Ain’t No Room on Board for the Insincere: A Look Back at Life Is Strange, My Favorite Game of the Year
One of my favorite things I read this year was a post on Reddit that got to the core of why I despise South Park. It says:
South Park has always been fundamentally reactionary; those pushing for change are wrong no matter what change they push for. Nothing is a bigger crime to Matt and Trey than Giving a Shit. Their ideology is apathetic-libertarian; whether you’re on the left or the right, if you’re asking me to change my behavior, you suck.
It isn’t about left or right; it’s about change versus comfort. If you’re trying to change something, they think you’re annoying. And they think you’re lame, because caring about stuff is lame.
It’s the same attitude that establishes “u mad” and “butthurt” as the ultimate trump cards in internet arguments: caring is for losers, and if you become personally invested in politics you’re part of the problem. Uncritical, detached acceptance of the status quo is the only morally upright posture, and those who draw a distinction between is and ought are all smug bullies, outlandish freaks, and/or closed-minded zealots.
It’s a show that teaches its audience to become lazy and self-satisfied, that praises them for being uncritically accepting of their own biases, and that provides them with an endless buffet of thought-terminating cliches suitable for shutting down all manner of challenges to their comfort zones.
South Park is a place where you never have to have your assumptions challenged. It’s a place where you’re always right, you shouldn’t bother to think, and the people asking you to change your mind are annoying busybodies and prigs who should just shut up and leave you alone.
I admit that it is partially because I became particularly fed up with cynical detachment this year that Life Is Strange emerges in the end as my favorite game of 2015. This game, and its protagonist Max Caulfield, are endearingly, awkwardly sincere. Max feels things deeply. She cares about people and doesn’t feel any need to deny that to the world. She doesn’t build a shield of emotional detachment. To me, that is quietly heroic.

Sincerity is also why I don’t love Undertale, one of the most beloved games of the year. Initially, I was excited about Undertale’s determination to challenge the flimsy kill-or-be-killed premise of so many games. But the way to avoid killing in Undertale isn’t through honest, open communication. It’s through manipulation and evasion: figuring out exactly what you have to do in order to avoid having to kill someone, and then doing it. In a confrontation with the skeleton Papyrus, this means flirting with him. A lot. You’re not flirting with him because you or your character actually have feelings for him. It’s just what you have to do to not have to kill him.
This sets up a zany and very funny date that ends with Papyrus confessing to you that he doesn’t like you “that way,” which is played for laughs because he thinks he might be breaking your heart but of course you never liked him that way, either; you just went through the motions of flirting with him a whole bunch because it was the only way to avoid actually fighting him. Time and again, encounters required me to just figure out the one thing I could do to make it so that I didn’t have to kill my would-be enemy.

This made me uncomfortable, because I don’t think violence should always be the way to solve our problems in video games, but I don’t think that insincerity and manipulation should be, either. Yes, the characters in Undertale are charming and funny and surprising, but I felt like my connections with them were founded on lies, and while that may not be as morally wrong as wholesale slaughter, it didn’t exactly feel right to me, and it’s no less gamey and artificial, either.
With Max, there is no deception or calculated manipulation. What you see is what you get. Because of this, the game made me reflect honestly on my own life and my own connections with other people. It’s a game that benefitted in my mind from its episodic structure. I got to live with it over the months of the year, and since its episodes had room to breathe, they were able to encourage me to think about the game in a variety of different ways.
In March, just after the second episode came out, I wrote this piece for VICE about how the game has an aching awareness that each moment is slipping away, and that we live our lives not so much in straight lines, but in interconnected moments.

In August, I was enthralled by how the game examines the ways in which the things we experience inform who we are. It’s a game in which you explore different timelines, and find that as circumstances change, so, too, do people. I grew up feeling like I was trapped in the wrong timeline, but now can’t imagine who I would be today if I hadn’t been through the things I’ve been through, and my post, The Blue Butterfly, was my attempt to explore this feeling through the lens of Life Is Strange.


And finally, after the final episode, I wrote my most sprawling and personal piece about the game, Storms of Possibility.
The thing that makes Life Is Strange so rare and special to me is the way that it’s about moments and special connections, the way that a person can crack us open and know us better than anyone else, the way a person can change us, and reveal us anew to ourselves. It lets you live in these moments and feel them.
Almost everything doesn’t happen, and everything almost doesn’t happen. Do you ever really think about that?



Where Undertale feels hollow to me, Life Is Strange offers something up about how to live. How to care about something. In the end, there is a kind of moral choice, and if you do the math, the “right” choice seems clear. But people are not interchangeable and the heart is not a calculator.


South Park says it is a sin to really care about anything. I feel like it is a sin not to. If you find someone to love and understand you, maybe that’s worth holding on to. Maybe it’s worth fighting for.
See you next year.



Notes
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I also feel like…they must not have watched many South Park episodes. Just because it sees anything as a target of...
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op is very wrong on multiple levels
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I wanna set the South Park stuff aside and talk about the interpretation of what these two games are going on about,...
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Minor rebuttal: you actually don’t have to flirt with Papyrus at all in order to end that encounter peacefully. If you...
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