#okay gonna talk about the Schrödinger's cat sidenote for a second here cuz ive got some Thoughts now

[rathayibacter]

thinking a lot about how IMMORTALITY squeezes a ton of meaning out of being a game. like, theoretically, you could get all the same themes and significance from watching all the footage once or twice, in order, all the way through. after all, that's kinda how previous game by the studio Her Story was: there was a full picture, and it was waiting for you to put all the pieces together so you could see it.

but IMMORTALITY's a bit different. the thing that you perceive to be the big mystery actually isn't that hard to solve, and is really just a couple stops to check off along your much longer journey of understanding. and so much of that is thanks to the specific mechanic of how you uncover new clips. you click on something in the shot, and you're brought to another shot with the same object, or a shot related to that object, or a shot thematically linked to that object. you're navigating via the Kuleshov Effect, and that means you're constantly, inevitably creating meaning through how you interact with the game.

like, super minor, non-spoiler-y example: there's a set of scenes connected by a cat. you see a cat in one scene and click on it, and you're taken to the rehearsal of a scene that will have that cat, but they aren't using the animal actor yet cuz it's just rehearsal. you're brought to the moment that an actress is leaning down and petting where the cat will be, at some point, later. it's a cute little move by the game designers, cuz yeah, these scenes are connected by that cat you clicked on, but not literally, only in the final product.

but then i clicked on the space where the cat would be, and it took me to another scene, once again with the actual cat. and isn't that funny. isn't that interesting. of course it makes sense in hindsight, right? we're traveling via cinematic language, and in rehearsal there's no difference between a cat and an empty bit of floor where the script tells you a cat will be. you gotta treat that empty space like there's a cat there, or else the whole thing falls apart.

this isn't a significant moment in the game. none of the three clips involved really matter that much. but like, at the same time, by connecting these three pretty empty filler scenes in this way, by taking you from a cat to a not-cat to a cat, and telling you that they're all equivalent, the game is making a pretty strong thematic declaration, one that would be completely absent if you'd just watched these three clips separately, in the parts of the movie that they belong in.

not every player is gonna read that deeply into this moment, just as i havent read this deeply into most of the other connections ive made in my so-far 12 and a half hours with the game. some folks will read something completely different into it (there's a pretty fun discussion you could have about it happening in 2 Of Everything specifically, playing into the mistaken identities plot via Schrödinger's cat). some players won't even find that connection at all! there's enough redundancy in everything here that nobody needs to find every possible point of interaction to finish or understand the game. and all that's kinda the beauty of it, right? there's a million ways to examine this text, to work your way through the enormous tower of information you're presented with, and every single one of those paths is gonna create unique meaning. they've taken the process of interpreting art and made it a game mechanic, without hamstringing the actual act of interpretation in the process. the game says "hey, in order to see everything, you're gonna have to make connections," but never forces your hand in what those connections have to be. it's absolutely fascinating.