Time travel

• Often used to go back in time, to experience well known events or events important to the character

• Rarely set in present day, as time travel hasn’t been invented, and therefore the character is usually still going back in time

• Causes the concept of being in the present to change and events taking place in the world, at whatever time they are in, to have less meaning as the character could go to another time whenever they choose

  • Adding restrictions, such as the butterfly effect, or personal connections to the character can change this

• The characters are more free and empowered, seeming almost heightened, as they have all of time at their fingertips

  • Doctor Who visits many famous figures from history

  • Rosalind Brodsky gets psychotherapy from Freud

• The Butterfly Effect

  • The theory: even the smallest change in the past can make the biggest change in the future

  • Establishes rules and guidelines for time travel that are mutually agreed on across different time travel stories

Time loops

• Characters are often put into time loops so that at the end of the story they undergo a change in themselves

  • Groundhog Day

• Characters usually eventually test the limits

  • Killing themselves

  • Teasing other characters

  • Committing crimes, eg stealing

• Good situation for a game as it naturally leads the player to experiment with what they can do in the loop

  • Deathloop uses a time loop to encourage its players to engage in all the aspects of its immersive sim design

Seeing into the future

• Used to predict events, often to help the greater good

• Predicting who will commit crimes in the future

  • Should they be stopped in the present/past?

 

H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine

• The Time Traveller is never named and tells the main story in spoken word to another character who then relays it to us

  • Possibly making a point of how otherworldly the concept of time travel is to us, that we cannot ‘interact’ with the time traveller directly

• He travels to the distant future: 807,000ish

• He discovers that mankind has evolved into 2 new sub-species

  • These forms of man are less intelligent than today and the time traveller argues that this is because they surpassed all challenges that made mankind’s life difficult and so no longer require intelligence

• The future is not the incredibly advanced civilisation that he suspected and this, in fact, resulted in him being unprepared

  • He needed to bring more sources of fire from present day

• When he traverses time he sees everything going by fast

  • He feels sick during traversal

  • He needs to consider that when he stops he does not collide with whatever is there

• Time is a 4th dimension that our consciousness is always travelling forwards within