3/2/2021 Crossing the border in Life is Strange 2 versus real life - Polygon

My mom crossed the border in real

life. I only cross it in a video game.
One video game’s take on American racial tensions
By Patricia Hernandez@xpatriciah Jan 21, 2020, 1:01pm EST

E
verything over the last 15 hours has led to this point: my brother and
me, standing before a wall. The wall. I wasn’t sure we’d make it here.
We are, after all, two kids who hiked our way down to the border, only
a few dollars to our name. The odds, and more importantly the law, are
against us.

Then again, I’ve heard a lifetime of equally incredible stories like this, from
friends and family. My mom was still a teenager the first time she crossed the
border.

People risk it all to get to the United States, even if it means they might not
make it, even if it means sitting in cages, even if it means taking up harsh,
degrading jobs for people who don’t fully see them as human. Anything for a
chance at a real life that’s free of violence and extreme poverty.

I grew up around these stories, but my experience is different. I’m fortunate

enough to have been born in the States, which means I’ve never had to sneak
my way across the border — until playing a video game. In this case, the goal is
not to enter the U.S. as an immigrant, but to leave the country as two full-
blooded American boys.

I was never fully sure that Life is Strange 2 would actually take players to the
border, as it proposed near the end of its first episode. Too political, I thought,
as I waited for the game to eventually pull its punch.

B
ack in 2018, the first episode of Life Is Strange 2 introduced players to
Daniel, a young boy who loses his father to police violence. Daniel
then accidentally kills the cop using his mysterious magical powers. I
play as Sean Diaz, Daniel’s older brother, who faces an impossible
choice. The boys have no caretakers. Their father is dead. Their mom
walked out on the family years ago, for reasons that are never fully explained.
The only family the Diaz brothers have left at that point are their white
grandparents, who aren’t in the same state, and may not be able to harbor a
grandson wanted for murder.

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Image: Dontnod Entertainment via Polygon

In a moment of panic, the high schooler, Sean, recalls that his dad has a plot of
land in a place called Los Lobos, where the rest of his Mexican family also
resides. Maybe the siblings could run from the law?

It’s a jump, and one that may be hard to understand … unless you’re brown.
White people in this country can shoot up a church, only to have police buy
them Burger King a few hours later. People with actual melanin in their skin,
though? The system feels stacked against us. We worry the cops will shoot first.
And if we make it out of a confrontation with the police alive, black and brown
people have to fear a legal system that has unfairly framed them for crimes they
didn’t commit. It’s no accident that a recent work in a different medium, Queen
and Slim, also proposes the same exact solution (to run) after its characters kill
a policeman in self-defense. To trust in the law’s willingness to treat you fairly is
to have privilege. Black and brown people don’t always have that luxury.

CONFRONTATIONAL, YET CLUMSY

Life is Strange has, as a franchise, never been subtle, digging into topical
teenager stories with a well-intended mix of sincerity and bluntness. The results
have been a grab-bag. The first game was a mix of tender moments between two
girls and increasingly traumatic scenes where they have to watch each other die
repeatedly — only to have the next episode undo it all. You could say that the
first Life is Strange dives into complex subjects like rape, euthanasia, and
suicide, but it often comes across more as attempts to titillate the player, rather
than make them reflect.

Life is Strange 2’s primary concern is race. The initial tragedy that kicks
everything into motion happens after Sean’s neighbor yells that he should go

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back to “his country,” despite Sean being born in the United States. Later,
there’s a big moment where Sean is stopped by two men who threaten to hurt
him if he doesn’t sing and dance in Spanish. The more the player refuses, the
more they watch Sean get beat down.

Creative director Raoul Barbet tells Polygon that it was a “difficult” yet
important scene to write. Where most games give players the reins to a power
fantasy, Life is Strange 2 posits a dead end where pain and humiliation are the
only way out.

Based on my experience, this approach feels crass. The literalness highlights

how video games have the same finesse as a punch to the face, as those are the
specific verbs at play here. For me, racism isn’t always a direct confrontation
where a bigot threatens me with violence (or even outright mentions my
background); it’s often way more Knives Out in nature. Personal, precise, and
intimate betrayals where things are implied but maybe not outright said.

Photo: Claire Folger/Lionsgate

It’s having memories of helping my aunt’s boss, the same one who always called
us her “family,” throw a party — only to be hidden away in the kitchen, our
existence too embarrassing. It’s noticing the slight alarm in a rich white
person’s voice when I tell them I got into the same private school as their child.
It’s being asked if I’m some white boy’s nanny. It’s being the single brown
person in a room. It’s the perpetual feeling that well-meaning white people are

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smiling to my face as they stab me with a toothpick. And I’ve got it good,
relatively speaking.

The other day, one of my closest friends, the one who’s got “dreamer” tattooed
on her chest, told me she regularly thinks about suicide. It is, among other
things, a matter of documents that say whether she can belong. It’s in part due
to a torrent of headlines like “Woman Ran Over Girl Because She Was ‘a
Mexican,’ Police Say” and “El Paso Suspect Confessed to Targeting Mexicans.”
It’s not knowing what laws or executive orders might be erected without
warning. It’s knowing that, regardless of what the government might say, what
it actually does has nothing to do with the law — even when you’re an actual
citizen. It is a lifetime of toothpicks.

Life is Strange 2 doesn’t have the range to capture experiences like that, instead
opting for flashy, dramatic moments. There’s a part in the final episode, for
example, where Sean asks Daniel to use his powers so they can literally
dismantle the border wall. But the wall only covers a small section of the
border. Nobody seriously trying to cross the border would take the route that
Sean and Daniel choose in the game. And yet.

Image: Dontnod Entertainment via Polygon

Life is Strange 2 may be clumsy sometimes, in that way video games often are,
but it’s also doing me the courtesy of reflecting that what I know is true is in fact
real. Sometimes, that’s enough.

As Joshua Rivera noted last year at Kotaku, there’s a Latinx void at the heart of
video games. This is probably the most visible video game tackling the
immigration crisis in the U.S. head on, rather than abstracting it to some mealy-
mouthed nonsense involving elves, orcs, or aliens who are likely just as bad as
their oppressors somehow.
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Most of the time, though, gaming companies are out here insisting that they’re
not political at all. That spineless erasure often gives me whiplash when I step
back into the real world, which, more and more, reminds me how it may not
want brown people around.

The developers at Dontnod did plenty of research, they say, including visiting
the border firsthand and interviewing people who lived near the area. That’s
how the game’s creative directors, Michel Koch and Raoul Barbet, learned
about heavily armed vigilantes who believe they’re “help[ing] the country” when
they try capturing immigrants themselves, a phenomenon that also makes an
appearance in the game.

Life is Strange 2’s creative directors tell Polygon that some Latinx players have
informed the French studio that they’ve legitimately been in violent situations
like the one where Sean is threatened by racists. Nevermind all the far-right
movements, like Brexit and the alt-right, that are sprouting up around the
world in response to immigration concerns.

Image: Dontnod Entertainment via Polygon

It wasn’t always so fraught and so violent, according to my mom. Crossing used

to be easier, she says, because the country knew that it needed cheap workers.
To wit, when she came over, she was captured by immigration and actually let
go, something that she says would probably never happen now.

M
aybe Life is Strange 2 didn’t have to do more than to let me stand at
the border and give me a decision — any decision — over this
imaginary line that has nonetheless cast a shadow over my entire life.
To be a first-generation kid is to carry the weight of a family who has
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