I feel the need to preface this with the fact that as I’m writing this, it’s quite late at night and I’ve been playing video games for the better part of the day. God Of War, to be precise. Because nothing gets you in the Christmas spirit like a series that has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, Christianity, Western culture, or the abstract concept of peace on earth.
(And I’m checking on this the next morning to confirm that it is, in fact, lucid enough to show the world. Enjoy, but I should warn you that the subject matter here will be a wee bit weightier than what we’re used to on this site)
Ugh. Died again. That platforming segment is such a beast. As soon as you leap across the ledges, one of the buzz-saws gets you! Okay, let’s load up and try agai-dagnabbit! Okay, let’s try it again…argh!
Fifteen tries and several words unfit for the public sphere later, and you finally make it to the other side. Your character gives a hearty shrug and carries on their journey, completely oblivious to the notion that in fourteen other versions of the game universe, they died considerably terrible deaths.
To use the example that made me think of this, let’s go with God Of War. In the average slice-and-dice platforming segment, let’s say a first-time player will die…seven times, partially thanks to the somewhat objectionable platforming elements (You can’t see your shadow when you jump? Isn’t that, I don’t know…cheap?). In that version of the story, Kratos’s journey ends there. He just dies. But you keep trying, and each version of the story in which Kratos doesn’t succeed is discarded when you load up the file again. The version in which he succeeds and continues on his quest is the one that you play all the way through. If Kratos were a real person and aware of himself (which in itself is kind of a scary notion, but), then it would be the version of him that did not die, and instead made it through the games unscathed. With me so far?
Because there’s actually a scientific theory about this very concept. Yes, in real life. I’ve mentioned them before on this blog, but humour site Cracked offers quite a bit more than just scatological jokes: this article shows how the concept can be applied to movies, and I think video games are an even more prescient example.
It’s called Quantum Immortality, and it goes a little bit something like this. I’m quoting directly from that Cracked article here, because I’m no theoretical scientist and they put it better than I could.
The theory arose when scientists were poking around inside the atom and noticed that certain particles appeared to move in two different directions at the same moment.
To understand why that should be impossible, imagine that you balanced a perfectly sharpened pencil on a tip occupied by one of these particles that spins left and right at the same moment. If the particle actually did move in both directions, the pencil wouldn’t know whether to tip left or right. Or more specifically, it should tip in both directions at the same time. Now obviously, if you actually balanced the pencil in this way, you’d see the pencil tip in one of the two directions, because that’s how reality works. What science hasn’t been able to figure out is how reality chooses which of the two directions to make the pencil tip. The most interesting theory they’ve come up with states that reality doesn’t choose, and instead branches off into separate parallel universes.
Now imagine if, instead of a pencil balanced on one of these particles, there are 10 of these particles connected to a contraption that fires a gun at your head if they move right and lets you live if they move left. After the first test, reality branches into two parallel universes, one in which you’re alive and another where you’re dead. After the second test, you’re dead in three universes, still alive in one. After 10 tests, there are 999 parallel universes where a bunch of scientists are cleaning your brain matter off the wall behind you, and one universe where you’re still alive. According to the “many worlds” theory, the scientists have a 99.9 percent chance of existing in one of the realities where they’re about to have a lot of explaining to do. But since you no longer exist in any of those realities, from your point of view, you have a 100 percent chance of existing in the one universe where the gun never fired. You are guaranteed to continue living in one of the 1,000 universes that you just created, which is, of course, the one that you’re going to be aware of.
(Cantrell, M. A., Cross, J. Cracked dot com, 2012. I never, ever thought I’d be using Cracked in an academic citation)
If you read all that (and you really should, it’s fascinating if you’re into the fringes of scientific theory), then it should be self-evident how this applies to video games. The reality in which the protagonist (in this case Kratos) exists, and continues to exist throughout the sequels, is the reality in which he evaded all the traps of Pandora’s Temple in the first game, and the very existence of the first game’s plot owes to the reality of him having survived everything in the prequel games, not the infinitude of realities where he succumbed to the traps in those games and died.
If you’ve ever seen the Nic Cage movie Next, then regardless of the movie’s overall quality (The climax was a freaking dream?! Sorry, had to get it out of my system), there’s a scene where his character, who has the ability to tell the future, demonstrates Quantum Immortality incredibly well. He basically looks through all different possible futures at one point, which involve all different timeline versions of him walking through the warehouse looking for an assassin or something (Apologies, it’s been a while), each of them ultimately getting shot and killed. With this foreknowledge, he does everything that the dead future-versions of him don’t, and therefore brute-forces himself into the timeline where he does live.
