Doing the time warp again
(Background: Braid is a game where you can do stuff, then rewind time and use your knowledge of the “future” to your advantage)
As far as I remember, I only briefly played Braid as a demo, on my own, a couple of years ago, and I skipped most of the levels for being a pain. But I have just spent the evening playing the full game, with Aoi (who I met this year) telling me how I solved the puzzles before, and how I got 100% completion on them. Then when she can’t remember one level’s solution, I think to myself “maybe I should look online”, and she says “this is where you looked online last time… but you can’t now because the internet has cut out”; then I went upstairs and checked, and it had o.o
I wonder which is weirder — her being a magical girl with the power to see the future, or me actually having played a lot of Braid and then completely forgotten it…
I do kind of vaguely remember it, now that she tells me in detail what happened, but that in itself is weird as I was waiting for the linux release before buying — and if we were watching a youtube run through just to see the plot, why does she know so much about the puzzles? Did we really go through the demo, then watch a full plot + puzzle run on youtube, she remembers every detail, and I don’t remember it at all? o____o
A tangent on free will / determinism / many worlds — apparently, I approached each puzzle in exactly the same way this time as I did when I was playing it the first time, as though this time /was/ my first time… This then makes me ponder the many worlds theory — in one universe a coin flip lands heads, in another tails; but would it? As eeriely demonstrated, even with a system as complex as the human brain, given the same inputs you get the same outputs…
October 2nd, 2011 at 5:02 pm
With the recent release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the thought has struck me that, even with games with multiple paths to completion (stealth, hacking, guns blazing, etc), I tend to take exactly the same approach when I replay them. Indeed, I often find myself going through the same thought processes again.
I don’t assign any sort of cosmic significance to this in terms of quantum mechanics: I mean, games like this are limited by their nature to a small set of finite possibilites, with events triggered by binary switches: For example, you either make it through the level without setting off alarms, or you don’t. A scenario where a guard may become suspicious if you get to close, but then he turns away and dismisses it as the wind has precisely the same outcome as a scenario in which he was never suspicious at all.
(Of course, this all may be laziness on my part: I know how I got through the level last time, and I don’t want to die multiple times again trying to find an alternate solution.)
In the real world, of course, events are triggered more by a continuum of choices, rather than a finite set of discrete options. My layman’s understanding of the function of the brain is that we tend to look for patterns and divide objects and events into discrete categories. Therefore, given the same input stimuli in the same order, the brain gives the same output. It is how we make sense of the world.
In my experience, the brain seems to have a filtering mechanism so that it doesn’t bother remembering things that happen regularly. I often find myself, when leaving the house in the morning, turning away from the front door and realising that I can’t remember whether or not I locked the door, meaning I often have to check. (Of course, what I most fear is that my brain gets so used to checking the door lock that it filters out those memories as well, so I get stuck in an infinite loop.) Perhaps this is what happened with you and the game: The scenario was familiar, so your brain filtered it out as redundant.
Remember, what we experience is not actually the world around us: Our brains gather sensory stimulus and construct an analogue of the world inside our minds. By necessity, this model is incomplete, so the brain will fill in the gaps, sometimes with fabrications, and sometimes with memories. Sometimes it will edit out events completely, stitching together two periods of time that were in fact distantly separated.
As a side note, it seems possible that we don’t actually have free will at all, but rather apparent free choice is determined by chaos: I remember reading an article about a study (I forget the source, I’m afraid), which using fMRI to determine the point at which a choice was made in the brain. The results showed that the subjects’ brains had already made a choice, sometimes several seconds before the subject was consciously aware of it. This choice may have been determined by the probabilities associated with the firing of chemicals across a single neural synapse.
If the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true, perhaps choices at the synaptic level are analogous to the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment: single (albeit, admittedly not necessarily quantum) events determining the fate of macroscopic systems. In this way, what is in fact a continuous analogue world, is reduced to a discrete digital world, simply by virtue of the choices we make, and the fact that what we experience of the world is merely the model cobbled together in the same brain that makes choices about that world.