Alternate History in games

Games like Bioshock: Infinite and the Fallout series present alternate histories (alt-history) in a context of a playable game space.  A city like Rapture would be difficult if not impossible to achieve with modern science and engineering, and the floating city of Columbia using quantum forces also fits that bill, and the ability of mankind to make such things in that series points to a very early divergence in the scientific realm from our history.  While Bioshock: Infinite misses the point of quantum changes yielding an extremely large number of time frames that make up many divergent time lines, it at least gets a good setting in place in which to stage the game.  Results do matter in game play, and if the premise of Infinite realities is to be upheld, then a set and single ending in a single reality can only be seen as 'a' outcome not 'the' outcome.

The Fallout franchise takes place in an alt-history setting in which the post-WWII world differed dramatically from our own.  The transistor was invented much later, atomic power was researched and utilized far differently than in our history, and the culture of the US (if not the world) became one enamored with the 1950's to the point where that era's outlook didn't end.  The dividing point or point of divergence between that history and our own has been one that community members have approached multiple times.  The music heard in the games since Fallout 3 is often used as a divergence pointer that would indicate when, exactly, the Fallout series diverged from our own.  Unlike the Bioshock series that just takes the super-science and setting for granted, the Fallout franchise has an expanded setting from its early days at Black Isle and Interplay when it moved to Bethesda Game Studios (under Bethesda Softworks, the publisher, and Zenimax the holding company for Bethesda Softworks and other concerns).  One thing of note is the lack of Martin Luther King as a historical figure, or even a mention of racial discrimination in the post-WWII America as a problem.  Lack of evidence isn't much to go by, of course, yet in the post-war era there has been no discrimination showing up (as such, though bigotry against sentient ghouls and peaceful super mutants does happen and is real in that timeline).  Part of this is to appeal to a wider gaming audience, so that no one feels that there is a virtue or hurdle to playing any type of protagonist via racial stereotyping.

As a non-problem this can be seen as a pointer to when some major changes happened in the US, and that means that the era of Progressive racial division and bigotry that was inculcated in the federal government by Woodrow Wilson didn't happen.  To get to that point requires a different formulation of post-Civil War America, and how that happened is something that is difficult to imagine.  Was Abraham Lincoln assassinated?  If so did it happen as it did in our timeline or due to other causes, or did he even die a natural death in or out of office?  A different reconstruction era would yield changes to the social landscape of the post-Civil War America, and a more cohesive and less bigoted society that finally comes to terms with racial differences would allow for much of the way the post-apocalypse doesn't use this very base way of determining a society.  Even among those Raider groups that are dysfunctional mentally due to lack of education or chem addiction do not resort to this (by and large) and are far more inclusive than typical prison gangs of the modern age.

With that said a change that is only seen by what is lacking is difficult to sustain as a premise.  Something that is seen or stated in the games is worth looking into, and that moves over to the realm of cross-fictional events, settings and characters.  The original Fallout and Fallout 2 were not concerned that much with what Easter Eggs (events, items or settings from other genres or 4th wall breaking indications) would mean for the series: they wanted players to have some fun and smile at nods to cultural events.  This has only expanded with Bethesda's time of ownership.  Thus the works of HP Lovecraft are incorporated, as well as Zetans the space aliens, plus a police public call box that dematerializes, and even a large lizard-like footprint in the desert indicates that Godzilla may be roaming around.  Of these the most solid evidence is for Lovecraftian mythos and Zetans, and of the two the one with the greatest impact are the concepts promulgated by H.P. Lovecraft.

In our universe (or collection of interlinked time frames) H.P. Lovecraft wrote fiction that includes beings outside the normal realm of the 'natural', then expands the 'natural' to include them and a much wider conception of universes.  Beings that have great power and actually don't care about humanity all that much and do things in their own way and time scale are fictional in our history, but a real thing in the Fallout franchise.  Thus the very first and most decided change for that franchise is the inclusion of Lovecraftian style beings which must incorporate the greater universal changes necessary for these beings to exist in the first place.  By inclusion the first deviation is not in the 1940's or 1960's or even the 1860's, but at the very start of the universe: the Fallout franchise features a universe that parallels our own, but is not based on our own history or a derivative from it.

Bioshock: Infinite tried to do quantum mechanics and decision making and failed in understanding the nature of quantum mechanics.  Simply put it is impossible for an observer to know the position and speed of a given particle at any one point of observation: you can know one or the other, but not both.  From that the actual position of something like an electron cannot be known and is represented by a cloud of possible positions around an atom.  Also included in this is that the outcomes of decisions are not preset, but depend on making a decision out of all possible decisions that can be made at any given instant.  That instant is in Planck second, the smallest possible unit of measurable time in the universe. There are 10^42 Planck seconds in a second and each of those ticks features decisions made not just locally by an individual but universally (though varying based on local conditions that change the rate of passage of time, like the singularity in a black hole).  Each of those has all possible decisions by everything happening at that one instance.  If one attempts to travel back in time, that traveler will have knowledge of all of that on a macro-scale, and such knowledge of outcomes is not allowed by quantum mechanics.  What happens then is interesting: the universe changes to ensure that your future knowledge and experience of the past will not be valid.

