The Programming Continues Apace

O daughter mine insisted that I watch this stunning and brave take down of the much ballyhooed vidya, Life is Strange, as reviewed by the incomparable E;R.  If you’ve seen his next level Plinkett take-down of Star Wars, The Cancer Years, then you already know to brace yourself for the bad language and highly controversial noticing of things we aren’t supposed to notice in these enlightened days.  He does a great job, but misses one very important subtlety to this game.  Watch first, or skip it, I’ll cut to the chase below the fold.

The whole point of the entire…game…?…is to deliver you to one single decision point.  Murder your horrible friend or murder the entire town.  That’s it.  That Sophie’s choice is the whole point of the game, and it is as subtle as it is evil.

First things first, the game is a long string of decision points, many of which represent that exact same dichotomy.  False choices that force the player to decide who dies and who dies.  Neat huh?  The big whammy occurs regardless of the choices you make, and only after a whole lot of time invested in the game.  The big choice waits until you throw in the towel and can’t even imagine cutting the Gordian knot of that fateful ultimate choice.

This whole game is predicated on training the player’s mind to become increasingly comfortable making “lesser of two evil” choices.

As Wikipedia puts it:

The lesser of two evils principle (or lesser evil principle and lesser-evilism) is the principle that when faced with selecting from two immoral options, the one which is least immoral should be chosen.

(Brief aside: Normally, I’d use the Infogalactic entry, but Infogalactic makes a subtle but important distinction by using the word ‘harmful’ in the place of ‘immoral’.  If you don’t already, you’ll understand the importance of that word change shortly.)

Life is Strange represents nothing more than one giant argument for relative morality, which is itself one giant argument for no such thing as morality.  And it does it in a very circumspect manner.  It never comes right out and expresses the idea that one should always be running their choices through a calculus of relativity, but by designing the game in this manner, they’ve boiled the universe down to a constant stream of, “which sin should I commit here?” decisions.  It demands the player chuck any semblance of principles straight out the window in favor of expediency and in-the-moment feelz.

That calculus is like a cancer that infects your thought processes if you don’t prune it on a regular basis.  It starts with a game like this, but it infects your thinking until you consider an infant’s death a fair trade for its mother’s financial well being.  Or the ruin of a stable North African nation a good price to pay for choking Europe with a flood of vibrant diversity.  Or the costs of invading a Middle-Eastern nation on false flag pretexts worth living in a world where…you know, something something it’s all Bush’s fault anyway.

People who play Life is Strange are training their minds to run through those channels, to reject any sort of principles or even a belief in any sort of underlying truth.  It’s sick and twisted and just one more sign of how low the post-modernists have driven our culture.  Yes, our culture – this stupid game is much beloved by the sorts of anti-West media types responsible for ruining everything from movies to film to literature to…well, video games, of course.

As with most games built by SJWs and leftists in general, the only way to win…is not to play.  That goes for you and your kids, and if your kids have already played the game, show them E;R’s review – it won’t just make them laugh, it will make them think, and that’s something that the makers of Life is Strange never intended.