I've been thinking about it a lot while playing Bioshock Infinite, especially towards the end of the game. There's an article Yahtzee wrote a while back about the role of death in video games which I remembered because I agree with him so much on that point. Especially the whole "loading the game as strating the new universe where things act differently":
"When we restore the game, the knowledge that we've had to step back a moment in time to correct a mistake is what's crucial to our minds, consciously or unconsciously. In terms of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, we are stepping into a different universe where events can occur slightly differently. That death we suffered still stands back in the old timeline. In that universe, the goodies will fail, a superior officer brings tearful news of your death to your parents in what little time remains before the bad guys' doomsday weapon detonates. We, the player, opportunistically hopping into the body of our player character's quantum clone, are the only ones who remember the old timeline, but it will still exist somewhere, and that will weigh heavy on our minds for eternity. When we finally beat the game, we are playing as the one Gordon Freeman or Sam Fisher or Lara Croft that got enough lucky breaks to see things to the end, while the multiverse at large is riddled with the corpses of our failures".
Here's the link to the whole thing:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/8753-Death-in-Videogames
And, I mean, doesn't it look at least a bit like Ken Levine took notice of this?
"When we restore the game, the knowledge that we've had to step back a moment in time to correct a mistake is what's crucial to our minds, consciously or unconsciously. In terms of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, we are stepping into a different universe where events can occur slightly differently. That death we suffered still stands back in the old timeline. In that universe, the goodies will fail, a superior officer brings tearful news of your death to your parents in what little time remains before the bad guys' doomsday weapon detonates. We, the player, opportunistically hopping into the body of our player character's quantum clone, are the only ones who remember the old timeline, but it will still exist somewhere, and that will weigh heavy on our minds for eternity. When we finally beat the game, we are playing as the one Gordon Freeman or Sam Fisher or Lara Croft that got enough lucky breaks to see things to the end, while the multiverse at large is riddled with the corpses of our failures".
Here's the link to the whole thing:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/8753-Death-in-Videogames
And, I mean, doesn't it look at least a bit like Ken Levine took notice of this?