To take care of Booker in the past requires knowledge of it, and the moment any attempt to reach that version of the past is attempted, that past changes upon arrival to remove our future certainty.  Time is not a stream and quantum mechanics eliminates paradoxes as the very basis for prior knowledge of events that one wishes to change are removed upon arrival in an instance or frame of time that may have a number of similarities to what is expected but will have substantial deviation to ensure that the events the arrival knows about as a certainty are changed or removed entirely.  At the point of existing in that new frame of reference the universe then continues on normally from there, and there is no possible way that it can reach the future the traveler knew as quantum mechanics prevents that at the smallest possible scale.  Changes need not be radical, but they do need to be sufficient to prevent the universe the traveler came from then coming into being from the point of entry: future certainty must be removed by this new formulation of the universe.  Not only is the journey into the past one-way, but there is no way to get back to the future the traveler left.  By taking Booker into the past, the entire future where the game of Bioshock: Infinite started was automatically shunted off into a possible set of time frames that existed before the attempt to change its past.  The past that universe had can't be changed, and going back in time creates a brand new set of frames where changes happen along a separate, alternate history. Any event that is being changed will not take place in that prior history as the outcomes are known and fixed by knowledge of those events happening and what the outcomes were.

For all of the fun game play of Bioshock: Infinite, the story and plot which attempt to do a death-redemption falls flat on its face due to the misunderstanding of quantum mechanics and time itself.  The Fallout franchise has no such problems (although the Police Call Box might be one) as the stories continue into a future that is not predetermined.  And while some beings of chaos may have some way to interact with time in ways that we don't understand, they have not attempted to perform such feats in game play.  Treading forward is safe and letting the player re-play each game to get variant outcomes shows some respect to the power of player agency and player decisions: they are not futile and do make an impact on the future course of events.  The past memory of another history is left undisturbed as it is in a different time sequence of frames, and it is a sequence that cannot be reached from the moment the game starts.  What can be done is to make different decisions and see how they play out.

It should go without saying that any game that puts forward a historical framework to play in, that is a representation of past history and events, is alt-history every time it is played.  A game like Crusader Kings I and II will yield different results, different events and add some randomness into the game, all of which guarantee that it is impossible to get to our current setting.  That is much the point of such games: understanding the era they represent and having fun with the dynamics that the game developer has put into play.  In fact any game that features Earth-based humans is representing an alternate history as the actions of the player will change the course of events.

Time as presented here is not what we think it is and does not behave in a manner that is one that leads to paradoxes.  As no state of the universe we live in has a bias to outcomes (although the overwhelming presence of matter to anti-matter is one that is hard to explain) when there are probabilistic outcomes to any event then all event outcomes are possible and valid.  Once time exists with quantum mechanics at the heart of how energy works, then all possible outcomes are valid.  We do not like this way of thinking as it seemingly invalidates choices we have made in the past as other versions of ourselves made them differently, had a different life in which those questions never arose or, and this is the great and vast majority of alternatives, did not even exist at all.  It is to be remembered that effect of the observer changes quantum potential states to a probabilistic real state. 

That is the point of The Schroedinger's Cat Experiment with the 50/50 chance of the cat being alive or dead based on a probabilistic outcome: it is in both states before the box is opened.  Unfortunately for us the cat is also an observer, but the concept of having an event that has an equal probability for outcomes has those outcomes superpositioned on each other until the observer takes in the results: reality is formed by the experiment and then viewing its results.  The coin toss ends in heads or tails, with the extremely rare instance of landing in such a way as to balance on its edge also included.  The coin can also roll away, get snatched up by someone or something else in mid-air, or not be a coin at all but some other artifact that has equal event outcomes as part of its nature or not even take place at all.This is happening not just on the local scale but across the universe that has sets of clocks ticking at different rates due to the effects of gravity, distance and there being no universal clock. This is only captured at the lowest possible time division to create nested frame events that go from the sub-atomic scale all the way up to the interactive and interlinked set of universal frames that all go at different rates of time.  The universe is damned strange to say the least.

