It’s late at night on a Sunday evening, which means it’s time for yet another of my ill-conceived, deliberately provocative overgeneralizations. Today’s topic: ‘time loop media’ is not only a genre, but one that can only be properly experienced through the medium of video games. This is because video games wield a very particular tool — the implicit mechanic of uncertainty — that is essential in conveying the proper experience of time-loop-ness. Got it? Cool, here’s why.
For lecture on Thursday, I — no, not I, everyone, surely this was a universal experience — was placed in the unfortunate position of experiencing it with (a) a miniature clock strapped to everyone’s right arm, and (b) other near-future commitments everyone had to make. When everyone watched Groundhog Day, every time everyone so much as lightly bumped the mouse, a countdown timer until the movie’s end would appear in the lower right-hand corner. This sense of pre-ordained, unavoidable ending is antithetical to the spirit of the time loop and effectively ruins the immersion of both theatrical and cinematic time loop narratives.
Ashlyn has been adamantly insisting all week that time loop games don’t have unique genre-specific mechanics. While this may or may not be true (yes this is a cop-out), video games as a whole certainly have unique medium-wide features, and it happens that not knowing (indeed, being unable to know even if you wanted to) when a piece of media will end is essential to the experience of a time loop narrative. Hence, video game time loops are the only true time loops. All other time loops are false prophets. Charlatans, I tell you!
Okay, maybe I have a horse in this race. Truth is, I enjoyed being in that time loop with Bill Murray, and going through the motions of starting class over and over again as our lecturers did. I made the world of lecture my own, embellishing it with frankly stupid gags, and repeating my mannerisms. It’s not so surprising, then, to learn that I didn’t want the loops to end in either case. Maybe eventually I would’ve, but I didn’t yet. So I fixated my attention on the ticking clock — how much longer will this last? — and the act of doing that undermined my experience.
In a video game — and only in a video game, really — that constraint is gone. Nobody knows when the loop will end, certainly not the player. This allows video games to more effectively convey pretty much all facets of time loop narratives: both the freedom and joy and the horror and dread.
I think this is a really interesting take, and it reminds me of the arguments made about the horror genre being a sort of exercise in fear — and maybe one of the only ways to experience intense fear “safely” (I thought about this argument a lot for/in my video essay). Perhaps, along with your argument that games allow for truer forms of time loops because of the inherent uncertainty built into them, they also allow for a more (or perhaps the most) realistic experience of a time loop because of the fact that they are programmed. In videogames, the player, at least virtually, can be made to repeat an action or relive the beginning of a day or a span of twelve minutes exactly as they did previously (within the game). This is not the case for films because a viewer does not experience a film in the same way that a player experiences and interacts with a game, and this is not the case for time loops played out in reality (as the one on Thursday) because it is (at this point in time) impossible to perfectly replicate a real-word environment and the mannerisms, the speech, and the actions of the people that occupy it.
This is a very interesting perspective, and I think I would like to provide some friendly counter-points to your blog post. The idea that watching a time-loop movie, being that it is within a time constraint, doesn’t provide you with the same ideas of what it means to really live in a time loop is true, but I seemed to look at Groundhog Day in a different light. As Groundhog Day isn’t first-person perspective, but instead tells the story of Phil, the weatherman, it isn’t necessary that we as an audience feel like we are also stuck in this time loop. In fact, we merely need to feel like Phil is stuck in this time loop (and within the realm of the movie, he definitely could be for forever, the ending is indeterminable throughout the duration of the movie) and the characters allow us to empathize with the possibility of us being stuck in a time loop rather than us being in the loop outright. That’s why video games depicting time-loops are way more accurate, because it is actually you experiencing the time-loop without an indeterminate ending. (I just read the previous comment and realized we talked about very similar things, oops)
Great blog post, thanks for sharing!