Life is Strange

At the moment, I can't say its Glurge.

Deus Angst Machina seems to be what the writer of that article is describing.

Glurge seems to be, if I understand it, linked more closely to the morals of the story being told and messages imparted on the audience.

Which, I sometimes question if Life is Strange has a more easily discernible 'message' or 'moral' to it besides its own title (I'll come back to this). But, the game doesn't have a clear 'this is the right choice' moment very often. Every choice has its own rational and logic to it either for the player or for Max. You can take a photo as evidence instead of helping, or you can help Kate feel significantly better and not be able to prove it. Neither choice really has and outright 'consequence' for which is right and which is wrong, but they aren't 'meaningless' either (except in the Fridge Logic of not doing both, but we discussed that.)

A Glurge tale would moralize the decision of Chloe's Assisted suicide and tell you why you're wrong to send its message. Life is Strange... doesn't. It makes it unclear which choice is 'better' or more 'moral'. Instead of either, it feels like the game asks a VERY heavy question of you, takes your answer, and then goes 'I see' before continuing the rest of the tale. And I think that's very mature in its own ways.

There are bits and pieces here and there as 'morals', but they're built into logically and with good rational and the game doesn't really throw it in our faces. Some are more rational/common logic (Watch your drinks at parties, always have a sober friend/someone who will watch out for you, etc.) while others are far more subtle.

But I feel its title is probably the core; Life is Strange. It has its ups and downs and often makes no sense at all, but its also a beautifully strange experience.

As far as Deus Angst Machina... I also question if that's appropriate. Most of the plot twists and ideas have been built up and foreshadowed across several episodes. Jefferson's first speech all the way back in episode one, one of the first lines in the entire game, is basically a mission statement of what he WILL do to his students. Chloe's complete and utter apathy for the disabled builds into the twist at the end of Episode 3 in a rather clever way. Deus Angst Machina means that awful things happen with no build up or are created for the sake of creating awful things and Life is Strange, while it has awful events, none of them feel out of place or 'for the sake of awful events'.

it feels like the game asks a VERY heavy question of you, takes your answer, and then goes 'I see' before continuing the rest of the tale. And I think that's very mature in its own ways

But that's the problem. It brings up these heavy issues, but then moves on to the rest of the story. Glurge or not, perhaps Life is Strange shouldn't use them unless it wishes to discuss them.

edited 25th Aug '15 3:06:33 PM by SilentColossus

Actually, I think there's a third option here. We're talking about it as if the only options are:

1. Game presents you with a decision
2. You make decision
3. Game either rewards you for making the right choice or smacks you down and says "NO! WRONG!"

or

1. Game presents you with a decision
2. You make decision
3. Game nods sagely and moves on without giving you a concrete moral judgment on your choice

Neither of which are particularly deep or meaningful, for different reasons. I would argue, though, that what the game is actually doing is more like:

1. Game presents you with a decision
2. You make decision
3. Game nods sagely and then presents you with the consequences of your decision—and every decision has both negative and positive outcomes, and it's up to you to decide whether it was right or wrong because in the real world, there is no such thing as objective morality, only cause and effect.

That is what I think LIS is trying to portray: A world where "right" and "wrong" is only meaningful from the perspective of the people dealing with the consequences. The game itself refuses to hand you an easy answer about whether it's right or wrong to take Kate's call: Hey, look, some people ignored the call and saved Kate's life. Even if you know the game's entire method of tallying decisions and meting out consequences, it's not as if ignoring the call is tantamount to murdering Kate; it's not that easy to quantify.

The game is saying "Here's a situation. Do what you will, and we'll see what happens as a result."

It's not just "Do what you will, and we'll see what happens"—you are seeing the results of your actions, so you can't pretend the decisions are meaningless. The consequences are complicated, though, and not always immediately attributable to your actions, so while they're not meaningless, they're also not simple or predictable—like life itself.

