Hello, and welcome to the zone of infinite stories. In this blog I will be exploring some of my, and hopefully your, favourite stories in the entirety of their depth, from video games to literature.

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New posts every Wednesday and Sunday.

Sunday 29 January 2017

Life is Strange: A Meta Problem of Ethical Choice

Spoiler Warning: As counter-intuitive as it is to write an entire post based on the ending of a game and then beg you not to read it – please do not read this unless you have completed Life is Strange or have no intention of ever playing it. I will be specifically talking about the end of the game, so I personally recommend playing it first; it is a really good and gripping story-rich game.

Life is Strange is a story-rich game, to say the least. It starts with some interesting characters and scarcely any game-play mechanics, save for one element – the time reversal. In Life Is Strange it is possible to reverse time for a limited way back and there are multiple uses of this, such as learning new dialogue options to re-talk to people in a better way. While this power might seem immediately useful to replay scenes in order to choose the best scenario and therefore time-line, it isn't as simple as that. Life Is Strange is all about multiple options of equal value, so that either every scenario seems bad or all scenarios seems okay – there is not much middle ground.

With this background it is easy to see how far this notion could be pushed. For example, using multiple bad options we are able to see which option most will think is the lesser of two evils, or which option might seem bad now but looks to be the most beneficial for the future. The entire game culminates in this kind of notion, too. After each chapter, we are offered a page with all of the important choices from the previous chapter and what percentage of people chose each scenario. With judgement and moral choice, the percentages are often close, however with some possibly skip-able scenarios in the game, there are other scenarios which are heavily weighted on people picking one choice. One of these choices is looking at Dana's pregnancy test and getting told off for doing so, which only 2% of people kept the decision of and 98% of people either missing it entirely or rewinding so that Dana never knew you looked at it. The one choice that stands out as particularly interesting, however, is the last decision in the game.

Life is Strange ends with a strange twist to a philosophy of ethics thought experiment called 'the trolley problem'. The trolley problem is an old scenario that tests people's morality in a difficult situation and was popularised by Philippa Foot; it goes as such:
There is a trolley (train) moving on the tracks towards five people who are stuck and will be killed. You happen to be stood next to a switch that you know will change the direction of the tracks and move it away from the five people towards the other tracks where there is one person working, who will then be killed instead. Would you pull the switch?

As the notion of Utilitarianism suggests [1], when asked, a significant portion of people say they would pull the switch and let the one person die rather than the five. There have been variations of this problem that changes the scenario to include factors that might sway people's decisions, such as knowing some of the people on the tracks, or actually having to push someone onto the tracks yourself to stop the train. However, Life Is Strange ends with a variation of this problem and is interesting for two main factors. Firstly that people have played many hours empathising with the characters so it is a closer situation to actually having to make the decision in an informed way rather than just being asked a hypothetical. Secondly it reverses the circumstance set out in the problem entirely. At the end of the game you are asked if you want to let your best friend die as fate appears to be trying to make happen, or change that fate (by 'hitting the switch') but as a result you sacrifice an entire town and the people inside of it.

What is most striking about this choice is that in any utilitarian perspective it seems obvious – one life against an entire town of hundreds / thousands. However, this is your best friend who has gone through a lot of the game's difficulties with you, against a town of people, about thirty of whom you know with some of them you don't care for. When the page comes up to show the results of what people chose, the split is almost half. Around 46% of people choose to save one life and condemn hundreds (potentially thousands) to their demise. Furthermore, the developers of the game said that they wanted there to be no right decision, they wanted each ending to simply be the player's choice and that it as fine. Under a logical notion, though, it still seems like a difficult choice to justify.

So, we can use this statistic to consider a few things about making this decision – as there is so much more to the game's story that has gone unmentioned – what has happened up to this choice would seem to make a big impact on the decision made. Firstly we ought to consider that there will be some people who could never let someone close to them die, even if it means the sacrifice of many others, and for those people, there is only one choice. For everyone else who picked that choice, it stands to reason that something about their game and the choices they made pushed them towards the decision.

In Life is Strange there are up to three other characters who have the potential to die from the choices made and many of those who don't die in the game are easy to dislike. If the decisions kept in the game amounted to some of the characters you liked dying and big mistakes having been made and an utter dislike for the town was created – it starts to seem like a more viable option. There is also the consideration that throughout the game you saved your best friend multiple times, so feel the whole experience would have been valueless if you decide to just go back and let her die anyway. With this kinds of extra perspectives, the choice is a little harder to make for some and it might be easier to see why some were tempted by the seemingly less moral choice. If, however, you like Warren and Joyce and Kate, then you know they are in the town and it is a matter of not wanting to let people such as that die as they are greater in number, again, the choice seems obvious to that player.

Overall, it is possible to understand from the perspective of the player that all the choices they made throughout the game factor into this last choice. [2] Of course, it is also important to take into account the null-choices of people who didn't fully enjoy the game and just wanted to see what would happen, but if they got to the end of the game I'm going to unprofessionally assume this is a low number.

Foot first raised the thought experiment of the trolley problem to emphasise the idea that there are not always good options in moral decision making and, in the many variations of the problem that have arisen, it seems that each variant has different numbers of people taking action or not. One of the most important factors in your decision of any varient, it has been shown, is having encountered this kind of hypothetical before. [3] Those who have never heard of utilitarianism are more willing to let the five die over the one, and those who have heard of it and have been asked these questions are more likely to kill the one instead of let the five die in any circumstance. As it is likely that most of the people who have played Life is Strange have probably not studied ethical theory or know much about Utilitarianism at all – then the statistics support this idea. To those who have not encountered this kind of theory of hypothetical before, the choice may present itself in their heads not as a numbers difference but in some other kind of way. If it simply seems like a choice between two equally bad options and you simply choose your best friend whom you have been through so much with and is right next to you, maybe that is just as viable decision.

Another factor not yet considered is that nobody would remember most of the events that happened as resetting the time means the time-line will be rewritten. Naturally, this is impossible to factor in with real life situations, but it may well affect the decision made at the end. Though with a 46 to 54 percent split on what seems to be easy choice for a utilitarian, it shows that the world doesn't work the way logic would suggest. When put on the spot, people's choices are their own and perhaps that is okay, or perhaps everyone simply needs a little more moral education. [4]

Footnotes:

  1. Utilitarianism in it's most simplistic form is to 'act in such a way that brings about the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people.'
  2. There are some who have criticised the game for the choices made throughout not changing the ending as there are only two endings based on this final choice – though the entire journey along the way changes according to those choices and the journey affects which of the two choices you make – so I would argue that it does matter and is a satisfying ending.
  3. Unger, Peter. “Causing and Preventing Serious Harm.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 65(1992):227–255
  4. Thanks for reading this meta-exploratoring of Life is Strange, I would quite like to return to this game and perhaps look into the story a little deeper in a less meta way. If this is something you might be interested in – send me a message and let me know! Thanks again, ciao for now!

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