Time travel and narratology (99. Life is Strange (2015), 76. Braid (2008))
There needs to be an article on time travel mechanics in gameplay. Braid, Life is Strange and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask all give you the option of traveling backwards to try again as an explicit game mechanic. But it's strange (haha like life is strange, get it? get it?) and meta to encode it explicitly, to make the game *about* that, when almost every game lets you do that. You die, you "go back in time" to five minutes ago, when you hadn't died yet, you try it again. The difference is that these games let the character remember they went back in time.
Life is Strange follows a teenage girl who discovers this ability, along with a conveniently concomitant superpower that allows her to see into the catastrophic future, and she wanders around having cutscene/event-based adventures (with a similar feel to The Walking Dead) and re-doing recent events to improve (or maybe just change) the outcome. There's a time limit to use your power (you can't go back an extended period of time, just redo the most recent scene), after which time cements and flows as usual. So the shape is linear but with curlicues? I'm imagining something like this:
Hm I made my curlicues too small but the POINT is, there are branching storylines spurred by one small redo, at many points along the story. This shape itself might not be accurate, but this is the way time travel functions in Life is Strange. One time-travels to access different parts of the story, to work towards the best outcome. One suspects, though, that perhaps there's only one global storyline after all and the shape is more of a linear bottleneck, like this:
Hooray, visible curlicues! There are several models for linearity in stories, and, while I'm overdue to find some good narratology articles and settle in, here are some narrative forms in bite-size:
- Linear. Point A to Point B.
- Branching narratives. My first beautiful drawing.
- Parallel structure. My second beautiful drawing, a branching narrative that returns to bottlenecks. There is choice, but certain events are mandatory and the plot is globally linear.
- Threaded. Multiple intersecting arcs. Like Love Actually, or the Max Brooks novel World War Z.
- Framed. Story within a story within a story within a story. Like Cloud Atlas, or Frankenstein.
- Dynamic narrative. Mini stories with no single ending, they might intersect with each other but you can't get to all of them in a single playthrough. Open world games (although often these have a linear main narrative within a freeplay-friendly open world), a DM's plans in a D&D campaign (although the campaign itself is a linear narrative), etc. A linear medium like a book or a film can hint towards this but, because they cut linear swaths through a world, cannot truly offer a dynamic narrative like a game can. **jump to bottom for academic German Studies explication of the idea that a city is a dynamic narrative and the flâneur walks 1 linear storyline of it, aka the city is a book whose pages you turn with your feet.**
- Digressive. Like dynamic narrative, but without the teleological plot. Curlicues all the way down. Like a Montaigne essay or Proteus or Tristram Shandy.
Braid, on the other hand, uses small bits of time travel as a puzzle-solving mechanic, not a complication of narrative form. You need to travel forward (maybe to jump on a platform far away), travel backward (while standing on that platform) to pick up an object that only appeared there for the first 3 seconds of the scene, then let time run forward again. The puzzles are much more complicated than that, but that's the gist. Because you need to move through each puzzle to open the last level, it's globally quite linear. You could argue that it's a parallel structure game (the bottlenecks), but honestly, it seems like the puzzles are pretty much solved one way. Time travel here is purely a way of manipulating space so you can get what you want out of it—another tool in the arsenal, like a jump or a weapon, in what is essentially a metaphor-laden platformer. The story in Braid all comes from the intertext screens, which tell of lost love and mistakes and forgetfulness—ah, that we were younger and less lonely and could go back to mess things up less. It's a really fun and fascinating game, and after a whole army of platformers without this mechanic, it's totally interesting. Just not narratologically.
*academic section*
You came! Thanks, nerds!
As I posted earlier about Dear Esther, early German thinkers of the flâneur conceived of the practice of flânerie as reading the book of the city through the feet. Ludwig Börne writes in his 1824 text Schilderungen aus Paris that the French capital is “an unfolded book, wandering through its streets means reading. In this instructive and delightful work, illustrated in such plenitude with images true to nature, I browse every day for several hours.”[1] Wilhelm Raabe’s Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse (1857) features the eponymous Sparrow Lane as its protagonist and the text is constructed as a succession of images and spatial relationships, a series of walks down the lane rather than in the form of a traditional narrative.[2] Börne’s and Rabbe’s conception of the modern city as a book of images one can flip through evokes Walter Benjamin’s Blätterbücher, protofilmic objects which contain a set of browsable images (and prefigure ergodic literature and the cybertext: texts which require effort and action to traverse, unlike the voyeuristic (but powerless) pleasure offered by traditional narrative).[3]
As opposed to a city which one reads, a text through which one walks has (retroactively) existed for centuries but only recently begun to be examined by literary scholars. Ross Chambers' concept (and book) Loiterature identifies the kind of digressive literature which has no narrative center and is instead entirely made up of digressions, in a constantly shifting textual context impossible to pin down. Chambers highlights the three-way crossing as a metaphor for digressive texts, in which an author chooses which way to swerve but presents digression of some kind as a foregone conclusion.[4] For literary scholars, the question is how to grapple with works so utterly unconcerned with having a plot.
[1] Ludwig Börne, Schilderungen aus Paris: 1822 und 1823 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1829) 34. Emphasis in original. Quoted in Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 10.
[2] Gleber 18.
[3] See Benajmin on images seen by the flâneur in the city: “Sie flitzen rasch vorbei wie jene Blätter der straff gebundenen Büchlein, die einmal Vorläufer unserer Kinematographen waren.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, volume 4, book 1, ed. Tillmann Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). Quoted in Gleber 217. On ergodic literature, see Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
[4] Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
