Life is Strange

Hold on to your britches, kids. We’re travelling in time.

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My favorite video game is called Life is Strange. You play as Max Caulfield, a senior photography student who moves back to her birthplace of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, to attend school at Blackwell Academy. In the opening scenes, Max has a nightmare in which a huge storm is approaching her town. She wakes in her photography class, convinced whatever she just envisioned is more than a dream. When she goes to the bathroom to re-center and collect herself, two people burst through the door. Max hides behind a stall. The people, a boy and a girl, begin to argue about something drug related, money related, Max can’t really tell why they are so angry with each other. Then, the boy pulls a gun on the girl and shoots her in the stomach. As a knee-jerk reaction, Max jumps from her hiding place, holds out her hand and—

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finds herself sitting back in her photography class. Hearing the same lecture she already heard just minutes earlier. Witnessing the each same behavior of her classmates that she already observed. Scared but determined, Max heads back to the bathroom to see if she really did just turn back time, and if she can save this strange girl with blue hair who she saw die. 

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hile I love the game, it does have its imperfections…like the occasional slang mishap. 

Nonetheless, yeah Max, time travel is a pretty hardcore concept. 

I won’t tell anymore of the plot from there, because this game is best played spoiler-free so its complex storyline can shock and surprise you at each twist. The game deals with a lot of themes that emotional poet types (I realize not all poets are like this, but I certainly am) eat up like there’s been a donut shortage for 78 years and someone successfully found, and then broke into, an old Krispy Kreme factory.  Interpersonal connections, symbolic animals and colors, questions of individual significance, the value of memories made with someone, love transcending a physical realm into a spiritual one, human flaws, alternate realties, the butterfly effect…

That’s what the game is all about. Our choices in life and how they affect ourselves and the people around us, the people we love and the people we pass by in the street. 

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In other words, the butterfly effect. It's defined as “…the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.” The famous example that gave this concept its name was that a butterfly flapping its wings over the ocean could later cause a hurricane.  This famous example comes from scientist and mathematician Edward Lorenz.

Chaos theory in itself is a fascinating realm—one that goes way over my head. I understand it as the universe, defined as infinite, therefore has an infinite number of itself. However, in each different universe, everything that could ever happen has happened. So, there exists somewhere floating in the universe, limitless versions of you, a you that has made all different choices in life than the ones you’ve made in your life so far in this universe.

Whew, you still with me? Or maybe you’re shaking your head because my understanding is so limited and basic, or a little bit incorrect. Sorry. My deeply buried inner scientist tried her best.

Anyway, what does this have to do with poetry? Everything.

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Your task, poet, should you choose to try it in this reality, is to write a poem or stream of consciousness based on the main themes of Life is Strange: the butterfly effect and the chaos theory. If you were to rewrite part of your life, just a snapshot of it, one particular choice in a particular moment, what would it look like? Try to visualize it and engage all of the rest of you senses. 

In the game, Max takes pictures of different things she sees with an old Polaroid camera. What would Polaroid images of your life in alternate universes look like? What people would be standing next to you, smelling familiar, with familiar voices fencing you in or setting you free? Would you feel the grass on your feet, be somewhere warm?  

What could your life have looked like? What image is crumbling and burning because you didn’t take a certain path or make a certain choice? This is not to send you into crippling regret or existential crisis, so, uh, I hope it doesn’t. 

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Check out the Life is Strange website. Happy writing, gaming, and theoretical time traveling, poet. 

Read more of Alyssa's excellent work on Floodmark.