Of course, I still strongly believe the Ep4 Assisted Suicide decision will come back in some way, shape or form. I don't know what form that will be, but I categorically reject the idea of a decision-based game featuring a decision that has literally no in-game consequences. That, to me, is completely antithetical to the nature of choice-based games. If I wanted to make meaningless "hard" choices with no consequences, I would just buy a book of philosophical thought-experiments, pour myself a stiff drink, and settle into a recliner. That's not the point of a video game. Video games are interactive. If your decisions are meaningless, then the game is meaningless.

edited 25th Aug '15 3:35:16 PM by SolipSchism

Now that its been said in so many words, I have to agree with the first part.

I disagree with the 'meaingingless' decisions comment though. It entirely depends on how you view the word 'meaningless'. How are we defining that here?

In my opinion, as long as either the question asked of us is meaningful in its own way; either by asking a question that tells us something new about a character or maybe a question that perplexes us and we're honestly not sure how to answer or, the obvious one, having certain detailed outcomes to the choice.

One of the things that I find VERY good about Game of Thrones is its ability to make me terrified of EVERY LITTLE DECISION. Even just dialogue choices have me terrified. Realistically, I know that there a limit to how much I can control how my dialogue will change people like Ramsay's opinion of me. However, the sheer terror I get from being confronted by those characters has me invested to the point I find myself completely unsure of what to say to half of them just out of 'What could the consequences be to lying to Tyrion or telling him the truth?'

Even if they may not ACTUALLY change much, that doesn't change the feelings that are resonating with me.

edited 25th Aug '15 5:31:53 PM by InkDagger

But presumably they change something. Like I said—having some form of tangible consequences to the decisions you make is the difference between making choices in a choice based game and just... Making "choices" in a vacuum that affect nothing except the mental state of the person who made them, and even then only in the sense that having made the decision, you can now say you made the decision, and literally nothing else has changed. That is practically the definition of a thought experiment: An exercise in wondering how you would react, in a situation you are not in and probably never will be in, with literally no reason to make the choice except for the sake of thinking about it.

And that is fine—thought experiments can be marvelous exercises in introspection free of consequences. What if you pressed a button that would give you a million dollars but a random person in the world would be brutally murdered as a result BUT you'd never know who or even hear about it? Would you press it? What is your rationale? Okay, cool, question answered, no consequences. But that is not the point of a choice based game. The point of a choice based game is to make choices, and see what happens as a result.

edited 25th Aug '15 10:12:39 PM by SolipSchism

Well, duh, the entire game should never be nothing but 'consequentless decisions'.

At the same time, I don't think a game is fully sustainable on making EVERY choice resonate and change things up. Its just not practical for a lot of reasons. Its just not resonable to have Dialogue Choice A's 'conseqences' differ so heavily from Dialogue Choice B's. and the Dialogue Choice C's from both A and B's.

Yes, big decisions need to have purpose and some plan in mind when they're asked of the player; They need to have intention. However, I think its perfectly fine to have a handful that DON'T wind up being as big of an impact. Its true to life that sometimes big choices we put a lot of effort into thinking about get dashed because of some 3rd party event we couldn't foresee.

Decisions that don't add in by the end can also be eternal paranoia fuel depending on the setting/tone. Once again, with Game of Thrones. I keep wondering if some random choice that was never mentioned again will bite me in the ass come episode 6. It gives anxiety and keeps players on their toes and that means the audience not only believes your story but you are invested in it.

And every choice factoring into things would cause issues; I know everything will matter later so its less of a surprise when things 'shockingly' become relevant via Chekhov's Gun.

I say take the middle path. Have a large number of choices and some dialogue options that will open scenes you may never have seen otherwise, but illusion of choice is helpful and has its benefits. Watering Lisa really has no actual benefit, but damn does it get me in character and kind of happy that I'm in the percentage of players who watered her properly.

You're making contradictions though—How is it not reasonable to have a choice whose consequences differ widely? There are choices you can make in this game that make the difference between a girl jumping off a roof versus agreeing to seek medical help. That's a pretty wide difference between the two.

