We Were Younger: My latest piece for VICE, on Life Is Strange

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In a 2011 interview, the writer Jeanette Winterson said, “Time is never linear. You always feel that everything happened just yesterday but also 100 years ago. I don’t want to experience time in a line.”
On its surface, the episodic game Life is Strange, which just saw the release of its second part, is about literally not experiencing time in a line. Your character, the introverted photography student Max Caulfield, discovers that she has the ability to rewind time, a gift she uses to both impress her friend Chloe and to save Chloe’s life more than once. This mechanic is Life is Strange’s gameplay hook, its gimmick, but what makes the game so fascinating to me is the way that its concerns with time go so much deeper than Max’s nifty superpower. This is a game that understands that we live our lives in interconnected moments, not in straight lines.

Read the rest of my piece on Life Is Strange’s thematic concerns with time and how the game fosters a sense of appreciation and nostalgia for the moment, here on VICE

It’s OK to be young
Before long you’ll be gone
It’s OK to be gone
Before long you’ll be young