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Steins;Gate, Part Two
Sep. 20th, 2015 09:01 amI stayed up until three in the morning playing this game. I then went to sleep and had dreams about it all night.
Steins;Gate is incredibly well written. I usually hate stories about time travel, but this one is really good. The character development is so engaging that I've been taking notes.
There are two concepts from the game that have stuck with me.
The first is the 2008-era 2channel slang term "chuunibyou," or "eighth grade sickness," which refers to the sort of delusions of grandeur that are typical of middle school kids who read and watch way too much fantasy and sci-fi. I've seen the word before, but I didn't entirely understand what it meant until playing this game. I definitely had a bad case of this in... ninth grade, actually.
The funny thing is that, even though I didn't have any geek friends in middle school, I am surrounded by people like this in my adult life. I'll meet someone at a bar, and he'll be like, "I'm with such-and-such think tank, which informs national policy and is very important," and I am like, "Bro you are living in a fantasy world of your own creation, stop it."
The second is "convergence," or the idea that multiple parallel or alternate timelines will come together at certain points. For what it's worth, this is not determination, as the point of convergence can be manipulated by various factors. I took a class on quantum mechanics in college, and the math (which really isn't that different from high school level Calculus) behind this makes a lot of sense and is fairly easy to understand. What bothers me most about time travel stories is the way they tend to dwell on paradoxes, which mathematically do not exist. Steins;Gate is the first time travel story I've encountered that makes a compelling argument concerning how convergence works and how it might be experienced.
Welcome to Night Vale also touches on this concept. I've been joking with my Night Vale friends that "convergence" is how I excuse conflicting memories regarding drunken escapades...
...but the chuunibyou part of me enjoys the fantasy that I might actually have memories from slightly different timelines. I guess I'm like one of those vampires from Twilight in that I am fourteen years old and have been fourteen years old for a very long time.
Steins;Gate is incredibly well written. I usually hate stories about time travel, but this one is really good. The character development is so engaging that I've been taking notes.
There are two concepts from the game that have stuck with me.
The first is the 2008-era 2channel slang term "chuunibyou," or "eighth grade sickness," which refers to the sort of delusions of grandeur that are typical of middle school kids who read and watch way too much fantasy and sci-fi. I've seen the word before, but I didn't entirely understand what it meant until playing this game. I definitely had a bad case of this in... ninth grade, actually.
The funny thing is that, even though I didn't have any geek friends in middle school, I am surrounded by people like this in my adult life. I'll meet someone at a bar, and he'll be like, "I'm with such-and-such think tank, which informs national policy and is very important," and I am like, "Bro you are living in a fantasy world of your own creation, stop it."
The second is "convergence," or the idea that multiple parallel or alternate timelines will come together at certain points. For what it's worth, this is not determination, as the point of convergence can be manipulated by various factors. I took a class on quantum mechanics in college, and the math (which really isn't that different from high school level Calculus) behind this makes a lot of sense and is fairly easy to understand. What bothers me most about time travel stories is the way they tend to dwell on paradoxes, which mathematically do not exist. Steins;Gate is the first time travel story I've encountered that makes a compelling argument concerning how convergence works and how it might be experienced.
Welcome to Night Vale also touches on this concept. I've been joking with my Night Vale friends that "convergence" is how I excuse conflicting memories regarding drunken escapades...
...but the chuunibyou part of me enjoys the fantasy that I might actually have memories from slightly different timelines. I guess I'm like one of those vampires from Twilight in that I am fourteen years old and have been fourteen years old for a very long time.
