The central conceit of Braid is the ability to rewind time, and change the course of events. In that game this is explicitly integrated into the story — Tim, the protagonist, works through the puzzles to try and efface some event in his past that he regrets. But this concept is relevant to any game with a save system.
In a recent ‘Game Club’ play-through of The Thing, RebelFM joked about various points in the game where a companion character would reach a point where they are scripted to turn into the ‘thing’ and attack the player. The player then dies, and has to reload. They have moved back in time — but this time armed with the knowledge that a certain character is infected, and will turn somewhere down the road. The RebelFM solution? Shoot them then and there, before they turn and cause damage. In this second play-through of the scenario the game does nothing to acknowledge that the player holds this information. Other companions would rightly be shocked at what would appear to them to have been the random killing of someone that appeared to be helping out.
This is an interesting and unique element of games as a narrative form in their own right. Films, books, radio — in every case if you rewind, turn back the page, when the scene plays forward again it will be the same. The text on the page will never change.
Game design often seems to (consciously or not) assume this malleable sense of time. The modern Prince of Persia games are obvious touchstones. From the Prince’s narration in The Sands of TIme (“No, no — that’s not how it happened….”), to that game’s rewind mechanic. The forgiving hand that snatches you from danger in the 2008 reboot of the franchise assumes a great deal of ‘trial and error’ experimentation.
Braid aside this concept is very rarely an explicit part of the narrative of games. The grandest experiment with time-bending is almost certainly Planescape: Torment. The Black Isle RPG casts you as a nameless immortal, living through what appears to be one of thousands of lives, none of which he can remember. The great twist to this concept is that all the other characters in the game very much so remember previous incarnations of you. Playing through the game gradually reveals that each version of ‘you’ has behaved differently. Some people knew you as a saint, some as a villain. This dovetails creatively with the huge amount of freedom that the game allows you. One could think of the character’s past lives in the game as the play-throughs of other players.
Planescape came out in 1999. Ten years have given us Braid — but not much else that really moves the relationship of games and time to fresh places. More games need to push forward and explore what the form could allow.
Time to Play
14 01 2010The central conceit of Braid is the ability to rewind time, and change the course of events. In that game this is explicitly integrated into the story — Tim, the protagonist, works through the puzzles to try and efface some event in his past that he regrets. But this concept is relevant to any game with a save system.
In a recent ‘Game Club’ play-through of The Thing, RebelFM joked about various points in the game where a companion character would reach a point where they are scripted to turn into the ‘thing’ and attack the player. The player then dies, and has to reload. They have moved back in time — but this time armed with the knowledge that a certain character is infected, and will turn somewhere down the road. The RebelFM solution? Shoot them then and there, before they turn and cause damage. In this second play-through of the scenario the game does nothing to acknowledge that the player holds this information. Other companions would rightly be shocked at what would appear to them to have been the random killing of someone that appeared to be helping out.
This is an interesting and unique element of games as a narrative form in their own right. Films, books, radio — in every case if you rewind, turn back the page, when the scene plays forward again it will be the same. The text on the page will never change.
Game design often seems to (consciously or not) assume this malleable sense of time. The modern Prince of Persia games are obvious touchstones. From the Prince’s narration in The Sands of TIme (“No, no — that’s not how it happened….”), to that game’s rewind mechanic. The forgiving hand that snatches you from danger in the 2008 reboot of the franchise assumes a great deal of ‘trial and error’ experimentation.
Braid aside this concept is very rarely an explicit part of the narrative of games. The grandest experiment with time-bending is almost certainly Planescape: Torment. The Black Isle RPG casts you as a nameless immortal, living through what appears to be one of thousands of lives, none of which he can remember. The great twist to this concept is that all the other characters in the game very much so remember previous incarnations of you. Playing through the game gradually reveals that each version of ‘you’ has behaved differently. Some people knew you as a saint, some as a villain. This dovetails creatively with the huge amount of freedom that the game allows you. One could think of the character’s past lives in the game as the play-throughs of other players.
Planescape came out in 1999. Ten years have given us Braid — but not much else that really moves the relationship of games and time to fresh places. More games need to push forward and explore what the form could allow.
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Tags: Braid, Planescape: Torment, Prince of Persia, The Thing
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