Centralising Chloe & the Struggle of Player Choice by David McNeill

Centralising Chloe & the Struggle of Player Choice

Written by David McNeill

I don’t think it should be especially controversial to suggest Life Is Strange’s success or failure as a vehicle for story is underpinned by the relationship between Max and Chloe. The opening act of the game centralises Chloe: she’s the reason Max develops the ability to time travel, and she forms the inciting incident for the narrative at large.

Writ in unmissable ink across the story is the theme of consequence, the exploration of choice, and a simple question: is Chloe worth more than the people around her. The game constantly puts Chloe’s desires in opposition with the people around her, and Max must decide whose interests she’ll support.

By centralising Chloe’s world view, Max is forced to react to Chloe’s perspective, rather than the stimulus in front of her. By the time you, the player, can decide how you feel about a decision, the game has already precipitated events through Chloe’s particular brand of self-serving nihilism.

Which isn’t to say there is an inherent problem with associating with, or agreeing with, Chloe. Plenty of folks have worldviews that differ from our own and plenty of bad folk do good things, and plenty of good folks do bad things. The fulcrum of the Chloe problem is not one of ethics, but of choice.

Video games are, cliche as it, one of the only mediums where you get to decide how and when to do things - even in a linear narrative like Death Stranding or even Ninja Gaiden, the player’s ability and requirement to interact with the game is what creates unique experiences, and empowers games writers to explore empathy, sympathy, and themes in a rich, deep way that film and prose cannot.

Games do not hinge on choice, but a narrative driven mystery that simulates Telltale’s inhouse style, one that relies on dialogue decision-making and consequence, sort of needs a little of it.

The inclusion of Chloe and her centralisation is a rather unique and hard to explain phenomenon, so to illustrate a little of why this can detract from the story, let’s talk about Fallout 4. Despite being the least RPG that ever RPG’d, Fallout 4 does a lot with a little when it comes to morality. Yes, you can’t really be anything other than a saint or a murderous psychopath in Bethesda’s version of Fallout (a pale imitation of Obsidian’s original works) but, at the very least, Fallout 4 taps a handful of rich themes around immigration, marxist theory, and socialism - in particular, via its use of The Institute, Synths, and the proletariats of Diamond City. The game also shares a similar issue to Life Is Strange. Rather than being menaced by Chloe’s ever present “I’m smart enough to actually enjoy Rick and Morty and you’re not” attitude, Fallout 4 is burdened by the world’s most straight shooting moral companion of all time: Piper.

Piper is one of the first companions most players will meet. She’s a reporter who believes in straight forward American values: freedom of the press, a fair go for everyone, being nice all the time. The game borrows from The Walking Dead by including a HUD indicator when a decision you’ve made is liked or disliked by companions in your company. If you have Piper with you and you do something mean or unfair, the game tells you she doesn’t like it. Periodically the game shows her satisfaction with dialogue or her actions, but this tends to be as binary as the display, often resulting in her stomping back to her newspaper shop for a while until you move your morality meter into the “good guy” zone again by shooting some designated evil bandits.

But Piper is funny. She’s a little sassy. She’s independent and has a handful of insightful thoughts about Synths. She gives you a cute nickname. She wants to get to know you. And, crucially, you can romance her. Thanks Bethesda.

The result is that a lot of players meet Piper, like her a whole lot, and start to make decisions in the game based on what Piper might like or dislike, instead of focusing on what their player character might want to do.

There is nothing wrong with this mode of play, it just isn’t the most dynamic option when it comes to RPG’s. Contrasted with Fallout 2 where your companions have opinions that are not binary. They want to talk about fucked up decisions you make, and they want to understand why you did that really bad thing that they disagree with.

What I’m aiming at here is that the play style of trying to please a character you want to romance just kind of sucks. If you know someone in this type of relationship in real life, you’ll know it is not fun for anyone involved. Max, by contrast to our player character in Fallout 4, is presented as having her own opinions on all matters. The game renders these opinions in an almost self-perceptive way where the game tonally wants us to be constantly on the edge of tears with an aggravatingly cliched use of the most predictable music of all time, a simulcrant for Max having actual emotions. Max never quite engages emotionally through no fault of Hannah Tell, who does an exceptional job of voice acting. Rather, Max is not allowed to emote properly in response to almost anything in the story without Chloe’s expressed suggestion or concern. It’s fairly telling that the only scene where Max feels a feel is when she’s flashing-back at the end of act one and Chloe is there to comfort her. Or, indeed, at the end of the game, when Max feels a feel about Chloe. Max’s emotions are MacGyvered into a shake-shift hessian sack where the writers can hastily jam Chloe’s opinions and reactions into a jumbled mess that you are asked to engage with. As a result, the game ultimately provides Chloe as a way to elevate your requirement to choose and engage in the ethics of the story at hand. It’s a clever way to provide an immediate understanding of consequence: every time you make a decision and Chloe is around, you’ll receive immediate feedback as to whether that was a good thing or a bad thing to have done.

In the presence of Chloe’s strong, nihilistic worldview, I found my initial playthrough a breeze: my ethics, my morals, and my imagination need not be stretched much further than asking the question: will Chloe like the decision I make?

The game is more dynamic than this, of course. The first real decision of any consequence the game presents, and the first real use of your powers, is during Kate’s suicide. Of course, the game strips you of your powers in the moment where you confront Kate on the roof. This lack of power mirrors the player’s vulnerability in the face of Kate’s emotions. And it smartly allows you, the player, to experience talking Kate off the ledge by using empathy and sympathy, and engaging with her on the same emotional level Max does.

Even Kate’s death, however, is somehow about Chloe. The game never shows us how it might affect Kate’s family or the community at large, aside from in passing. No, the focus, instead, is on how Chloe feels about it.

I’m undecided if the aggressive centralising of Chloe is good or bad, but certainly it should change how the game is discussed and written about. It’s still a game of player choice and the story is still influenced by your decisions as Max, but unless you try very hard, Max is not a free agent in the narrative, and being beholden to Chloe’s attitude can be draining. I like some things about Chloe, but the further I move back from the story, the more I wonder if the game developers watched Scott Pilgrim Meets The World then 500 Days of Summer and sort of missed the point of both: Chloe is not the problem, per se, but Max should be allowed to stand by herself.

DAVID MCNEILL is the lead writer at Digital & Creative Media Works and the author of the Maynard Trigg series, find his other work at www.youtube.com/dcmworks