I'm not saying the game needs to have 128 different endings based on every conceivable branch of choices you could make—look at Wolf Among Us. Regardless of what you do in the game, it all basically comes down to arguing your viewpoint to a group of angry citizens and trying to convince them that you did the right thing and that you are not a bad guy. That's valid—all your choices feed into how they react to your arguments.

Look at Mass Effect 3. Yes, the reduction of all your choices into "did you win or not" is supremely frustrating, but at least in some infinitesimal way, those choices still mattered. You can still make such poor choices that you hamstring yourself and make it impossible to really win, or you can make enough effective choices that you get the Golden Ending. Even if they don't matter as much as they should (and I'm in the camp that thinks they didn't matter enough), for Heaven's sake, at least they still mattered. None of the choices in the Mass Effect trilogy are literally, totally without consequence of any kind. None of the choices in the Mass Effect trilogy are there solely to see what you would do.

I'm not saying those choices don't belong in video games. There are genres where it's appropriate. And even in choice-based games, it would make sense to have an early, almost tutorial-like decision where the game says "Okay, now choose A or B. Good! You made a decision! Look, see, here is the consequence of your action—but don't worry, it's not a real consequence, it won't affect anything later in the game, we just wanted to show you how this whole choice-based thing works. So be aware, your later decisions will have real consequences." That would make sense. And in, say, something like Animal Crossing, it makes sense to have decisions that don't make any real difference: You can decorate your house however you like and it affects nothing (well, there's the whole feng shui thing, but let's not get into that). You can wear whatever clothes you like and it makes no difference.

But a choice-based game makes a commitment to the player by its very existence, by the very fact that it's branded as a choice-based game: "You will make choices in this game, and those choices will affect what happens later in the game." Making you choose whether or not to help someone commit suicide is far too big of a choice to have no fucking consequences at all. That's absurd. That's not just absurd, it's offensive. I should not be able to have a choice between helping someone kill themselves and refusing to help, and be able to just go on playing the game as if nothing had happened. That cheapens the whole situation to a point where it might as well not have happened. I mean that in the most literal sense imaginable: If that is in fact what happens, then you could literally skip everything that happens in the alternate timeline and miss absolutely nothing. And I don't for a second believe they would waste their time programming and writing that whole sequence just to make you think about it.

And frankly, I think the plant living or dying is the consequence of your decisions in watering it, so I don't agree with your claim that it's an example of a choice with no consequences. I've already said over and over that the consequences don't have to tie into the core plot, or be earth-shattering, or anything. They just have to be there. (Not to mention, lest we forget, ep5 is not out yet—there could still be a follow-up on the plant. The plant living or dying may be the consequences of how you choose to water it—but there still may be some follow-up to whether the plant lived or died.)

edited 26th Aug '15 7:58:52 AM by SolipSchism

When I said that, I was referring to the smaller things such as encouraging Daniel to go to the party or comforting Taylor. Or even smaller things like just simply which dialogue choices you state, which is what I meant by mentioning Telltale's Go T.

It isn't painted as 'Lie to Tyrion' or 'Tell the Truth', but by giving dialogue options that tell the truth, lie, or half-truth based off of what is actually being said. I reasonably know, by virtue of it being impractical and by knowing how Telltale games work, that the dialogue choices probably will matter very little on their own, but there's still a lingers anxiety of 'Am I saying the right thing? Did I just fuck it up by that innocuous comment???' There are even very small choices such as how you treat 'you friend Bowen' at the beginning of the series or what you say to Whitehill/Ramsay that, in the end, don't change anything (with even in-character explanations), but they are still treated in a certain way that has its own merits besides a more tangible 'consequence'.

Say I'm doing things to screw around with King's Landing. 'Cersei will want our heads' my friend cries. She repeats this after every action and everything builds up that Cersei will not be pleased. Its terrifying. Now, maybe its actually impossible for this to alter her later mood (knowing her, she'd be pissed off about a loose thread in a curtain), but the illusion in-universe for my actions and their later re-actions still have a point and purpose to them even if they don't have a tangible change.

