But there’s something I wanted to address that came to me in a fever dream two weeks ago while my paralysis demon hovered over me.
We say we want control over our lives, because we’re God-modders at heart. But what we actually want is permission.
And that difference matters far more than you think, so let me explain.
The Fantasy of Rewind
The rewind mechanic in the original Life Is Strange feels intoxicating at first.
You mess up. You undo it. You fix it.
You get to sculpt the “right” version of events and it repeats like clockwork, making you feel invincible.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of the time, we aren’t trying to correct mistakes. We’re only trying to escape consequences that arise from them, and that’s not the same thing at all.
And this is where the game becomes rhetorically interesting.
Rhetoric Is All About Consequence
In classical rhetoric, persuasion is never neutral. Words don’t just describe the reality around us, they shape it altogether.
Every argument carries, or should carry, what rhetoricians like to call:
A value system
A risk
A consequence
When Max rewinds time, she isn’t just correcting dialogue. She’s quite literally intervening in causality, and the world pushes back at that point of entropy to eradicate it. It’s poetic. That pushback is the argument.
The game quietly insists that just because you can intervene doesn’t mean you should. And that’s the power of rhetorical responsibility, if Uncle Ben taught us literally anything at all.
Here’s the Illusion We Carry into the Digital Age
We essentially do live in a world of soft rewinds on the worldwide web.
You can actually delete the tweet. You can even edit the caption. Unsay the thing. Rebrand the mistake, if you truly must.
The internet gives us the illusion of revision without residue.
But the residue is always there via carbon footprint that may or may not haunt you when you’re trying to get a new job or try to sleep at night.
Screenshots will always exist, memory exists in someone, and deleting something doesn’t lessen the potential impact by any means.
Life Is Strange exaggerates the rewind for dramatic game effect, but the underlying question is deeply contemporary and exciting (so contemporary and exciting I could give a TED Talk on it on the spot, while gloving).
If you could take back what you said, would you, and at what cost?
You Don’t Actually Want Infinite Choice
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for many of you, and unfortunately, I don’t hold hands first.
Infinite choice isn’t liberating. It’s incredibly destabilizing and enabling.
The more options you have, the less stable your identity becomes. If you can always revise yourself or versions of yourself, who even are you in the mirror when revision is no longer possible?
The final act of the game (no spoilers here, keep your pants on) removes the rewind mechanic entirely.
No optimization for you, no comparison either, and no statistics. Too bad, so sad.
It’s just you.
That design choice is not accidental by the developers or the writers, but you didn’t need me to inform you of that. It forces you to confront something rhetoric has always known and has been trying to convey to the masses for ages.
Choice only ever matters to us when we believe it’s irreversible.
Why This Matters Beyond the Game
If you care about writing in any sense, especially writing online, this is going to be crucial for you.
When you publish something in your voice, whether your name is attached or not:
You are shaping public perception.
You are influencing interpersonal interpretation.
You are committing to a version of yourself that has chosen a specific side on something.
You don’t get to rewind the way you think you do. Sure, you can edit, but the act of saying something in public changes you alongside the preconceived idea of you in other individuals’ heads.
That’s the quiet terror Life Is Strange understands and perfects deliciously.
What the Game Is Really Asking
Well, here’s what it isn’t asking, despite the obvious story you’re faced with: “Would you save the people in the town?”
What it’s actually asking: “Who are you when revision stops?”
And that question is enough to unravel some precisely because it applies directly to us as a populous, as writers, as persuaders, and as digital beings.
Why I’m Writing About This on a Rhetoric Site
If it isn’t obvious already
Because narrative games like this one show us something that theory alone can’t and likely never can. They make us stew in consequence.
You can read Aristotle or Burke and peruse thousands of manuscripts to learn about ethos and agency and constraint and the whole nine. But when a medium makes you sit in the discomfort of a decision you can’t undo? That’s not just rhetoric embodied. That’s argument through design, like an obnoxious flair bartender leaving you in waiting for ten whole minutes before serving you an overly shaken cocktail of rhetorically infused moonshine.
And that’s why I think digital storytelling deserves to be taken seriously in rhetorical study, especially by the pretentious overheads.
Your Turn
Have you ever wished you could rewind something you said? Don’t lie to me, the answer is “Yes.”
But would you actually undo it, or would you change who you were to avoid saying it in the first place?
Static Pages, Moving Meaning 
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