Imagine a video game that simulates an entire world. This shouldn’t be hard to imagine because today we have video games that simulate whole cities. Take for example San Andreas, that’s a pretty damn good simulation of a city, aesthetically speaking anyhow. The further time progresses, the better the simulations will become.
If you are in a simulation right now, it’s probably a video game. Or maybe in the future, we will advance beyond video games, and use simulations for educational or learning experiences. If you’ve ever noticed in some of these advanced open-world games time tends to move much faster than in reality. Let us take for an example GTA V, in two minutes of game play, one hour elapses in game time. So it takes 48 minutes for a full 24 hours to elapse in the game.
Allot of games now, will allow you to choose your own way to a predetermined outcome. If done well, it doesn’t feel so much like a predetermined outcome. It feels more organic, it gives the illusion of choice. Ultimately, no matter what you choose you’ll get to one of these predetermined places as you play the game. If you can imagine playing a choose-your-own-adventure style game from the future. Only it’s more than that, it’s also a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game).
If this is the case, you’d have to come to the conclusion that many people will be making many different choices. In order to accommodate these choices, as the game moves forward, let’s just say certain choices will divert players to different servers, and each server is dedicated to the story surrounding the choice that was made. So just imagine the broad spectrum of choices that this game gives you. It starts with one choice and ends with maybe 50, to give the game a unique feel when it’s over.
However to get people to that last choice, the gates have to be narrowed. Once the gates are narrowed, it starts merging different servers together. The only problem is people from each one of these servers which are now being grouped together. They are going to have different memories, especially if they start talking to each other about past events. If they didn’t know it was a simulation they’d probably be at each other’s throats about what really happened. (Sound familiar?)
So I guess the best way to think about it is a choose-your-own-way Stephen King novel that was turned into a video game. Lots of things happen in a Stephen King Novel, allot of it is relatively unimportant. Yet there are key important elements that make the story move forward. In the end the choices will have to be narrowed down to bring everyone back on track for one of the 50 disturbing endings.
If you merge two servers together where a fact is a fact, Mandela is dead for example. How or when it came to be, may be less important than moving the story forward, from the developer's perspective.