The choices where time is slowed down and you HAVE to pick a choice or the game will not continue; I will say that those should have consequences because they are framed in such a big and important way. But I think there's room for a few to be there and never mentioned again. One 'major choice' of Walking Dead Episode 3 is weather you Mercy Kill the screaming woman or get more supplies during the distraction. This scene provides nothing to the plot. There is nothing really important about this scene that couldn't have been explained in other ways. But they give us this horrifying choice and it works because it invests me.

About ME 3, yeah... I understand that one. That was a... mess. I don't mind A FEW choices not mattering much in the end, sure, that's fine. MOST of them not mattering is... yeah, no. But, no, there are a few choices that are purely there for the sake of choice. How you deal with Kolyat's Assassination Attempt is never mentioned again. How you deal with Jacob's Father is also irrelevant. Should I mention Jacob's romance here too? Ouch.

However, with the first two, I don't think that's exactly a bad thing. It might have been interesting to see how that event's outcomes might change Kolyat's character, but its no big loss if it doesn't and there are bigger fish to fry in that department anyway. With Jacob's father, we have no reason to track his case through the Alliance courts and he dies in the other two options so, while the choice exists, it isn't a bad thing that it doesn't have a tangible 'consequence' to it. The third one is one to be reasonably upset about, but anyway...

Plus, there are TONS of examples in literature where scenes and entire chapters didn't matter much by the end or could have entirely be skipped. Harry Potter has an entire chapter about singing Valentine Cupids that has VERY VERY little relevance to the main plot except for Ginny to find out Harry has Tom's diary. Could they Jo have written that chapter in any other way so that Ginny just got that knowledge more simply and move on? Sure. Is it bad that she didn't and instead used the Singing Valentine Cupids? Not really. It characterizes Lockheart, Hogwarts, its students, and even some world building here and there.

Or, another more 'classic' example, the Duke and the King from Huck Finn. They really serve nothing to the plot. They hang around for a dozen or so chapters and act REALLY uncomfortably creepy, are generally annoying (or to me, they give me a headache), and they play Huck and Jim the fools constantly. They're only purpose is really to sell Jim back into slavery and that's about it. Yet, I've met well over a dozen people who cite those two as their favorite characters in the entire book. And other 'irrelevant' scenes from the book such as the Totally-Not-Romeo-And-Juliet couple in one town and a few others color the setting. Arguabkly, this makes it more shocking when Jim's completely forgettable scene about seeing a dead body comes back to reveal that he saw Huck's father.

There are even MORE examples I could pull out of books and movies and etc. So, if books and movies can have 'irrelevant' scenes and still be top of the line genuine classics, why can't video games? Why to video games always have to be concise and to the point otherwise it's 'wasting our time' or some such other complaint?

If Episode 5 makes the assisted suicide chocice have a 'consequence' (though, I think you MIGHT dip into Glurge depending on the exact nature of that consequence), but I don't think its a massive loss if it doesn't. The nature of the situation gives what we just learned (Max can use photos to time travel) far more gravitas than Max turning back time and going 'Oh! Sweet! I can use photos. Just going to go back to when I left then!'. It'd be concise but awful. The situation gives us some character development, character building, world building, and some gravity/weight to it.

If they don't give a 'consequence', fine, I don't think there's a big loss and I can't imagine what the consequence could possibly be anyway. I can't think of any logical reason to go back to that Alternate Timeline since there's been no progress made toward stopping Nathan/Jefferfuck and it would invalidate basically ALL of the other choices in the game if we were to stay there. I just can't think of a single reason to go back. I feel like we got the closure we needed from that timeline and we moved on.

I'm not trying to say it shouldn't, but that I don't think it will since we have a billion far more important plotlines to wrap up in Episode 5's 3-5 hours and I just simply can't think of any reason why Max would go back to that timeline. Maybe she'll 'accidentally' do so or it'll be an impulse thing decision, but I can't think of an 'intentional' reason for her to go back there.

EDIT:

However, could it be possible that the choice could change Max's chatacter herself and she will act differently during Episode 5? That's a conceivable 'consequence' that would avoid Glurge entirely as long as its thoughtful and logical to whatever actions it relates to. And it technically could tie itself into the plot indirectly.

