Lots of thoughts recently. Everything feels plastic.
I could go on and on about why all that AI "art" is bad. I could mention theft, lack of creativity, it's impact on the work field and environment, but countless people have already said all that. I wanted to touch on something that to me is the most utterly wrong about all of it.
Art is more than just something pretty to look at or listen to. It's therapeutic. It's a form of communication. A tool for human connection. It's a pure, human need.
So I finished Oxenfree 2 recently. Very good and forms a complete story with Oxenfree 1. It's like what Alan Wake 2 was trying to be for its predecessor except that it does a better job of it.
(Probably because it doesn't have to deal with trying to integrate a whole bunch of lore changes that a mostly unrelated side game by the same developer bolted onto the original story. But I digress.)
That choice at the ending was brutal, and really got me thinking about one of my personal wonks: the flexibility and complexity of circumstantial morality.
I will die on the hill that right and wrong are often highly contextual, and not easily hammered into ironclad rules. The Talos Principle 2 is probably the game that landed most closely to my moral beliefs. Specifically when it said the one true moral principle is that you must always follow your reason and your compassion to wherever they will take you.
And it was that very thing, following reason and compassion, that left me momentarily paralyzed by the endgame choice of Oxenfree 2.
So. Like.
Setting the stage for a moment.
The "villains" of Oxenfree 2 are a trio of teenagers named Charlie, Violet, and Olivia. The main plot-moving force is an MCU Sky Portal made of radio waves that they've opened up which is shattering the fabric of reality and threatening to take over people's bodies and fill them with ghosts.
Right.
But Charlie, Violet, and Olivia are the antagonistic characters you actually spend most of the game getting to know. They're the ones you interact with, while the Sky Portal is really just the stakes of the thing.
But also they're just dumbass kids fooling around with forces they don't really understand because Olivia's grieving her dead parents. She is nasty and mean throughout the game, at one point even trying to convince Charlie to stab protagonist Riley with a knife, but it's clear this is coming from a place of traumatized desperation.
Olivia's been promised that she can see her mom and dad again if she goes into the sky portal. Which is true. If she goes into the sky portal, it will imprison her in her happiest temporal memory in exchange for letting someone currently trapped inside out.
Olivia wants to make that trade. She wants to spend eternity locked in a time when her parents were alive. To never grow up, never move on from them, never recover from her grief. To simply languish in the memory forever.
And the main reason we can't let her is because there's a bunch of angry spookers on the other side who see the opening and are all trying to forcibly come through the portal and take over random bodies and shit, potentially ripping apart the fabric of reality in the process. So the portal needs to be closed.
Also there's Alex, the protagonist from Oxenfree 1. A teenage girl who went to a spooky island with her friends that she wasn't supposed to go to, who became imprisoned in the Sky Portal and locked in an eternal temporal prison of repeating memories right alongside all of her friends because she had to sacrifice herself to save the world.
Alex just fucking wants out. She is a teenage girl who had to die and go to Time Hell because she did some misdemeanor trespassing.
She made a deal with Olivia to trade Olivia for Alex. Olivia wants in, Alex wants out, fair exchange. And also all of Alex's friends will be released alongside Alex if she gets out because of... something something. That's not important.
(That Olivia is metaphorically trying to commit suicide is pretty blatant.)
So we arrive at the endgame.
Someone needs to close the Time Portal from the inside. And the player has to choose who stays in Time Hell. The one option is Protagonist Riley, a grown-ass woman we've spent the game getting to know, who's lived a complicated but mediocre life. The other option is Olivia, a traumatized teen girl trying to kill herself out of grief but who technically caused all this.
Like. Starting at the fact that "Do you (correctly) sacrifice yourself or this other person (you coward)?" is a pretty common moral choice in video games. The way Oxenfree 2 handles it is... interesting.
See. I think most people, facing this choice, aren't going to have a very hard time with it. Olivia seems tailor-made to produce one of two kneejerk reactions.
1 - Olivia is the villain who did all this. Fuck her. She should die and go to Time Hell.
2 - Olivia is a child lashing out over her trauma. She deserves a chance to recover and get better, and my protagonist's life is a small price to pay for that.
Depending on how much sympathy you have for troubled children whose emotional hardships manifest in ways that aren't convenient to handle and easily brushed aside in a five-minute pep talk. Personally, my kneejerk is the second.
But this is where things get complicated.
Because. Like.
The thing about Riley is?
A lot of this game is subtextually about the complicated relationship between parents and their children. There's a reason you're cast in the role of a grown-ass adult who's still figuring her shit out and isn't ready for the burdens of parenthood in a conflict whose central antagonists are troubled children. Children who need an adult, and can't wait for you to get ready.
Riley is two months pregnant. This is happening. Rex's birth and all the struggles that entails are bearing down on her. She doesn't have time to figure things out anymore. She needs to be ready now. And this manifests in the plot in the form of these children who need someone to guide them now. Charlie, Violet... and Olivia... and Alex.
