Would You Erase Someone’s Grief If You Could?

After 10-year-old Ethan Lambert wanders into the danger zone of a scheduled mining blast, Alex Chen and her brother Gabe run into the blast zone to save him. Gabe calls the mining company, Typhon, which has a powerful and political hold over the town of Haven Springs, Colorado, to hold off the blast. They save Ethan. But the blast goes off anyway, and Gabe is killed.

The Haven Springs community — a small, intimate, mountainside town — is left grieving one of their most beloved community members. Charlotte, mother to Ethan and girlfriend to Gabe, is left with more grief than she knows what to do with. One afternoon, Alex goes to Charlotte’s art studio to check on her. In addition to some dark and eerie art sculptures across Charlotte’s studio, Alex sees a red aura around the grief-stricken mother, indicating Charlotte’s grief is manifesting as anger. Alex focuses hard and is soon able to hear, see and understand all of Charlotte’s thoughts, memories and art pieces. This reveals Charlotte blames those around her for Gabe’s death, including her own son — which she can’t bear.

“None of it fucking matters,” Charlotte says to Alex. “He’s dead. And I wish I were, too.”

You, the player, are left with a choice: “leave her alone” or “take Charlotte’s anger.”

Life is Strange is a narrative video game franchise where the action in the game is driven by choices made by the player. Each of the franchise’s three games has its own story and characters (though Easter eggs reveal the characters likely exist in the same universe). The stories follow the same general blueprint: the main character discovers they have some sort of superpower — time-travel, telekinesis, extreme empathy — and quickly learns how tampering with the natural world can have severe consequences.

In the third instalment, Life is Strange: True Colors, Alex is left to investigate the truth of what happened to her brother on the night that he died. Using her superpower to see and understand the emotions of people around her, she discovers the guilty conscience of one local who works for Typhon — and uncovers the town’s dark secret.

True Colors is, in some ways, a classic mystery story. But it’s also a story about grief, and what it’s like to seek justice against a greedy, multibillion-dollar corporation. As a result, you, the player, are doing those things too.

As we navigate year three of COVID-19 and enter a world where the impacts of climate change are increasingly visible, we ought to consider what truly moves people to action. That in turn begs the question: what causes, or encourages, indifference? One answer is that, when an issue doesn’t yet personally affect a person, they might not have any reason to care.

The impacts of climate change have always been personal to those affected by it up close. Take people of colour and Indigenous people in Alberta, who face the consequences of a premier whose tax breaks for oil and gas companies impact their communities more than anyone. Or coal developments on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, which risk critical watersheds, economies and futures due to the industry’s long-standing water pollution.

How to make someone realize politics are personal to all? That is, and always has been, the type of storytelling that goes deep and gets personal.

Getting political in video games

In Life is Strange 2, the player follows a pair of brothers whose Mexican father is killed after being shot by a police officer. After finishing the game, I wept for my character Sean and his little brother Daniel, feeling as though I’d been through the journey myself of losing my dad, raising my little brother, facing the potent racism of November 2016, and having to find refuge from the police coming after me.

At the end of the game, Sean and Daniel reach the U.S.-Mexico border and must decide whether to push through to the other side or give themselves up to border patrol. The ending you get, based on your decision to cross or not to cross, depends on how well you raised Daniel to be a good person, to not harm others as much as you can, to listen and to trust you. After spending 20 hours with the characters, the result you get is either devastatingly revealing about how well you did, or a happy ending, still tragic in the nature of being an orphaned Mexican-American kid.

Life is Strange uses politics as an explicit world building and back-story-building tool. It’s unique for that reason — most narratives in general don’t necessarily view politics as the building blocks of a person’s experience, because society doesn’t view it that way. If you’re lucky enough to be ignorant of how inequality affects you, you’re not going to notice all politics are in fact personal.

Being a half-Mexican person born in Canada, I didn’t know how much stronger my empathy for refuge-seeking brown families at the U.S. border could get. I reflected on how I look like Sean Diaz, not as a question of “representation in the media,” but as a question of just how much personal responsibility I could feel toward a lived experience that wasn’t my own. I felt a newfound urgency to the issues the game grappled with, such as police brutality and migrant issues.

It’s a refreshing takeaway from video games, historically and still discussed as, at the very least, the cause of violence desensitization in young boys with games like Grand Theft Auto, and at most, acting as propaganda for American imperialism through war games like Call of Duty. More and more, video games are acting as a storytelling medium that pushes the player to enlightenment instead of capitalizing on shock-value devices such as shooting war opponents.

Not that any explicitly left-wing game is an automatic win on this front.

Alfie Brown writes in the Guardian that many games, like Detroit: [Become Human], which assesses the dangers of AI, and Assassin’s Creed, whose narratives support ethnic minorities and oppressed groups, embody liberal values — at least on the surface.

“On the vocal right-wing of the gamer community, the claim is that games extol left-wing ideology by featuring marginalized characters: in short, any character that is not white, straight and male,” he adds.

But, he continues, this liberal influence doesn’t turn video games into some left-wing political force. “Wolfenstein might be about killing Nazis, but it gave birth to the first-person shooter genre, in which players often spray bullets in the service of American foreign policy,” he writes. In other words, there’s an important interplay between a video game’s form, and its storyline. If the two lack synchronicity, they can result in a player walking away with a regressive lesson as opposed to emotional, intellectual or political enlightenment.

How facing choices (and consequences) increases empathy

“Written stories can allow us a view into a character’s thoughts; film does well at representing the story visually; drama often uses movement or exaggeration to shift the attention of the audience,” Tyler Pauley writes.

What is video games’ specialty, then? Choice.

Being in control of a story makes the player acutely aware of the fact that their decisions and consequences are in fact a reflection of them. The player stood up for the girl who got bullied, because, in real life, they’d do that too. They lost touch with their little brother who once looked up to them because, in the real world, they allowed their trauma to go unhealed.

When I played the scene in True Colors where I had to decide whether or not to take Charlotte’s emotions away from her, I panicked. Letting her outpouring of emotion go ignored felt like risking another tragic loss in the Haven Springs community. Afraid and anxious, I selected, “take Charlotte’s anger.”

Later in the game, my character Alex met with Charlotte during the spring festival at a dock. She was staring out over the lake. “How deep, do you think? The lake, I mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Alex responded.

“I felt horrible this afternoon,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t know if I could survive that feeling. But now, it’s like when your leg falls asleep. And even though it’s still attached, it’s become something other than you.

“My whole life, I’ve always felt so deeply. But, maybe this is better?”

Chills took over my arms, a pit in my stomach. In trying to save Charlotte from herself, in taking an emotion so crucial away from her, she ended up a shell of a person, emotionless, disconnected, detached. If I had selected “leave her alone” would she have killed herself? Or would she have survived it? In video games, you can look up alternate endings. But in real life, there’s no alternate ending to look up. You live with your choices.

The power of narrative video games feels auspicious in a time of forsaken existential world crises. As we drift through the years we have left to reverse the effects of climate change, my sister, an ecologist, frequently asks: Why don’t more people care? Her occupation and mine intersect, again and again, when we tell our stories.