That might actually be a rather brilliant conclusion to the choice.

edited 26th Aug '15 9:40:51 AM by InkDagger

I don't think the comparison of consequenseless choices to thought expirements really works.

Cause, like, a thought expirement literally is in a vacuum. There's no context by its very nature. But, let's take the choice that started this for example: Chloe wanting assisted suicide.

If this was just a thought expirement, there would be no real emotional resonance. It's abstract- you're not going to agonize over the decision, because you don't actually have to make the decision.

But in the case of this game, there's a ton of context surrounding it. You're being asked to help a character you've spent three episodes growing attached to die. That's a hell of a lot more impactful than some book presenting an anstract question about assisted suicide, and I think that scene still has value even if nothing really come of it.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

I am kinda loss in this whole discussion but I agree with that last sentence. Even if assisting Chloe's suicide leads to no tangible consequence in the game, it was still a good scene and a good choice. Personally, I am perfectly content if all the "consequence" we see is Max emotional reflections after the fact. Having it impact the plot in some large way could, in fact, possible ruin it, I think, as it could reduce it to a right or wrong question.

You quite literally just summed up the brunt of my opinion. The game has established a way of telling you "Okay, now, you've made decisions before, but this one, oh, boy, this one's a doozy—this one will definitely matter." Time stops and the game forces you to look at it as an important decision. And I absolutely believe that those choices need to have consequences. To do otherwise would be tantamount to deceiving the player—it would be the game, in effect, saying, "Hey, be careful, this choice matters!" And in case you hadn't noticed, the assisted suicide choice is one of those decisions. Having it just disappear into the aether afterward would be stupid.

Re: the Mass Effect decision, I have to point out that even if you discount how your decisions feed into your ability to garner enough forces to win the final battle (which almost everything factors into one way or another), there is still the baseline that almost every choice factors into: Your morality points. Even if it affects nothing else, virtually every choice at least feeds into those. There are still consequences, however small. There isn't nothing.

I think you might be misunderstanding what I mean when I say consequences, because you are describing consequences and saying that they aren't consequences. Jacob's father dying as a result of one choice or another: That is a consequence. Knowing that his father has been consigned to the courts is a consequence. It is different from what would have happened if you had made a different choice. There may be no later consequence, but those at least give you something that isn't immediately erased by going to a different timeline. Consigning Jacob's father to the justice system and then never hearing about it again may make you feel like it didn't matter because it's never brought up again, but there is still the knowledge that it is still happening somewhere in that universe. There is still the possibility that it could come up, say, in the next Mass Effect game that's in the works. And if nothing else, there is still a bit of the story unfolding outside your experience of the game.

It's a very thin distinction, I'll grant you, but the fact remains that you have done something, and the results are unfolding somewhere else in the game's universe. If you made that choice and then immediately erased that timeline from existence, that, for me, would completely negate the choice, as opposed to just sending its consequences off somewhere where you just don't see them. Yes, at the end of the day, the effect is almost the same: You don't see the consequences. But in the case of ME, you know the consequences are still there. In the case of erasing a timeline, you have literally undone the consequences of every possible choice in exactly the same way. That is what makes them meaningless. It's the difference between writing "A" or "B" on a slate and then locking that slate in a box that you'll never open again, versus writing "A" or "B" on a slate and then hurling the slate into the sun afterward. In the former case, at least the slate still exists and could potentially come back. In the latter... I think you see my point.

