Yes, Life is quite strange (Guilt and time in Life is Strange)

Abstract

Time, as well as a game mechanic, is a phenomenological and subjective experience that affects the player. Life is Strange (Dontnod entertainement, 2015) uses it to deconstruct two game features: the horizon of death and the possibility to reverse the flow of becoming. In doing so, it highlights the entire time rigging of the game narrative construction: the player does not fear the death of the avatar (she can resurrect it, or go back in the game, or pay a small fee for its recovery) and she knows that the sense of becoming is already given by the diegesis through the directed freedom to which she is subjected, without the deep logic of time spent performing these actions being questioned. Its justification as a case study comes as it responds to several painfully human features that other games simply ignore: the longing to reverse the experience of time, the desire to not make mistakes, either ethical or phenomenological, the desire to survive, even over the constant threat of the inevitable tragedy that flows over Arcadia Bay. Thus, the main game mechanics —the possibility of going back in time to change the actions—, while not very innovative in their conception, reveal themselves to be determinant in shaping the experience of the player and in compromising her ethically, pointing to her guilt. In the following article we will use the philosophical and psychoanalytical conceptions of time and the guilt and failure of the cyber-textual hero to explore how they affect the, inevitably ethical, gaming experience.