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mc776(Intro post here)
We see two distinct time travel abilities in the game: focus and rewind. Max's questions of alternate realities mostly come up in the context of a focus, though there is no inherent reason why this cannot be a concern for rewinds as well.
It is possibe that Max creates a new alternate reality with each press by the player of either rewind button - or even every frame of a continuous rewind. This has consequences that are quite unfortunate, and I dare to submit both therefore and despite, unlikely.
Consequences of the model versus meaning of the story
As discussed in the last post, I am basing this analysis on an assumption that the folks at Dontnod are not intending to create an utterly, irredeemably bleak work the core message of which is that all endeavour to avoid or mitigate suffering will only multiply it.
If each rewind were to create a new timeline, assuming the player is playing for the first time and does not already know where the hammer is, we finish the first challenge with at least 3-5 timelines where Chloe is shot in the bathroom (including the very first one that can't be avoided; double these numbers for anyone who didn't immediately catch that anything Max has picked up isn't put back where it was in a rewind). This would mean that basic fairness would require choosing Bae, because we already have several Bay endings where all those not-Chloes are living in their intact Arcadiae happily(???) ever after, while the clifftop would be Chloe's first chance to die (hopefully many, many years later) having reconciled with Max.
But also consider:
All of whom would still have died those miserable deaths even if you were to choose the Bay ending.
The way I get the thousands of dead Kates is based on a theory that the time-freeze is actually a pulsing pattern of tiny, rapid unconscious rewinds. If we assume it takes 3 minutes of Max's time to get up to the roof, and 30 micro-rewinds per second each of which branches off into an alternate reality, that's 5,400 worlds where Kate killed herself with no one present to intervene. The problem with this is that it fails to account for Max immediately rewinding after each "fail" branch and increasing the number of worlds exponentially again. Assuming these retries are not instantaneous (which would mean an infinite number of worlds are being recursively created at each rewind, micro or otherwise) each rewind to stop something Max cannot bear to allow will end up creating at least one world where Max has exhausted her resources and is no longer in a position to prevent the unacceptable event.
I don't think this is what anyone responsible for this game intended to model.
According to the directors' commentary the game is designed to encourage the player to experiment and rewind at leisure. The commentary contains nothing that even begins to suggest that this is intended as a Spec Ops: The Line-style setup to shame the player for making everything immeasurably worse by doing exactly what was required of them to advance the story - at least not without the "out" provided by the Bay Ending. (And of course, at minimum, the ventrally-blue, definitely-not-an-invasive-Morpho spirit butterfly at the coffin is an unequivocal refutation of any "you were hallucinating the whole time" interpretation.)
Consequences of the model versus Max's intuitions of what is going on
I am assuming that Max is subconsciously receiving some extrasensory insight into the nature of her powers. The clifftop scene suggests that at least Chloe has received something of this sort by that point, just to establish that going back and refusing to save her life would in fact stop the storm (and not, say, another storm hitting Seattle instead, or Nathan being disbelieved as a delusional psychotic and Jefferson giving Max the Dark Room treatment while David is too busy mourning Chloe's loss to intervene, all the baddies being caught but the storm coming anyway, everything happening as planned but David getting shot in the spine during the raid, etc., following the pattern of the other photo jumps).
By the time Max steps out into the front of the school in Episode 1 she's already commenting on the ambiguity of whether Nathan could rightly be said to have in any way really shot Chloe. However, she only references a single alternate timeline where he did, whereas the encounter is balanced with the expectation that the player will need to rewind at least once.
It is of note that the very first, involuntary rewind which creates this apparent alternate timeline:
In these respects it almost resembles a focus, except everything else (including its permanent, unbound nature once the travel is complete) identifying it as a rewind.
If too many people are left dead in the game, Max will comment about seeing too much death when Jefferson dies. This does not happen if you just, say, see David getting killed over and over again due to incompetent (or morbidly curious) playing of the rescue.
