free will – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Thanksgiving was nice and peaceful, pretty much exactly the way we all wanted it, and rather than a big meal with a giant turkey we just made a ton of side dishes. Fried pickles and queso and mini cheesecakes and meatballs and a bunch of other shit that probably really doesn’t go together but we did it anyway. A small part of me misses mashed potatoes and stuffing and this corn casserole that is a family dish on my wife’s side of the family, but fuck it; Christmas is three weeks away.

Anyway, I’ve Consumed some Media, to use a deeply odious phrase, so let’s talk about it.

I finally finished Blasphemous II the other day, and other than an enormous and highly annoying difficulty spike on the penultimate boss, I’m a big fan. I turned my YouTube channel back on the other day so if you want to see what the original game was like, feel free (I don’t plan on going back to regular recording, but I wanted to watch some of my videos, so I had to turn the channel back on) but the basic idea is this: Blasphemous II is an outstanding Metroidvania with a deeply weird, pseudo-Catholic skin laid over it, only, like, insanely creepy Spanish occult Catholicism. It’s really something, and I’d love to pick the brains of the people who wrote it because I want to know what they’re like. The sequel smooths out some of the rough edges of the original, removing some bits of nonsense like instadeath from touching spikes and adding some weapon choice, and again, other than that difficulty spike, which nearly led to me putting the game down until I remembered I don’t take shit from video games, I really really enjoyed it.

I know about Neal Shusterman’s Unwind “dystology,” (fuck you, it’s a trilogy that got dragged out to four books because one of them ended up longer than the author wanted) because my students are reading the first book. They really enjoyed it last year and I resolved to read it at some point or another, and then I found a really good deal on the entire set (four books plus a fifth that is apparently a short story collection, by other authors?) and picked it up. There may very well be a full post coming from the series once I’m done with it, but I wanted to complain about something very specific and very weird about the third book: the main characters spend a fair amount of time hiding from the authorities on what is more or less a Native American reservation, only the weird thing is that the book treats all the characters and situations taking place at the res as people we should remember and events we should know.

I was convinced this place had never been mentioned before. I am open about the fact that my recall between books isn’t great; this is a YA book, so I don’t really get to blame my reading comprehension … but this was a lot, and I didn’t remember any of it. So I actually took the step of going back through the first two books today and looking for any mention of this place. And do you know what happened? The first book literally passes over it, saying “this character had some adventures, and we’re not going to talk about them,” and no, that’s not a joke, and I remember noticing it and raising an eyebrow on my first read, and the second book mentions that this one character did some stuff on a reservation during happy adventure time. And that’s it.

It’s obviously possible that the short story book fills us in, or that it’ll happen as a flashback later on or some shit, but this was a really bullshit move. Questioning myself over whether I’d read anything about this place and these characters before seriously affected my enjoyment of the book, and the whole thing was either a deeply bullshit move (if it’s a short story published somewhere else) or a seriously bad authorial decision if it isn’t.

This one’s going to have to be a full post on its own, but before I write it: has anyone out there read this? Because I need to talk to someone about it and hash some shit out before I write a big post out about it. The short version is that I think Sapolsky does make a pretty good case that there’s no such thing as free will … and I don’t care. There’s a lot more to say but that’s the gist. Anybody read it? Let me know.

I have been playing Returnal for the last several days, a game that, at least currently, does not allow you to save. And as I’ve been playing I’ve been thinking about the roguelike genre, which sort of incorporates constant player death into its story model, and thinking about some spoilers that I’ve heard about Returnal’s late-game story, which I won’t repeat here but which touch directly on the idea of “you” dying over and over again in a game.

And that got me thinking about Bioshock, one of the best games I’ve ever played, and a minor tweak that could have made it even more amazing.

Spoilers for Bioshock, a game from 2007, follow. Have a divider:

Bioshock has one of the greatest mid-game twists I think I’ve ever encountered. It’s basically a first-person shooter, and your character is exploring this underwater city, and you’re taking instructions and direction from this guy somewhere in the city who is talking to you over a radio. At about the midpoint of the game, you encounter the guy who has basically been your adversary throughout this journey so far, and after a whole lot of exposition that I’m not going to go into, this guy, wanting to control his own destiny, tells you to pick up a golf club and kill him with it. Well, asks, actually, specifically using the phrase “Would you kindly” in setting up the question.

And at that point it’s revealed that would you kindly is a trigger phrase that has been implanted in you, and that you’re conditioned to obey any order that follows that phrase. And the game flashes back for you to your ally using that phrase several times in directing you to go to certain places and do certain things throughout the parts of the game that you’ve played– all of which you’ve done, because that’s how video games work. Characters tell you to do things, and you go and do them. There have certainly been times where I, the player, didn’t necessarily want to do a thing that someone in a game was telling me to do, and there are games where player choice is a big part of the game itself, but you’re gonna play along, because the nature of gaming itself demands that you do so.

And so, here you are, with a golf club in front of you, your other weapons disabled, no way out of the room, and you literally cannot progress in the game unless you obey orders. And in the game, it’s presented as a question of free will, and whether free will even exists, and meantime here you are, the player, and you’re literally 100% in control of this fictional person’s actions and 100% constrained by the rules of the world the game has set up, and it absolutely blew my mind when I first played it all those years ago and frankly it still has a lot of impact.

And it just hit me this morning how it could have been better.

What if, instead of forcing you to kill the guy to proceed in the game, the game gave you the option to just … cut to credits? And then the game was over? The whole game is this extended meditation on free will and choice, right? So why not give the player to make the choice to disobey their conditioning, and by “their” I mean both the character and the player, and refuse to kill this person, but at the cost of not being able to play the game any longer? I mean, obviously you can always do multiple runs, but you’d still have to play through the whole first half again. Just being offered the chance would have taken what was already an amazing gaming moment and elevated it into the stratosphere.

It would have been unbelievably awesome, and I wish they had thought of it fourteen years ago, instead of me thinking of it now.