The problem with what you're saying about Harry Potter is twofold:

1. Video games and literature are two very different mediums with a key difference: Video games are interactive and rely partly on player input. Literature is not. Literature just needs to say what it has to say. Video games need to let you play a role in that. Choice-based games can also say what they need to say, but they have the leeway to give you a choice in how the game says it. Pretending to use that leeway by giving you a choice, but then pulling the rug under your feet by negating the choice—no, not just negating it but erasing it and making it as if you never made the choice, defeats the purpose of having it in the first place—especially in a game that is built on player choices.
2. Yet again, you say that the scene you're describing doesn't matter... but you're saying it doesn't matter because the only consequence is—hold on, let me stop you there. You just literally explicitly stated that there is a consequence to the scene and therefore it is, by your own admission, not devoid of consequences. Saying "Scene X is devoid of consequences because it could have been written another way" doesn't make any sense. It either has consequences or it doesn't. How it's written is irrelevant to whether it has consequences, and in this case, it has tangible, obvious consequences: Ginny finds out about the diary. Sure, she could have found it in an infinite number of other circumstances, but who cares? The cop in Reservoir Dogs could have died from being stabbed, or hit by a car, or fallen off a building instead of being shot, but the fact is he got shot, and then he died as a result. You can't say the shooting had no consequences—he died. It doesn't matter that he could have died any number of other ways. He died. As a direct result of being shot. That's what gives the shooting significance. The same logic applies in the Harry Potter example. The singing valentines aren't irrelevant by virtue of the fact that they could have been replaced by something else with the same effect—they are relevant because that is what the author chose to use to achieve that effect. And more importantly, they had an effect. You're acting like being replaceable makes something meaningless, which doesn't make sense. I do a very important job at work. Many, many, many other people could do that job. That doesn't make me worthless. It just makes me replaceable. Big deal. Nearly everybody on the planet is replaceable in some context. They still are important because they are the ones in that place doing those things.

It is a basic tenet of good writing that if something can be removed from a work, it absolutely should be. Don't waste space in your work with shit that doesn't factor into the story. If it absolutely doesn't matter that Alice used to be an accountant, don't mention it at all. Now, maybe it factors into her characterization. Maybe something significant happened at her old accounting job that matters to the current events. If that's the case, include it. There are so many ways that stuff can be important, and any of those could be enough to justify including it. But if her old accounting job is totally and completely irrelevant to the story, don't bother mentioning it at all.

There are plenty of possibilities I can think of that would make that assisted suicide choice have consequences that do not involve erasing one timeline or the other. Maybe Max has a conversation with Chloe about what happened. That would be enough. Maybe Max meets someone who has also visited that timeline—I'm still holding out for maybe meeting some version Rachel who jumps timelines. That would be enough. Literally any mention of what happened in the alternate timeline would be enough to constitute consequences.

You are responding to my argument as if I'm saying that Max needs to go back and meet still-alive Chloe or visit dead-Chloe's gravesite in order for the choice to matter, but it does not have to be that blatant. It could be something as subtle as having different options in a later conversation based on what you chose in the alternate timeline. It could be something as meta as getting an achievement for never letting Chloe die in any timeline. It could be a conversation with God at the end of the game about why you made the choices you made. It could be anything. But it has to be something.

On the contrary—a thought-experiment can absolutely have emotional repercussions. The one I chose as an example doesn't (well, unless you are really easily affected by the abstract idea of killing a stranger), but there are literally whole books that are just "What would you do in X situation?" And it's painfully easy to think one up that would require you to think about it from an emotional viewpoint. Like... "You are Bob. Your wife, Alice, is having a baby. The pregnancy has extreme complications, and the doctors can do a procedure that will help the baby's odds of survival. Alice is unconscious. You have to choose. If they do the procedure, there is a 80% chance that Alice will die, but an 80% chance that the baby will survive. If they don't, there is a 90% chance that the baby will die and a 90% chance that Alice will survive. What do you tell the doctors?"

But at the end of the day, there are no practical consequences to such a question, only mental and emotional ones.

edited 26th Aug '15 10:55:47 AM by SolipSchism

By this definition, the assisted suicide choice already has enough of a consequence. If you don't help her, Chloe is pissed at you, and if you do, she's, y'know, dead. Except that scene can't be removed. Because Chloe wanting to kill herself is basically the final straw in Max deciding to go back to her original timeline. It also teaches her that she has the power to travel really far through time using photographs.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

Muko, I have a problem with that: The immediate consequences of the decision would be enough if you didn't immediately erase the entire timeline from existence. That's what I take issue with. If I knew that after making the choice Chloe was either dead or alive somewhere as a result, that'd be enough. But erasing the timeline means that Chloe is neither dead nor alive—she never existed.