The role of alt-history in storytelling and gaming is to recognize the desires of man via human nature and posit the variety of things that we do as individuals and then shift from a known setting to a variant one.  This is done by posing a historical happening that is contrary to the known events in our history.  How well this is done depends on the strength of the creative process and the given story involved.  When historically drawn fictions are created they are a casting of 'what if...?' to yield the setting, individuals and story involved.  In the novel War and Peace we recognize that all the individuals are fictional, but they are so well drawn and respond so well to their setting that they seem to be a natural part of it.  When a writer decides to alter events and toss in time travel, the common expectation is that as time as a stream with paradoxes, which requires careful plotting and a high level of craftsmanship.  This is, perhaps, drawing the circle for alt-history too large, yet it demonstrates the point that fiction that inserts individuals who are ahistorical into a historical setting is an act of defining a set of outcomes to tell a story.  As readers we can and do applaud this, even if we recognize the concept it uses as false that does not detract from the skill and workmanship involved in the actual art, itself.

In the actual world we live in, the classic experiment of shining a single light source through two narrow slits and then observing the resulting pattern on a screen behind the slits demonstrates that light is not a particle but a wave function.  The interference pattern is hazy, not hard and well defined, and this is due to the function of a wave front impinging on both slits and having a probabilistic outcome on the screen beyond it.  If light was made of particles then there would be solid bars with no haziness around them to show where photons interfered with each other.  Waves do not offer such a clean solution and create a fuzzy pattern indicating that the interference comes from a wave function in which the energy of the photon is distributed across the entire wave front, thus the pattern is not smooth for interference as it is determined by probability.  Yet it is still possible to treat photons as particles in many circumstances for ease of calculation, but it is always to be remembered that when not tightly observed the nature of light is that of a wave.  It was not expected that probability at the quantum level would have real world effects, yet that is just the case.  When positing a change to history the knowledge of how events come out remove probability, which is something that goes against the working system of the universe which requires quantum uncertainty.  If there was certainty we would have bars of interference that were clean and crisp, and yet we do not: by knowing an outcome it is that exact outcome which cannot come about and the universe can and will change to remove it.

In game worlds with a history behind them, that is to say Lore, there is a common consensus among gamers that Lore is a necessary building block and foundation for future stories.  Lore is the history of a game world and when game developers vary from Lore and retroactively change the continuity (retcon) gamers are left asking: why was this done?  And, more to the point, expecting the game developers to offer in-game reasons and rationale for the change.  It is possible to do a retcon smoothly, which is to say that it is streamlined into game play with an appropriate reason given by in-game play.

In Bioshock: Infinite the protagonist, Booker, had participated in a known atrocity and was seeking a path to redeem himself: the atrocity did take place historically, but Booker was not a part of it in our history as our history does not feature the use of quantum mechanics to lift entire structures into the sky in the late 19th century.  Thus the event is historical, but the outcomes fictional and the event is used to show what can drive an individual to extreme activities even when adhering to a strict cultural code.  It is smoothly used and a good back-story for the character, although the player is unaware of it which is withholding information to further the game experience, but not necessarily a good thing to do.

In The Elder Scrolls universe there are various reasons given as to why we don't know the exact outcomes of prior instances of the franchise in later games that are built upon that history.  There are multiple ways this is covered, like the concept of a 'Dragon Break' that happens when an Elder Scroll is involved which causes a discontinuity in time itself.  All outcomes that the player may have gone through in a prior game are valid, yet the history of the effects are known.  In fact there can be multiple different histories covering that time period and all are valid and, even stranger, all are true to the person writing them.  Changes after those periods can be explained by what happened in the period of discontinuity of history.  When all descriptions of a time period are true there is no need for a retcon, though it can lead to some arguments about just what is and what is not canonical to the game universe

History, then, is a building foundation for any game that presents a setting that is social or has social background, even if it is just whimsical, nonsensical or never stated beyond the environment.  Alt-history for games means taking the known history that we exist with and then offering a change at some point in the past to examine future outcomes.  Games set in the future based off our history will deviate from our history the moment the game is finalized as our history will change not in the way expected by the game developers or makers.  There can still be some very interesting events that mirror our own history after the fact and we can be bewildered by them: the developers and makers were only projecting or using conjecture, they did not have foreknowledge of events in any exacting way.

As a game developer knows what an outcome of a series of events will be, it is easy to put in a character that can 'see' the future, and yet that detracts from player discovery and removes player agency.  Such characters are a slap in the face to the player, in effect telling the player that the game developer feels the need to hand-hold them in case they ever get stuck.  Characters that are vague, only see generalities and basically only see an uncertain future are perfectly fine, however, and can be used as set dressing.  Giving cryptic hints and having background dice rolling going on to give out meaningless or known information helps to increase uncertainty and requires that the player actually examine the information for themselves to determine if it is useful or not. Mysticism or other means of seeing the future should be used sparingly in RPGs or any game unless it is one centered around time travel with wide-ranging outcomes that can easily invalidate such knowledge of the future.  A set of courses are predetermined by the game designer, obviously, but that does not mean that predestinationism should be featured in game play as that treats the player as not being up to the challenge of the game, itself, which is not a good way to treat gamers.

