Restart. It's a concept as old as video games themselves. It's simple and it's integral to how we play games as a form of escapism. For some of us that means to simply pass time and for others to help forget an awful day at work, school or some other form of social stress. When we play, we empathize almost entirely with the character we play as, almost, but not quite. Restart is something we can do in games at almost any time under any condition in a game but it's not something we can do in real life. Consequence is a real thing in and of itself. Consequence exists because we can't control it in real life, time can't be reversed nor can our decisions. This makes everything we do or touch or say permanent and eternal. That's not quite the case with video games, though. Consequence does not exist in games, at least not in a sense that can in any way relate to real life. Everything in a game can be exploited. By the A.I. or the environment or by simply resetting the checkpoint, consequence just becomes circumstance.
Every game, in a sense, is linear in that free will simply does not exist. Even in an open game like Skyrim or Minecraft you are limited as a player by what you are allowed to do within the game engine. Mass Effect, a series that spread the galaxy and touched many of our hearts, ended in just one of three ways because of circumstance. Shepard could be evil or good but, no matter what, was thrown into the battle of the Reapers. Because of this circumstance that exists in every game we, as players, cannot fully empathize with our avatars in the video game space. There is a hole that will never be filled...But what if we could remove consequence from our own lives? What if restart or reset checkpoint did exist in the real world? How would we live like this or would we even be able to? On the surface it sounds great, all your problems effectively solved. Without consequence things would be great…right?
To start, let's hypothetically say that only YOU have the power to restart, because if everyone had the power then time would never progress past a single Planck length. So for the sake of hypothesis this wonderful power is yours and yours alone, much like it is in gaming. For most people this wouldn't change their lives all that much, not at first anyway. Most of us have a natural implication towards behaving 'right,' and, for the most part, we believe that we are good at heart and this is largely true. Short of a few exceptions, humanity is a prime example of what cooperation is capable of. In fact, it is the only example of true, selfless cooperation so in terms of biological life as we know it, we humans have a relative strength in simply behaving well to each other, it's a big reason we've developed society so well. This behavior would change, however, for someone with the power to alter their fate. Over time, everyone becomes an obstacle to goal instead of a person, and when a simple social interaction doesn't go exactly how you want it to it becomes'their' fault, even though you are the one in control. We've all had this experience. You know that one enemy that drives you crazy for some reason, the unfair boss fight that breaks you or the decision at the end of a game that you spend minutes contemplating over. Rarely do we admit that it is our fault as the player that these things hindered our progress because we like to be in control and when control is broken or removed we gamers tend to react poorly in that we don't quite understand losing control in an environment in which we have full control. Losing control is so common and general that we refer to the panic we feel from it as Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
If you had the ability to be perfect, if you could not make mistakes because of the fact that you could retroactively fix all of them, would you even have anxiety for anything? Well, this question is hard to answer because it's largely based in personality, which is something we still don't quite understand. Personality is unique to you and there is no way that we, through any means of science, could replicate you. Only you are you and only you CAN be you. So really, the weight of fate weighs on the personality it is given to, right? For a given amount of time that would be correct until you change and given your control over time, you will have an eternity to change. Think for a second on your childhood. Remember all those things you used to like that seem silly now? How many years ago was that? 10? 5? If you had control of time, being able to reset certain points to your liking that is, then your age is conceivably infinite and if that's the case then your personality would be so variable that there are also an infinite number of ways for it to travel. This eventually makes you NOT you, in however long you decide your lifetime to be. Given an infinite amount of time your psyche would depart so far that you would not be able to recognize what ‘is’ compared to what ‘was.’ If you had impunity to everything then how long until you just take what you want as opposed to earn it, or how long until you first kill someone in your way? You will be able to do it and you will be able to do so without any penalty and chances are that, given an infinite amount of time, you’d eventually succumb to that temptation. At some point the lives of others would be meaningless if you could just reverse your actions and living through eons with those memories would only exacerbate that reaction. At some point it’s very likely that you’d become so detached from “normal” people that you couldn’t relate to them, their experiences or their personalities. To you they would just be pawns in your game of life, tools to your goals and means to your ends. To you pedestrians would be equal to those in Grand Theft Auto IV only you’re not Niko since Niko himself doesn’t control the restart function or even access the pause menu. That’s you, the player, doing that.
If there were an outside force in our world with the power to reset segments of time we would not have the capacity to realize it. Time isn’t yet a force or energy that we can monitor or measure (remember that clocks don’t measure “time” itself they just measure Earth’s rotation in 24 parts). The best we would even be able to do is simply believe that such a presence exists. So what would video game characters, if given (or if you like think that they already have) sentience, think of us, their controllers? Being that we have no way to interact with them and our only communication is through direct manipulation they would likely be just as unaware of us as we would be to an equal force in our realm. At best, they could believe a higher power is controlling their fate, guiding them to some ultimate goal but for the most part they would completely ignorant to our influence, unable to comprehend our actions or motives and they would live blissfully ignorant that they are, for the most part, toys for our enjoyment.
Let's just hope that we don't have that outside force on us but, sadly, that's about all we can do. Have fun with that thought.