Which is why I believe that ep5 will bring the choice back to matter in some other way. I think a conversation with someone is the most likely, because it'd be the easiest—Max confesses to someone about her powers (or brings Chloe back and talks to her about the alt timeline) and the conversation varies based on what you chose.

My issue with your second point is that it doesn't teach Max that she can travel really far—she's already done that. It's how she got there in the first place. And as to its plot significance, yes, the situation as a whole matters—if Chloe just upped her own dose somehow, and that made Max decide to peace out of that timeline, I would accept that. But the fact that they make you choose and treat that as one of the game's major decisions forces me to believe that it has to come back in some other way.

Correct.

I also kind of want to stop using the word 'consequence'. I feel like that's such a negative term in regards to this.

By your description, the outcome of the choice is the consequence in of itself. If you leave Jacob's father to die, he's dead and that's the 'consequence'. If you take him in, that is the 'consequence'. In Life is Strange, by that logic, Alt!Chloe being dead should be the 'consequence' of giving her her final request. End of story, we already have the 'closure' to the choice.

No, it DOES teach her she can travel really far back in time using photographs AND just how dangerous doing so is. That was the entire intention, 'You can go back REALLY far if you want, but you run a TON of risks by doing so'.

And, I quite honestly think there was no other way this was going to go except for that timeline being erased (though, if its totally gone is another question all together, but lets not do that). That version of Max has NO progress towards solving the mystery. The storm is a day away. She has no allies really except Chloe (who could be dead) and Chloe doesn't have any involvement in anything else in the plot; no connections to David, Frank, Rachel, Nathan, no one. It would be an Uphill battle for the narrative to deal with 50% of its plot having to start from scratch. And we'd end up with even MORE choices that don't have consequences.

It really feels like it came down to either Alt!Timeline or the Main!Timeline and we can't have both so I MUCH prefer staying in the Main!Timeline.

edited 26th Aug '15 11:12:38 AM by InkDagger

Wait, do we know for a fact the timeline was erased entirely? I mean, it didn't seem like the original timeline had just stopped existing when we went back to it. It seems much more likely that the alternate universe does still exist.

Though, if all you need to be satisfied is Max just mentioning what she did, I suppose that's fair.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

If she just needs to mention what happened, then that's not a problem. Go ahead. No issue there. But, if she says she feels uncomfortable telling Chloe (which she thinks this right after she comes back to the Main!Timeline), then I have no idea who she'd tell. I'm not entirely sure in what context she'd need to bring it up to Chloe either.

Ink: Except that erasing the timeline means she's not dead or alive, as I mentioned. She never existed in the first place.

Muko: Fair enough—I do agree that you could read it as the timeline existing, but if Max never returns to it—and I don't think she will, nor that she should—then it's no more meaningful than any of the other infinite timelines that she will never visit. But yes, I would say that absolutely any in-game result of the decision, even if it's just a conversation or an introspective internal monologue, would constitute a result of the choice.

I don't see a problem with the word consequence—it's just a word describing cause and effect. It doesn't need negative connotations, or positive. If B follows from A, then B is a consequence of A.

I dunno. I still think a choice just existing is enough to give it value.

Like, as another example: Say there's a game where you've been hunting a guy for trying to kill you. When you actually get to him, he begs for his life, saying he was just hired to do a job, and has no personal grudge against you. You can kill him in revenge, or let him live and he promises never to come back.

Presumably the game would give you reasons to hold a grudge against him, so the choice matters because you have an emotional connection. Even if he never comes back- because he promised not to- that choice is still important.

When I say the thought experiment books aren't comparable, it's because, to me, even if you set up a scenario like this with a couple of paragraphs, it's still not going to be as emotional as if I experience it myself. You can tell me this guy killed my family, or tried to kill me, or whatever, but unless I'm shown those things, I don't really care. It's still mostly abstract.

