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plutherusPart One of a series looking at Character and World Building in the computer game Life is Strange: Before the Storm.
I was playing the game Life is Strange: Before the Storm, the prequel to Life is Strange. Halfway through the final chapter, I accidentally wiped out my save game.
I decided to start over and decided to record some of my impressions this time through. There’s some incredibly good writing in this game and I thought perhaps there could be lessons to be learned from it for writers in other media, like me.
This series is going to be a combination, then, of live-tweeting my play through of the game, and looking at the techniques the writers used in creating it.
I write novels, which is a different format from video games, but the storytelling in each has a lot in common. I’ll point these out as we go.
This will also contain massive, massive spoilers of the game, so I recommend not reading it before you have finished playing both Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Before the Storm. Not only might it ruin some of the surprises in the game, but it may not make any sense without that context.
Let’s start with that opening. It accomplishes what an opening scene should: Good immediate worldbuilding, introduction to the main character and the important people in her world without being overly obvious about what they’re doing.
The very first line is our protagonist thinking "My mother will kill me if she finds out I hiked over an hour to go to a Firewalk concert."
Which tells us, in one line:
1. The protagonist is subject to her mother's rules, most likely because she still lives at home. Also, she’s currently breaking said rules.
2. She lives with her "mother", not her "parents". Dad is out of the picture for some reason.
3. She's a long way from home and if she gets into trouble she is probably on her own to get out of it.
The game, because it is a game, then proceeds to instruct us how to play it - teaching the player in short order how to move about, jump a fence, and interact with other people and objects in the world. This is an issue that doesn’t come up in novels, but all games have to handle it somehow.
The game is a prequel to an already established game. Which means it has to walk a line in worldbuilding of introducing new players to the world and its rules without boring people who are already familiar with them. They do this well with the introduction of an RV in the parking lot of the old mill where the concert is. Our protagonist, Chloe, remarks that it looks like it’s involved in the drug trade and anyone who recognizes it from the first game gets a chuckle because of course it is. Those who didn’t now have that information.
The whole concert scene serves both to introduce us to the rules of the game as well as of the world. We learn about our protagonist’s casual drug use, and about the violence lurking in this world and get a very brief introduction to Chloe’s love interest, Rachel.
To sum up, the opening let us get to know the protagonist a bit, introduced the secondary character, and established the world they’re in. It also introduced a couple of other major characters without telling us they’re going to be major characters. Which are all the things a good opening scene should do.
I was playing the game Life is Strange: Before the Storm, the prequel to Life is Strange. Halfway through the final chapter, I accidentally wiped out my save game.
I decided to start over and decided to record some of my impressions this time through. There’s some incredibly good writing in this game and I thought perhaps there could be lessons to be learned from it for writers in other media, like me.
This series is going to be a combination, then, of live-tweeting my play through of the game, and looking at the techniques the writers used in creating it.
I write novels, which is a different format from video games, but the storytelling in each has a lot in common. I’ll point these out as we go.
This will also contain massive, massive spoilers of the game, so I recommend not reading it before you have finished playing both Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Before the Storm. Not only might it ruin some of the surprises in the game, but it may not make any sense without that context.
Let’s start with that opening. It accomplishes what an opening scene should: Good immediate worldbuilding, introduction to the main character and the important people in her world without being overly obvious about what they’re doing.
The very first line is our protagonist thinking "My mother will kill me if she finds out I hiked over an hour to go to a Firewalk concert."
Which tells us, in one line:
1. The protagonist is subject to her mother's rules, most likely because she still lives at home. Also, she’s currently breaking said rules.
2. She lives with her "mother", not her "parents". Dad is out of the picture for some reason.
3. She's a long way from home and if she gets into trouble she is probably on her own to get out of it.
The game, because it is a game, then proceeds to instruct us how to play it - teaching the player in short order how to move about, jump a fence, and interact with other people and objects in the world. This is an issue that doesn’t come up in novels, but all games have to handle it somehow.
The game is a prequel to an already established game. Which means it has to walk a line in worldbuilding of introducing new players to the world and its rules without boring people who are already familiar with them. They do this well with the introduction of an RV in the parking lot of the old mill where the concert is. Our protagonist, Chloe, remarks that it looks like it’s involved in the drug trade and anyone who recognizes it from the first game gets a chuckle because of course it is. Those who didn’t now have that information.
The whole concert scene serves both to introduce us to the rules of the game as well as of the world. We learn about our protagonist’s casual drug use, and about the violence lurking in this world and get a very brief introduction to Chloe’s love interest, Rachel.
To sum up, the opening let us get to know the protagonist a bit, introduced the secondary character, and established the world they’re in. It also introduced a couple of other major characters without telling us they’re going to be major characters. Which are all the things a good opening scene should do.
