If you ever got into elementary geekery as I have then you have certainly heard of Schroedinger's Cat. You may not have seen it, or maybe you have, but not both. But what if, in combination with the cat in the superposition of states, you were also offered the Lady or the Tiger? In a game universe, this sort of thing happens all the time. But it has not quite happened as well as I think it will in the future.
What I'm talking about is tangential to a long overdue conversation I had with my best friend today. We were discussing the merits of the new show 'Daybreak' which is all about a detective who relives the same day over and over. His job is to save the life of his love who, for reasons unknown, is killed by mysterious mercenaries. He wakes up every day at 6:18 AM remembering what happened the day 'before' and then tries a new set of tactics to try and get the outcome. Some actions get him shot. Other actions get others killed.
In theory, or at least the last time I checked, one of the consequences of time travel would be that the universe might travel along a slightly different path were we to go back in time and change something. How large or small these changes might be on local events is anyone's guess. But it's certainly reasonable to presume several notions. Firstly that small changes made far back enough in time would have very large consequences. Secondly, it would take a great deal more energy to move someone further back in time. Thirdly, that the energy expended by the person who changed the past would probably only have a very few observable consequences for that person (if he retains his state). As a neutral observer of the phenomenon, one might conceive of what Borges called a garden of forking paths. All possible parallel universes existing as probabilities taken or not might resemble such a thing.
Someone else mentioned that this was the best time in history for television drama. It has to be in order to compete with all the other entertainments we have, so it's not surprising that film and tv are taking up this theme of time travel which is something we take for granted in video games.
For example, I'm playing Rainbow Six Vegas in Terrorist Hunt Mode. I am placed in Border Town and I have to discover and kill 30 terrorists before they get me. I have to learn the map by trial and error. The first time I learn there is one to the left of the first building and then one or two down that street. If I kill them first, I can proceed to the next part of this fictional neighborhood, but if they kill me first, I respawn and start the puzzle again. Although the transactions with these enemies are fairly simple, there is no reason that they cannot be as complex as they are in RPG (role playing games). The difference is that for the current crop of games, part of the experience is the showing off of graphic realism or fantasy as the case may be. That will probably continue to be the case until everyone gets bored with High Definition TV but still the paradigm for reliving a circumstance until you figure it out is well established in the gaming world.
So why not envision a game along the lines of 'survive through a day' in which it is your mission to discover all of the butterfly effects which cause your demise if you are ignorant? Instead of gaining powers to fight larger foes, or working to defeat innumerable enemies, such a game would be dedicated to your figuring out the causes and effects of things that are going on just beyond your peripheral vision. Every NPC might hold a clue. You might have to figure out, for example, why one of your allies in the game, at a certain point decides to turn on you. You might have to decide whether or not saving the life of a seemingly innocent bystander has an impact on your own future. You might have to discover secret relationships, or the location of something that gives someone a reason [not] to interact with you.
I'm envisioning a scenario in which you cross a street and get the last newspaper from a vending machine, read it and throw it away. If you get there first, then a particular businessman will not read that newspaper, and having not read it does not purchase the a new sports car. At some other point in the story that businessman gets carjacked by thieves who you must pursue in your own automobile. So instead of them having a fast car, they have a slow car, but no matter what you do in the story you are unable to stop the businessman from getting carjacked. Even if you kill him, his is the car the thieves steal.
The trick in designing such a game would be to create a sophisticated timeline with all the scripted plot possibilities. There's certainly software of the sort out there which makes it possible, but it's not a simple storyboard but a quantum storyboard with any number of possibilities. Game designers are very good (now) at designing optical effects which draw a player's attention to a particular part of a map - these are visual maze clues. But audio clues as well as dialog clues would be added in a Garden game, because the goal is not a destination, so much as a set of actions.
When the player encounters the setting of the game, it may seem to be a completely open environment. The player should be perceive that they have infinite moves and infinite time, but what they discover as they play the game is that certain things will have to have been done by a certain time or else their doom is inevitable. Certain things might seem innocuous, but later have larger consequences. I could see that there are certain checkpoints given in terms of judgments pronounced by various gateway characters. Perhaps you are to be seated in a restaurant and the Maitre'D makes a comment about your appearance, and you are therefore not seated on time.
In theatres in Denzel Washington's latest, Deja Vu. It's a very good thriller that makes use of something of this premise. The way the time-travel constraints are made determine the shape of the exposition. Also, the motive vehicle is an investigation of a terrorist act. But there are small things in the film that change or seem out of place that Washington must make sense of. Were they things he did in the future?
I'm looking forward to more of these kinds of time-travel adventure games. There are many interesting possibilities.
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