Thursday 13 December 2007

Pic of the day: Micropolis, my Sims 2 Prosperity Challenge. Except it has ten families rather than six, because this picture is taken almost two months from now, in February 2008. Actually, that's par for the course (whatever that means in French) here in the House of Chaos.

Thinking about time

Time is a strange thing. Take synchronicities, the seemingly connected events that have no causal connection but still appear at the same time and are interpreted as meaningful by the human mind.

Within the last month, I read a popular science article about a new theory that there may actually be two time dimensions. This was purely theoretical physics with no practical applications, and I don't know enough of the maths to comment on it. I found it amusing because the postulation of two time dimensions was an important part of my failed novel two novembers ago. At the time I didn't think it could happen.

Also within the last month, the MMORPG City of Heroes launched its 11th free expansion, "A stitch in time", which centers on time travel. It is of course purely speculative, as the game uses comic book stereotypes for flavor, and time travel is an old trick there. Higher-level players can go to the "Ouroboros" and take missions made for lower-level players. They will be aged down to the appropriate level and stay there until the story arc is finished or they break it off to return to the present. Unfortunately there is no corresponding future missions for lower-level players. The NPCs in the Ouroboros sanctuary tend to be even more vague about past and present than I am, sometimes referring to future events as if they had already happened or feigning ignorance of things that have.

All of this came to a head when I started playing the Prosperity Challenge for The Sims 2. In this challenge, you have to play two or more families in parallel. The longest you can play any of them is for 7 game days/years (the game refers to them as days but sims live only about 80 of them). After 7 days, you have to go to the next family and play them for the exact same amount of time. I rolled a 6 for the number of families (valid values are 2-6) and so I have spent the last couple days playing through the same week over and over in different families. To further complicate things, a season lasts a little less than a week. So I start in summer, play through fall, and in the winter I leave the family and jump back to summer to play the next. So in essence their time is "folded" so that I can be all the places at the same time, but not at the same time. That is to say, it is the same time for them but not for me. As their guardian angel I live through 6x7 days, but the sims (if they were real enough to perceive it) would think I was living 7 days in 6 different places simultaneously.

So both of my favorite games are challenging my concept of time, as is popular science. At the same time. Or is it really?