Rewinding, Focus, and the Philosophy of Time Travel by David McNeill

REWINDING, FOCUS, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF TIME TRAVEL.

Written by David McNeill

In the immortal words of Patrick Rothfuss: Including time travel in your story is just like, a dumb thing to do.

Rothfuss was referring to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but the quote prevails regardless of context: time travel is very hard to do well. Life Is Strange is built around the rewind mechanic. In short, Max, the player character, can reverse time - sometimes for a few seconds, in other instances, for much larger periods of time. It results in some really cool gameplay sequences.

In particular, early on when Max is proving her power works to Chloe, the two head to a diner. The player must observe what’s going on around them, and reverse time, then recall and explain what is about to happen to Chloe. It’s one of the best uses of the mechanic both in the fiction of the universe and in the gameplay. The diner scene has an understated eloquence in the alignment of narrative, mechanic implementation and themes - and yes, despite being plagiarized wholesale from Groundhog Day, it’s brilliant. If you don’t pay enough attention and predict incorrectly, Chloe straight up doesn’t believe that you can time travel. It’s extremely cool and is one of the best moments of the game, period.

By being directly associated with Chloe (her attempted murder triggers Max’s powers), and by extension, the game’s underlying themes, Life Is Strange’s Time Travel is baked into the game’s worldview, philosophy, and writing.

Time travel, by necessity, is a device of philosophy and science. On the one hand, time travel has been embedded in semiotic discussion and analysis since H. G. Wells The Time Machine, and on the other, the examination of its very scientific possibility summons questions of determinism, fate and so on. Philosophers and physicists alike have invested a great deal of time explaining how time travel may manifest, and a lot of these theories have become embedded in fiction and form the rules around time travel in a lot of worlds. Life Is Strange initially adheres to one such set of rules, in this case, Novikov’s Self-Consistency principle. Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov attempted to solve the paradoxes of time travel by suggesting that the possibility of changing the past with time travel is zero. Novikov proposed that if time travel exists, whatever you went back to change would always have been changed. 8 The most straightforward example of this occurs in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Harry and Hermione use the time turner to travel back in time a few hours to save Buckbeak from execution. Harry then casts a charm to repel creatures that were killing his past self. Novikov’s self-consistency principle suggests that Harry and Hermione always travelled back in time, and Harry’s future self always casts the charm to repel the creatures, because he can’t not have cast the charm, otherwise he would have died before time travelling (see more detail in my video, Harry Potter and The Time Turner Problem).

It gets a little headache-y if you think about it for too long, but in the initial use, Life Is Strange works similarly. When Max travels and alters an event, the new reality she returns to has always had that change. It creates a straight forward gameplay mechanic: you, the player, can change the past, but in doing so, you are sacrificing whatever reality you were in before time travelling.

JC Wheeler put it simply when he said:

You can coexist, take yourself out for a beer, celebrate your birthday together, but somehow circumstances will dictate that you cannot behave in a way that leads to a paradox in time. Novikov supports this point of view with another argument: physics already restricts your free will every day. you may will yourself to fly or to walk through a concrete wall, but gravity and condensed-matter physics dictate that you cannot. why, Novikov asks, is the consistency restriction placed on a time traveler any different.

Simple enough, right? Life Is Strange erects this self-looping logic, only the plot quickly demands to be made interesting (largely, I suspect, because the writers realised part way through chapter two that Chloe was not all the fun to spend great deals of time with).

During the third act of the game, the story throws in a new ability: Focus. If Max Focuses on a photograph, she can project her mind back into her past self and change the past. So, if she, seventeen, looked at a photo of herself at two, she would be projected back into her two year old body with her seventeen year old mind.

The mechanic starts off as fairly innocuous, used to save William Price from a car crash (and introducing some weird narrative side effects). By chapter four, Max has used Focus to revert back to the original timeline, and then the game loses its mind. Rather than following Novikov’s self-consistency principle, the game uses Focus as the single mechanic by which Max will escape the Dark Room. She Focuses on a photo taken by Jefferson, and uses it to get him to take a different photo, which then allows her to Focus on a different photo where she can see her diary, and within that she Focuses on a selfie of herself to move into Jefferson’s class, where she then submits the selfie to the Everyday Heroes Contest to ensure she has a window back to Arcadia Bay and Chloe for plot reasons.

While the above sequence is less confusing while playing, it causes friction with the game’s fictional rules around time travel to have Max engage in so many complex, repeatable jumps -- not to mention that allowing Max to Focus while already in the past, Focus again, opens the door to myriad, endless possibilities in a way that is conceptually cool, but ends up not feeling very fun to experience.

Rather than focus on one power, Life Is Strange innoculates itself from needing to follow any set of guidelines, and in turn, takes away the player’s ability to use Max’s power in a way that feels meaningful or interesting.

In offering Max the ability to create and experiment with infinite theoretical realities, the game introduces no small amount of dissonance as we’re unable to play through infinite theoretical realities. Before Focus, Max could certainly create alternate realities with time travel, but it was limited by her ability to act on the world directly--it never feels like you can do anything when you travel back, but rather, feels like you’ve got a handful of choice in each given circumstance and must choose the best way to alter reality from a neat, short list.

The idea of ludonarrative dissonance has been well written about in game design by folk much smarter than I, so I won’t dwell on it too much here (seek out Folding Ideas youtube video on the subject or Eric Swain’s 2010 piece for The Game Critique). But if Life Is Strange was created around the idea of the rewind mechanic, and because this mechanic is superseded by Focus, it leaves the player in a bizarre place.

The time travel becomes more about the player’s ability to keep track of photographs and the many realities Max is diving between, rather than the player’s ability to recollect the future and use this information to act on the past.

If the time travel is supposed to be symbolic of Max’s inner thoughts and desires, then by necessity, the mechanic itself has an element of interiority. You can only time travel in a way that the designers think Max would want to time travel. Equally, you can only alter events in a way that Max would conceive of altering events.

This issue of interiority comes with playing any game that contains choices and a named protagonist - Firewatch only lets you react to things within the degrees of Henry, you can’t suddenly call Delilah a slur and stomp off into the highlands, because Henry would never do that. However, Life Is Strange puts itself in an awkward position by having Max lack a strong personality.

If there was a firmer, more defined set of attributes for Max’s personality, it would be a lot easier for the time travel to lack agency. Of course, we might have said to ourselves, “I’d travelled back to this moment” but Max, the very defined X type of person, would only consider changing these two things.

The result is two mechanics, rewind and Focus, that are neither fun to play, nor have anything especially profound to contribute to the game’s themes. Rather than focus on one power, Life Is Strange innoculates itself from needing to follow any set of guidelines, and in turn, takes away the player’s ability to use Max’s power in a way that feels meaningful or interesting, aside from deciding what flavour of sarcasm you’d prefer Chloe respond to you with. Unless it’s a predetermined set piece, the game is ultimately not interested in time travel or what it means in Max’s life, except for a very big, black and white climax, which once again, relies a little too much on Chloe to make itself felt.

DAVID MCNEILL is the lead writer at Digital & Creative Media Works and the author of the Maynard Trigg series, find his other work at www.youtube.com/dcmworks