When I began playing 12 Minutes, I was of course deeply interested in the story and the narrative and the mechanic of a time loop that you are not in control of. As i thought more and more about it, I began to think about the artificial time loops that I have put myself in when I play difficult games. If I were to play a game on the hardest difficulty, I will surely die many many many times before I beat the game. In some games, I have played the same mission at least 100 times before winning, where I felt as though I was stuck in one place with no means of getting out, akin to the situation of Phil Connors in Groundhog Day.
Now, certainly this is a bit different than a time loop because I am choosing to pick up the controller and continue to play the game, whereas most people in a time loop do not have the option to leave the time loop. Is it this lack of choice that defines the time loop? Being forced to find the correct means of escaping the loop seems to be a bit different than me just being forced to get better at the game so I can get to the next mission. It would appear then, that in order for something to be truly defined as a time loop, the person stuck in the loop must be both put in the loop accidentally (or not of their own free will), and does not know how to leave the loop. Is this enough of a definition? Would a time loop be nearly as horrifying if we knew how to get out of it, or knew how ‘long’ the time loop would last? Is it merely the uncertainty about how to break the loop that makes the loop so scary, or is it the mundaneness and monotony of only have a finite amount of time (whether is be 12 minutes, 24 hours, or any number in between) that horrifies us?
