Thursday, March 7, 2013

Wheel of Time: The Complexities of Time in Video Games

By James Earl
Spoilers for the games Limbo, Journey, and Braid ahead. You have been warned!

While not all video games have a narrative, or even decide to focus on the narrative, storytelling has become more and more important as the industry has matured. For the most part, video game narratives have been pretty straight-forward.  Go to the castle and save the princess. Stop the evil scientist and rescue animals. Kill the aliens trying to destroy Earth. Stop the city from breaking down into anarchy. While all of these stories have been interesting and are complex, they aren’t really experimenting with what it means to be a storyteller.

As games have continued to progress, however, there has been an even deeper focus on the psychology of the characters; either you or the character you are playing. Games like Halo 4, God of War III, Bioshock, and Far Cry 3 are all games that take a deep look in the minds of the people we choose to have as video game protagonists. Games like The Walking Dead: The Game and Heavy Rain take this one step further and ask yourself to look at your own psychology. However, even in these games, the storytelling telling methods still follow a straightforward narrative path that can be equated with similar Hollywood-movie style narratives.

However, in recent years, a new set of narrative games have cropped up with a new idea of storytelling; the circular, never-ending story. Indie games like Braid, Journey, and Limbo and even a few mainstream games like Shadow of the Colossus (though calling SotC mainstream might be stretching a bit) have started to explore the idea of a circular narrative, where time and “cause-and-effect” are not as linear as we thought. It’s an interesting new territory that is ripe for video games to explore.
Games like Limbo explore new narrative styles for video games
What are circular-narratives? Religions like Buddhism and even music like the famous Carmina Burana speak of time and fate as if it were a wheel. That life and time are not just one long line that constantly move forward with a clearly defined past, present, and future. Instead, time folds back in on itself and certain events repeat themselves over and over again, but each time maybe a little different; maybe a little better or maybe a little worse. In Buddhism, the hope is each time one improves oneself to achieve Nirvana. Yet it is in the realizing that we are in a circle of time/fate that helps us reach this Nirvana, that we are constantly moving through this circle as one organism and that we are all connected together. While this is an oversimplification of the idea, and it certainly isn’t limited or confined to Buddhism, it is important to acknowledge time as cyclical. As the excellent TV series Battlestar Galactica puts it, “All this has happened before, all this will happen again.” Even western philosophies acknowledge this idea to a minor extent with phrases like "history repeats itself."

So a circular narrative is something that looks at and explores the idea of time being fluid and circular. For an excellent example of the idea of a circular narrative in literature, listen to this wonderful short story by Neil Gaiman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-K5p3VrrjQ). The games Limbo and Journey do this most obviously. Both Limbo and Journey put you on a simple quest to achieve a simple goal. In Limbo, you are journeying through Limbo to find your sister while in Journey you are trying to reach the top of a mountain. Both goals set you on a straight path that forces you to constantly walk towards a goal. While Journey may be filled with different ideas, both games end similarly. Once you achieve your goal, both games put you back at the exact same spot you started. From there, you can continue to do the exact same quest again, just constantly stuck in a loop. However, both games put a different spin on the idea. Limbo has a much sadder tone that has this young boy constantly stuck in a cycle looking for his sister, while Journey has a more positive tone in the themes of perseverance and apotheosis. Both games experiment with the idea of a fluid time and space.
The simple goal of Journey helps to underscore its constant cycle
Games like Braid experiment with this idea in a slightly different way. In Braid, your protagonist is able to manipulate time. As you continue, you learn that your character, Tim, is searching for his love that was attacked by an evil monster. One of the books that tells this narrative stays that “He [Tim] felt on his trip that every place stirs up an emotion, and every emotion invokes a memory: a time and a location. So couldn’t he find the Princess now, tonight, just by wandering from place to place and noticing how he feels? A trail of feelings, of awe and inspiration, should lead him to that castle: in the future: her arms enclosing him, her scent fills him with excitement, creates a moment so strong he can remember it in the past.” In the end, the game forces you to rewind time and discover that it was your protagonist who was the monster taking away the Princess from Tim. Here, the manipulation of time is more complicated. Time is malleable and reverberates through all moments. Each moment doesn’t stand in isolation but is touched and influenced by the next. Yet, in the end, it is this very malleability that forces us to never have the thing we want, and we are forced to repeat a cycle which we never knew was happening.
"Time keeps on slippin'...slippin'...slippin'"
The manipulation of time is not a novel concept to games. One need only look at games like Prince of Persia to know that. However, through games like Journey, Braid, and Limbo, video games have started to go deeper then just straightforward narratives and instead begin to explore a much more complicated, more fluid movement through time. The point of these games, in terms of the theme of time, isn’t to have a grand message or overarching theme. Instead, its about realizing that the way we view the world, especially in western philosophies, is open to interpretation and that even the basic notion of time may not be as simple as we think. And it is through video games that we are able to explore these ideas in new and more engaging ways.

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