So basically: every time Mario gets hit by a Goomba, or falls into a pit or gets whacked by a shell, he’s providing a demonstration of Quantum Immortality. Every play in which he dies opens up an alternate reality, theoretically, than the one in which he ultimately lives.
Sure, you say, these are movies and video games. But play a video game, like Super Mario Brothers, where it’s a one-hit-and-die sort of deal. The deaths really start to stack up, but inevitably you’ll get a little bit farther each time. With each death and reload comes a new circumstance, and you’ll do things ever so slightly different, and maybe you’ll make it through. And, of course, the character on screen acts as though he had never died at all, because in-universe, they of course wouldn’t be aware of it at all.
(Okay, maybe Deadpool would or something. But he doesn’t count.)
So what, you ask? At their heart, video games are just circuitry, so what am I doing talking about parallel universes and divergent realities?
If that’s what you’re asking, then this is the part that’s really gonna bake your noodle.
Those video games where you get hit once and die, get a little further and die, get further still and die, et cetera…there’s actually no better demonstration of the concept of quantum immortality.
Think about it the next time you drive to work. That car that nearly clipped you – that maniac could have killed you! And maybe he did. You’re just not aware of it, because you exist in the reality where everything was fine. As soon as the other guy hit the gas in a madcap effort to catch the yellow, those theoretical scientists say that reality branched off into two separate timelines: one where you live, and one where you die. Of course, you’re only aware of the one in which you live. Repeat that for every intersection you come across, every close shave you have, and the fact that you’re still living enough to read this is the theory of quantum immortality in action.
It’s even spookier to think of it from a third-person perspective: say, Princess Di might still be alive to this day, in a diverging reality using the exact same logic as the above example.
Ever seen a really awesome speedrun? The player buckles in and guides the protagonist through the game in record time, rarely if ever dying. The character blows through the challenges and enemies, oftentimes avoiding death by the skin of their teeth. In a game played “perfectly”, the character will seem to have uncanny good luck, avoiding death by the boatload, just like in the example of action movies in the linked article. It looks incredible, but only because this is the one diverging reality in which the character has successfully evaded every trap and beaten every enemy.
You want video games as a reflection of everyday life? How about one of the most basic video game mechanics as a pitch-perfect demonstration of one of the most incredible scientific theories I’ve ever heard?
And some games do play with the concept, even if unknowingly or by a different name. Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time is “narrated” by the protagonist after the fact, so when you die, he says something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s not the way it happened” and the game reloads. Well, to him, it’s not; he exists in the divergent reality where he survived all the gnarly traps laid out for hapless adventurers, but all those grisly deaths did happen to him in other equally valid divergent realities.
And in fact, the titular Sands Of Time turn quantum immortality into an actual game mechanic: when you miss a jump and fall onto spikes, for example, you can re-wind the sands of time, taking yourself back to before you take the jump. Essentially, the sands let the Prince manipulate reality so as to give himself quantum immortality, so long as the sands don’t run out.
Given that it’s an action platformer, you’ll tend to die quite a bit on your first run-through, so you’ll end up using the sands quite a bit, forcing aside those divergent realities so that the Prince only recognizes the reality in which he survives. The developers were playing with this very concept, even if it might not have occurred to them at the time.
Of course, all that avoids the philosophical implications of this theory. Ideas like, is the “true” reality only a matter of perception if new, divergent realities are created with every choice we make? If it can be somehow scientifically proven that we’ve all died millions of times in divergent realities that we logically cannot be aware of, what spiritual implications does it have? Does it shake the foundations of what we know as our physical and metaphysical reality, or does nothing change? Maybe it meshes with the theory that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, and that everything that could possibly exist, does exist. Maybe, maybe not. We’re through the looking glass here, at the point where theoretical science, fringe physics and philosophy collide and reach some kind of theoretical oneness. Try not to think about it too hard in your day-to-day, unless you for some reason like those questions that only open up the doors to more questions.
I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really does. But all I really set out to say with this was that if you’re interested in the concept of quantum immortality, you won’t find a more cognizant example of the theory in action than with video games.
So drive safe, folks. And don’t think you can rush to catch that light. Because you don’t want to end up in the reality where it didn’t go so well for you.
Because that’ll be the sound of your last extra life running out.