And it manifests in Rex. Through the temporal flashes and undoing of reality that strikes throughout the game, Riley sees visions of her life with Rex. And it's. Not great?
Like, it's not terrible.
But it's just. Moments of drama and the struggles of raising a child as a single parent. Riley isn't a Hollywood Parent armed with all the right answers, and she struggles to connect with her son as a single mom raising a boy who's just as much a troublemaker as she was for her father, who she no longer has a good relationship with.
She's just. A mediocre person leading a mediocre life. Raising a son who isn't going to be easy to raise, but who - by his own admission in the final conversation with him - will grow up to be a mediocre person with a mediocre life, but one who's satisfied with the mediocrity his mother instilled in him.
Riley is nobody special. And Rex will grow up to be nobody special. And it's going to be difficult and painful getting there.
And now Riley has to decide the fate of two three people.
And. Also. Uh.
Alex is lying to you.
Specifically, in the endgame choice.
Alex wants to get out. She wants Riley or Olivia to stay behind. She doesn't really care which. She is on the cusp of her freedom and she needs one of them to go into the portal and shut it down, in the process trading themselves for her.
Alex says that it's okay for Olivia to go in because Olivia's doomed. Olivia will never recover from her grief. Never come back from her trauma. Letting her metaphorically kill herself is the best possible outcome for her.
This is a bald-faced lie. In the same conversation, she admits that Olivia's future is cloudy and uncertain. She has no fucking idea if Olivia can recover or not. But she says it with certainty anyway because she doesn't want there to be any complications with letting Olivia trade herself.
Olivia's fate is, indeed, uncertain. If you sacrifice Riley, then Olivia goes one of two ways. She may wallow in despair and resentment and bitterness for the rest of her life. But if treated with kindness, if shown the patience and understanding of an adult to a child, Olivia goes into therapy. She comes back from the edge and moves on with her life.
Alex was wrong to say there was no hope for her. Or, more specifically, Alex was lying. Because she wants Olivia to go into the portal.
Alex also says that Riley's relationship with Rex is doomed. Rex is going to grow distant from Riley and ultimately separate from her. There's going to be a breaking point that they never come back from. But if Riley goes into the portal, then she can live eternally in a temporal snapshot from the best days of Rex's childhood.
She can be happy with her son and never face the doomed future of her inadequacy as a mother.
Alex lied to your face about Olivia's hope of recovery. There is no reason to believe that she's being honest about this. Alex tells Olivia and Riley what they need to hear in order to be willing to condemn themselves to a fate one of them must suffer.
Alex is lying, or at least spinning coercive interpretations out of a foundation that may or may not be true. She wants someone to sacrifice themselves to the portal. Nothing she says here is unbiased, and thus, nothing she says should be counted as part of this consideration. There is hope. For Olivia and Riley both.
(Technically you can also sacrifice Jacob. But only if you've gone out of your way to make him feel miserable and unloved by the world. And let's be real, if you bullied a man whose only crime is being lonely so that he'd be willing to commit suicide for you, you're the bad guy.)
So. The choice.
This is where things get hard.
If you were to ask me, "Does Olivia deserve a chance at recovery?" I would say yes. In a heartbeat. And, in fact, I love that she can actually get that chance if treated with kindness and understanding in the face of her lashing out.
It means the world to me that this outcome exists. The game makes a firm statement that even a child as troubled as Olivia is not a monster. She is just grieving and wounded, and she can get better. But only with the help of adults willing to suffer through the trials and tribulations of trying, of not giving up on her even when her pain pushes her to strike out.
It's not easy to change a life. This is why foster children have a hard time finding permanent homes. People think "Yeah, I can handle a troubled kid," but then give up and write the kids off as unsalvageable when their problems can't be solved overnight.
Olivia isn't going to get better because you said the right thing to her at the right time and made her anguish go away.
But Olivia can get better. With time. And work.
...
But.
The problem is Rex.
Because, as much as what Alex is saying is a lie, the choice itself is just as much of a lie. It's not a choice between Riley and Olivia.
Rex is not a hypothetical future that Riley might have one day. Nor is he a child waiting for her at home, who can be taken in by Jacob or someone.
Riley is two months pregnant with Rex. The gun to Riley's head is a gun to Rex's too. If you sacrifice Riley, Alex's endgame letter to Rex changes to a letter to Riley's father. This is because Rex went into the portal with her. He will never be born, existing only as a temporal shadow in Riley's memory of a future Rex will never be allowed to live.
This isn't a choice between Olivia and Riley.
This is a choice between Olivia and Rex.
Fuck, is this complicated.
For me, the presence of Rex in this equation, the fact that there is no way to sacrifice Riley without also sacrificing Rex, changes the math considerably.
At this point, it is no longer a question of, "Do you, as an adult, sacrifice yourself for a troubled teenager?"
Now it's become the Trolley Problem.
Down one track, there is a teenage girl waving at the trolley and shouting "COME ON, HIT ME!!! I WANT IT TO HIT ME!!! GO AHEAD AND HIT ME!!!"
