Project 1 contextual

                There is a particular trend in certain video games, mostly in RPGs and Adventure games. However, some other video game genres incorporate it in some way. In some games time moves differently then it would in the real world. For example in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, when you go to the fire temple to awaken the fire sage, you run into Darunia as he is about to go fight the dragon volvagia. You cannot follow him into the boss’s lair until you complete the rest of the dungeon and free the captured gorons. The interesting thing is, you can leave the temple and go do some side quests and even go to other temples (if you already have the hammer) for as long as you want. No matter how long you take or what else you do, you can still come back and nothing will have happened. No gorons will be eaten, volvagia is still there and everyone is still alive. When you leave the space, time is paused. Well you don’t even have to leave the temple, you can dick around inside and everything will still play out the same way. Some games go as far as to let you set a quest to inactive and go off and do many other things and the temporal space surrounding the quest will remain unmoved indefinitely.  Take Skyrim for instance. One of the first quests you come across is to attack a dragon that is laying siege to an outpost tower. You can simply deactivate that quest and go off and do any number of other side quests and when you come back the attack party will still be waiting on you to get there and start the attack. But in the real world it would be quite different. Now supposing dragons did exist and this actually took place, if you did not get there in time, everyone trapped in the tower would be dead along with the attack party more then likely and the dragon would be long gone attacking other towns and outposts. In real life, we don’t have the luxury of putting things for as long as we want and coming back to the situation exactly as we left it. In the real world every opportunity has a shelf life. You can’t just hold onto a job application for 3 months and expect for the position to still be available when you finally do turn it in. it just doesn’t work like that. A similar situation arises in many of these games when it comes to healing potions and such. You can be in the middle of a battle with 1 hp left and there is an arrow inches away from your face… (Pause button) “ Ok let me lazily look through my bag till I find a heath potion. Sweet I found them… but ahh I really only can max out at 50 hp, so do I drink the 40 hp potion or the max health potion? Ehh I don’t know. Well I guess ill drink the max potion just in case… glug glug, mmm that’s good.  Wait for it… wait for it…. Yeah there we go, I can see my health bar start to fill back up. Sweet looks good to me” (Unpause). The arrow hits you and you are down 10 hp, but thanks to that potion you are still alive. Sounds great, but I doubt if some throws a grenade at you in Iraq you can stop and put on some body armor, or go to the hospital get back into pristine health and come back all before it explodes. No you are dead, and there are no re-spawns either.

            What first go me interested into this topic was that fact that in many games I will put off the next mission until I have done everything else there is to do and increased my skills a bunch so that I am much more awesome when I play it and I can totally kick some ass. I mean seriously would it not be some much easier to beat that boss if I was a couple levels stronger, or I saved up some money and bought that rocket launcher before I ran into him. So I decided to enact that into the real world. So there is a project due in 2 weeks, but hey if I go ahead and spend all that time getting the rest of my homework done for the next month, then I can totally spend the following 2 weeks just working on my art project and it will be so much better. To a gamer it sounds logical right. I mean you can’t really expect me to get everything done that I want and it all be as good as I want all within a time frame. I mean come on that would be impossible unless I didn’t sleep and/or did a bunch of meth. And we all know that neither of those solutions is very healthy, so obviously I can just put it off until I have time too. No! For some reason in this world things have time limits and dead lines. I cannot just turn in my project when I feel like it. I’m going to get points off, or more then likely fail. This is the dilemma of gamespace. The algorithm is different. Time is liner. Sometimes you have to make a decision between one opportunity and the other. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. This is the gamer’s plight, we actually have to make some decisions as to how we spend our time. Also we have to live with the consequences of our actions. As gamers we get used to being able to go back and make a different decision to see if we made the right one, or to try again and do it better. Seems like a great idea in the cave. However, the same rules don’t apply in gamespace. You cannot redo it. Not only are we stuck with knowing that we could have done it better, but what is worse is sometimes we are stuck not knowing.