Maybe that's weird of me, but eh. I'm more than satisfied with choices existing just for the sake of existing. I enjoy when they have more long-term consequences, but I don't need it. (And, for the record, I don't think you're wrong to care, I'm mostly just exploring my own opinions)

edited 26th Aug '15 11:22:45 AM by Mukora

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

In the hypothetical game you mentioned, I think... I would be dissatisfied if that was the only result. Even if it was something as sterile as morality points, I would want some lasting or delayed in-game result—if it was a game built on choices, anyway.

As for thought experiments, let me try another tack: It doesn't have to be a book to be a "thought-experiment".

Say... You're dating Bob. One day you wonder, what would happen if Bob did X? X is some really big thing. Like break up with you, or admit that he was once raped, or something. And you wonder what you would do in that situation. That is a thought-experiment. And you don't have to tell Bob what went through your head when you wondered about that situation. You can, just as you can tell anyone you like about this neat book of thought-experiments you're reading, but that doesn't make it less of a thought-experiment—you're just constructing a situation in your head and wondering what you would do. There are all kinds of these things—all the way from emotionless in-a-vacuum would-you-blow-up-a-train-to-save-a-baby ones to very context-heavy emotionally-relevant what-would-I-do-if-I-found-out-Bob-is-cheating-on-me ones.

Regardless of the format, I still think those experiments are too abstract to be comparable.

Even if I love Bob, the thought that he's going to break up with me is still so far from the reality I perceive in that moment, that it doesn't really make a difference what I choose. Even if Bob does eventually reveal that he wants to break up with me, I'll have long forgotten whatever decision I made in that thought experiment because it wasn't tangible. It was quite literally just in my head.

edited 26th Aug '15 11:36:52 AM by Mukora

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

But then, you could apply the same logic to making a similar choice in a video game. Any choices I make in LIS are insanely far from reality. At the risk of sounding like my life is more dramatic than it really is, if you presented me the following possibilities:

1. I will travel to an alternate timeline and have to choose between helping Chloe kill herself or refusing to do so, and then afterward traveling back to my original timeline (which even then isn't the current, real timeline), or
2. My beau will tell me that he once raped someone

There would be no question that the second possibility is far more likely because it doesn't involve magic, it doesn't involve time travel, it doesn't involve me being someone I am not, it doesn't involve me being friends with someone who doesn't exist, it doesn't involve the highly unlikely situation of someone asking me to help them commit suicide in their bedroom—whereas, much as I wouldn't like to really consider it, it's not metaphysically absurd for me to consider that my beau might have once committed the crime of rape.

And if the decision in the game really has no consequences in-game, then for all intents and purposes, it is just as "literally inside your head" as any other thought-experiment you could be thinking through.

(Part of the problem here is that my argument is necessarily involving a thought-experiment inside a thought-experiment—I don't know enough about you to construct one that really takes place in your life, which is why I resorted to one about myself—but I think you see what I'm getting at. You can put a thought-experiment in the context of your own life, and realistically, you probably already do that on a regular basis, as part of the basic survival mechanism of trying to anticipate challenges so that you don't have to make decisions on the spot.)

edited 26th Aug '15 11:43:10 AM by SolipSchism

I can't add anything to this discussion, but I will say I'm more of a consequence guy myself. It's what I base my choices on.

Okay, but I can see the choices as they're presented to me in a video game. I can actually experience Chloe asking me to help her kill herself.

If I do this thought experiment, I don't actually hear my boyfriend telling me he wants to break up with me or whatever.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

On the subject of the alternate timeline: even if it still exists, I don't see any way we could return to it, unless Max suddenly becomes Elizabeth-powerful in Episode 5.

Mind you, if they do still exist, then one of the most horrifying moments in the game might have been when I rewound after Chloe shot Frank, meaning I just left her to deal with having killed a man alone.

Oh God! Natural light!

Man, if you think that's something, I probably rewound like five times trying to get that right.

Five Chloes just got completely fucked over.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."