "dramatic" and "sad" and all this.....and well, it sounds ridiculous because as said, usually the solution is stupidly easy and it's so clear this is done for the drama of it, it takes away value in the end.
Then there's the other type of stories that abuse the drama and bad things happening, the superhero stories where they are responsible for the well being of everyone (I'm remembering daredevil first seasons). The moment they deviate from this or decide to take a day off, the evil guys rape all their family, kill their dogs, behead their romantic interest and make them to be fired from their normal job because they failed to protect everyone by taking just a few moments to actually rest (which is something necessary for people not to go insane). Everything is overly dramatic and grey morality gets punished instantly in some cases (i'm also remembering Spiderman and uncle Ben, of course).
Regarding indie games, I read an article a while ago where it was mentioned the overly dramatic tone plenty of them have, and I have to agree on that....again, I understand the need to have plot by having struggles and dramatic things happening....but come on,some of them are so over-the-top that it ends being comical sometimes, like that joke of a story where a girlfriend without ovaries gets a transplant from her boyfriend that ends with "share if you cry every time".
I´ve played What remains of Edith Finch recently too, and that's another example. I mean, the premise of the game is based on that, that everyone in that family died too soon with different type of causes. You get to experience all the ways in which this happens. Some are dramatic, some are funny with their black-humour, some are deep, some are nonsensical, but in the end it´s a bit...I don´t know, it leaves you with a feeling that nothing matters much because the characters will suffer regardless.
I read this sentence recently, I believe from Terry Pratchett now that I think of, saying that you can make your characters suffer and go though gruesome ordeals, but you must have hope, there should be hope for a better world, or people will just go numb and not care anymore.
Indie films, indie games, and other artsy things tend to abuse on the drama sometimes to the point of nonsensical, and at the end it feels like bad world-building, in my case it removes interest in the story. I would say that if you set up a situation that is dramatic, no matter how unlikely, as a start, that's ok, you need conflict of some kind to make stories interesting. But if you compound it by adding more and more drama, it becomes ridiculous. It moves the narrative from "this people have problems" to "this people are basically cursed". I don't know if you remember Police Squad! movies, but one of the gags was always an exaggeration of bad things happening to some character, they don't only get shot a thousand times, they get hit in the head, put their foot into a bear trap, bang their fingers against a table, catch fire, and drown. So you have the dramatic unlikely event, getting shot, and you add all the other things and the unlikeness of it just makes it funny. Same applies for content that is supposed to be serious, if it starts resembling a Police Squad! gag of bad things happening, it gets ridiculous to the point of taking your attention out of the content....
I´ve played What remains of Edith Finch recently too, and that's another example. I mean, the premise of the game is based on that, that everyone in that family died too soon with different type of causes. You get to experience all the ways in which this happens. Some are dramatic, some are funny with their black-humour, some are deep, some are nonsensical, but in the end it´s a bit...I don´t know, it leaves you with a feeling that nothing matters much because the characters will suffer regardless.
I read this sentence recently, I believe from Terry Pratchett now that I think of, saying that you can make your characters suffer and go though gruesome ordeals, but you must have hope, there should be hope for a better world, or people will just go numb and not care anymore.
Indie films, indie games, and other artsy things tend to abuse on the drama sometimes to the point of nonsensical, and at the end it feels like bad world-building, in my case it removes interest in the story. I would say that if you set up a situation that is dramatic, no matter how unlikely, as a start, that's ok, you need conflict of some kind to make stories interesting. But if you compound it by adding more and more drama, it becomes ridiculous. It moves the narrative from "this people have problems" to "this people are basically cursed". I don't know if you remember Police Squad! movies, but one of the gags was always an exaggeration of bad things happening to some character, they don't only get shot a thousand times, they get hit in the head, put their foot into a bear trap, bang their fingers against a table, catch fire, and drown. So you have the dramatic unlikely event, getting shot, and you add all the other things and the unlikeness of it just makes it funny. Same applies for content that is supposed to be serious, if it starts resembling a Police Squad! gag of bad things happening, it gets ridiculous to the point of taking your attention out of the content....
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