User talk:Orangeboxman

SIMULATED TIME TRAVEL - NO I AM NOT PULLING YOUR LEG.

(c/p from earlier proposal to game designer who was apparently not interested)

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Actual Time Travel within Video Game Narrative

What makes the concept unique? The concept is a unique application of a specific technical aspect of computer games which has not before been deliberately exploited.

In a video game, at least some of the past can still exist in the sense that, the game states of which it was constituted can possibly be recorded and possibly be recurred. Some of the future can also exist in the senses A) that part of the past may serve as a future when the present has been replaced by recurrence of the past and B) that the same numerical processes that explain the past can be used to tentatively construct some version of the future; that is: to construct more of the present than is yet clearly needed.

But how can this actually work?

There is ultimately no real reason that a player avatar can't be dropped into some part of the narrative time line different from that being experienced by other players, even on machines operating within the same room in real life. This simply stands to create perceptual discontinuities and apparent nonsensical events by obliquely constructing multiple versions of the narrative time line which one would normally want to have resolved.

And why should we think this is possible?

We should think that it is possible because, in some ways, it already happens.

It occurs in Second Life, for example, in terms of certain types of 'lag'. Lag tends to be seen as a messy glitch which needs to be straightened out, rather than as the seed of a coherent system of limited time travel simulation. But this is because the elements of lag are not even subjectively uniform in the way they displace events in time, and because lag incidents also otherwise lack narrative benefits yet to be conferred by applying the phenomena in a coherent and controlled manner.

What, exactly, is being proposed here?

What I propose is a system of simulation that maintains a storage buffer of some length in which numerical game states assigned clock positions, which allows them to be replayed against the clock chronologically, much as frames are stored for a video recording.

Note that game state data already exists for games, and already affects play. It just isn't much subject to revision per clock position by means of play.... yet.

What I propose is a system that, under some conditions, allows players to interact with streaming game state data which has already occurred or which is only projected to occur later, as if it were occurring at the same moment the game clock defines as the present... and to change or use some of this data which would otherwise be closed to change or not yet open to observation... etc.

You may need to think about this a little bit before proceeding here.

The effect for players is to be able to play through events that are, for lack of a better understanding, must be understood as already having happened, and to play through events that 'could happen', in a way that allows them to influence events preceding them.

This has the same basic properties as the idea of 'time travel', and would likely have many of the same imagined consequences.

That is: the 'time travel' inside such a game would be as 'real' as any other physical property simulated within the game.

What sort of game data buffer?

The buffer will have to have some kind of limits, of course.

I see 3 basic ways of defining these limits.

1) Assign a fixed narrative game length that simply (possibly very subtly) loops around at some point, placing avatars from the end of the narrative at the beginning in whatever order they arrive there, and regardless of how the narrative has been or is being modified by continuing play.

2) Create a narrative time window which essentially follows a real clock, but which makes some of the preceding and following clock positions accessible for revision of recorded/projected game state data by players who do what they need to in order to jump back or forward on the clock. This plan notably allows for concentric chronology tropism by subjectively speeding up the past and slowing down the future in such a way that the time displacement is mitigated and eventually eliminated for the players who use it.

3) Create an expanding buffer in which the accessible past is limited to some zero point at which, for example, there were no avatars yet present in the simulation. The available end point could also be limited to some zero point at which no avatars have yet been going to exist without distorting time... or something like that.

I favor option 2, the normalizing progressive window.

Why the normalizing progressive window?

I favor the normalizing progressive window over the loop because the loop forces recursion unnecessarily, defines time, itself, as having a fixed duration, and allows players to distort the whole time line simply by hanging around.

I favor the normalizing progressive window over the expanding buffer simply because the expanding buffer would require too much data to be stored beyond some point.

Advantages to the normalizing progressive window include the fact that it preserves preponderant narrative direction referents and responds to player inaction by eventually pushing players into an essentially unified and concurrent time line. That is: the plan does not invalidate the past or preempt the future as such; it merely dilates the present in a non-uniform way from player to player.

I should point out that Second Life lag already does this. The lack of agreement between elements of continuity in lag simply occurs within, rather than between, subjective player experiences.

But wouldn't this allow avatars to be endlessly duplicated in one place and time?

No.

It is presumably already true, regardless of the game, that no two of the literally same avatars can occupy any chronological point in a game record. If one is added to a record, its duplicate must be deleted. Just try multiple log-ins on World of Warcraft, for example and see whether or not you can build an army of yourself by using multiple processors. If two things cannot happen at the same time, it little matters whether that time has occurred, is occurring, or may yet occur. It's simply a matter of which item will be eliminated from the record, or disallowed to enter it.

So what would happen istead?

My most naive suggestion would be A) that jumps forward in the record (that is 'forward in time') might require that the physical position of the avatar remain fixed; at least relative to some object, such as the seat of a moving vehicle, etc. and B) that jumps back in the record be made to whatever point is already recorded as the point of occupancy at the targeted moment.

I see exceptions to these basic principles, though. Such as where the future moment has already been occupied or where the past moment has not yet been occupied.

The simplest solution, it seems to me, is to throw out the question of temporal direction as it applies to this problem, and have the player specify whether the target position is to be fixed relative to some present object or to be projected from the available record of what position is on record most immediately preceding the target moment.

But how is this a 'game'?

In a classic 1st person shooter MUD, the time manipulation I have described would give a player opportunities to do things like sneak up retroactively on another player who remains on the record shooting, but who is now shooting (until revised, anyway) pointlessly at an empty spot where the sneakier player is supposed to be without the time distortion.

A player also might hide in the future and wait for another player to come into a chronologically vulnerable position. But while he's there, he might get damage messages indicating that he is being attacked in a past which is under revision by play.

Etc.

Depending on things such as the size of the buffer, narrative rates, resource cost per time manipulation event, and protocols for things like what happens to possessions when we take them through time travel or leave them behind, the ultimate challenge for players to construct winning strategies might be considered open-ended.

But would a simulation or game anything like this ever actually come to market and succeed?

I consider it to be inevitable.

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And, I might add, I'm more interested in seeing it happen than in preventing it from happening until there's some way I can get paod for the idea.

If you're reading this and you can make it happen... THEN MAKE IT HAPPEN.