Throughout this examination I use the concept of quantum time and the utility of having all outcomes as being valid along different paths of decision making.  While this may or may not be a valid approach it is one that removes the concept of the time travel 'paradox' by shifting to a different set of frames from the known historical route.  This means that time does not 'flow' in a given direction to a given set of ends, but branches continuously so that all ends are available, even those that make no sense at all.  In utilizing this framework it is also necessary to do a close-out on return to the quantum time frame the time traveler left as that is an intentional activity, a decision, and any attempt to return to it will not yield that point but a different set of frames where their knowledge about that world is invalidated in whole or in large part as they know too much about where they came from.  Using this mechanic there is no such thing as 'broken time' or having to 'fix events' because there is no predetermined set of ends.  Quantum observation of past time sequences will apparently 'work' though they will be ones that are variants of the actual sequences as the observer is utilizing energy of some sort to do the observation and this must be received at the other end to do the observation: the simple act of exchanging energy then requires a set of time frames where that took place and those are variants of the actual historical frame set.  No matter how close the events are to those that are known, that observed set of frames will not be the exact, same events as happened in the historical sequence: the act of observing removes uncertainty but also impinges upon the action and actors involved.

From this every single choice that can be made exists in a probabilistic state where it is not actualized for the reality you experience.  These do not go away, however, as they are equally valid states of being that require an observer to make into an actual set of contiguous time frames that create a new history.  Games that have multiple outcomes that are disparate to each other are showing how this works: the game path chosen on any particular run-through of the game is not set in stone and all of them are valid. 

For better or worse this is what Bethesda Game Studios embraced with The Elder Scrolls franchise, though it then continues on with events after a prior game to demonstrate what the generalized outcome would be given the meta-state of all possible endings.  The world is, in general, saved though how and who did it can be very much obscured due to historical overlays and probabilistic states.  It creates for some nasty lore, however, as no subset of events in any given game are canon: only the generalized ending is canon and what is written about other events is both true and false at the same time.  An actual Elder Scroll allows for seeing into the past and future, but that is different for every single viewer of each Elder Scroll.  Time changes based on the observer, just as it should, and nothing is assured.  Yet each of the Elder Scrolls and their content is valid, even those that have become 'lost' as these are artifacts of the universe not written by any hand.  While this approach may leave some players a bit unsatisfied on the actual meaning of what they accomplish, it does validate that what they do could have happened and did happen even when the wash of events is highly variant in any single instance of the game.  And the best part is that going back to replay any prior instance of a game in this universe it is still just as 'true' as all those that were done before the new game instance was released.

There are, assuredly, many ways to give this sort of accounting for probabilistic events and the universes they exist in.  If a game is created with this in mind it will then challenge the game designers to explore just what it is they are trying to present to their audience.  Bioshock: Infinite has the trappings of being in a quantum probabilistic universe, but comes to a single, set ending that the player arrives at.  All that is said and done in the game comes to a Predestined End that is intended to give a statement from the game designers about their view on human nature.  By eliminating choice they create something akin to a novel that has a directed scheme behind it.  What this does is gives the illusion of Player Agency, but any choice the player makes comes to the same outcome.  Throwing the ball or not throwing it both come to an equivalent end with little end result difference.  When doing something or not doing something is supposed to be a statement of actualized intent is turned into a meaningless choice then the moral statement of the game is one of the player's choice really not mattering all that much.

A good game can be made out of what happens when the player ISN'T the obvious hero or world-saving individual, as in the case of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.   And it even has multiple, meaningful endings for the protagonist based on how they treated the individual who is that world-saving entity.  It is such a good game that players forget that they are only the temporary hero of the day before going on to their next job and that they aren't the actual hero of the game.  It should be noted that the major choices for the protagonist involve personal choices, and that those choices are generally forced on the player.  You can have Yen or Triss or neither, but you can't have both, and you can't just chuck it all and forswear dealing with sorceresses on a romantic level and decide that a few of the regular human women might just be more compatible even with their limited lifespan.  What you can't do is just as telling as what you can do in a game and every choice you can't make is one removed to lower the time to create the game, itself.  No game can offer an infinite set of plots, paths and so on as they are restricted to setting and the amount of time that can be invested in them as games.  With that being said it is possible to put in probabilistic events and activities to simulate these choices, utilizing a set of event chains that can remold the world's social setting on each new instance of playing a game.  When the number of event chains is increased and have side-effects on others, then a game world begins to expand Player Agency and validating choice.  These are also hard games to make, but they do exist, just not in the RPG genre.