TEMPLE HQ

THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!

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NON-LINEAR NARRATOLOGY

Video games, beyond the usual linearity of art, go forward into a new dimension - time. The closest cousin to a game is a still image or sculpture for the reason that this form of viewing is not bounded in time. The entire image exists as-is before the view. A musical album, a book, a play, a movie, must all be viewed in time, one moment at a time in sequence. Their transmission of information is bounded to linear time. A game is not this, as the game's most fundamental unit of information is the mechanical. While the film's unit of information is the linear-temporal sequence of frames moving forward, the game's is the mechanical systems set up for the player to interact with. While these mechanics play out in linear time, their existence is not in-time until the player moves them forward down a particular timeline. The player takes all paths until they chose which path to take.

A game is a set of mechanisms that can be manipulated in any way the player sees fit, with information transmitted to the player through their continued interact with and manipulation of these systems. Games therefore interact with the reader in a way far more intimate than linear mediums. While a typical experience will have the reader yoked along the temporal progress of the work (the reader sitting down paging through their book, line by line), a game will have the reader engaged in the creation of timelines, engaged in the very same processes and systems that they do in the real world. A player has in-game hands that reach out, touch and manipulate, just the same as their real-life hands. Games in this way activate something far more primal than typical media, training the player and giving them new pathways of motion to follow, new systems to enter into and interact with. To put it simply, while a typical linear medium is showing a man the process of fishing, a game teaches the man how to fish, giving him the fishing rod.