In a playthrough where David had killed Jefferson and I rewound to lie to him instead, Max's journal only has a comment on the final decision. Killing Jefferson is presented purely as a counterfactual what-if, and she never even tells Chloe about how David (before the rewind) actually broke when hearing of her death.
Conversely, Max does record Principal Wells catching her trying to leave the dorm and her observations of him in doing so. But the main thrust of this paragraph is to note her having seen a different side of him, whereas David was at all times assumed to be capable of both lethal violence and extrapolating the worst of a situation. (Note also that this encounter is hard-coded to require a rewind - you get caught even if you run straight for the exit as soon as the scene starts - and once you've succeeded the area in front of Principal Wells is treated as out-of-bounds, so the last 3 events of the scene are always 1 rewind, sneak past, escape, in that order.)
You are never given an option to rewind immediately after you've successfully saved Max's, Chloe's or David's life. Not even to relive the catharsis of succeeding, it's just you've done it, it's done, move on. This means the metagame specifically prohibits the one thing you can do to make the diegetic reality as a whole better by spamming rewinds to ensure that the maximum number of iterations of people-you're-supposed-to-care-about do not suffer a horrific death under your watch. Arguably Max simply has no desire to relive such traumatic moments any more than necessary to get the desired result, but that also means she has no intuitive feeling that this might even be a possibly good idea.
Similarly, Max never rewinds any positive experience for Chloe's or anyone else's benefit except her own. Only her own memory being immune to being reversed, this is compatible with single-timeline thinking as only her experiences would actually add up if repeated using rewind.
Consequences of the model versus clues within the game itself
If rewinds had such devastating consequences, we should be expecting some kind of penalty for each rewind. Instead, Max is consistently penalized more for longer rewinds rather than numerous smaller ones, which is consistent with it being portrayed at all times as being merely a stress on her body.
There is no Steam achievement associated with completing any task without rewinding, and the game's own stats do nothing to track your rewinds. Rescuing Chloe from Nathan (theoretically possible but I can't do it, might be easier on a gamepad) or the train (trivially easy once you've memorized the steps) without any rewinds has no consequences beyond bragging rights.
Continuity: item fetch puzzles
Imagine entering a room and picking up a key from a table. Now imagine travelling across time and probabilistic space, taking with you all objects on your person, and enter an alternate universe, identical to your own, but a minute before you had come in and picked up that key. All common sense should suggest that you should have the original key you took in hand, and another key, the one from this new alternate universe, on the table untouched. In fact, another you should be walking in any minute now to take it...
This is not what we see in LiS. Instead, you pick up the key, then cause time to flow in reverse for everything that isn't you or the key (or anything else on your person, in the same time-bubble that keeps this from happening). Once you stop rewinding time resumes flowing normally, but the table no longer has a key on it, while the key you took remains on your person. The only coherent inference is that the key that is missing in this post-rewind universe is one and the same as the key that you have - and that "other you" has already shown up, in the form of you. The corollary is, of course, that the key that you took, you had taken from this universe, and all this time we have been dealing with the object permanence of a single object within a single universe.
Extending this logic to the very first involuntary rewind, we don't have any foreign objects being preserved but we do have Max's consciousness and memory - but at no point are we given any candidate entity for an "alternative Max" this early in the game. It can't possibly be the tornado vision since the event being rewound from predates the tornado so no tornado itself would have been in "either" Max's experience anyway. Everything points to the same scenario as the keys, but this time only with Max's memory and consciousness and the memory of new experiences instead of the additional physical displacement.
Symbolism: why "rewind"?
The alternative-universe model makes even less sense on a symbolic level if we take the rewind image more literally - or rather more strongly metaphorically. To rewind and continue with alterations is clearly evocative of recording on a cassette tape - a technology we see Max and Chloe using frequently in their pirate years in BtS, in line with the game's relentless millennial technostalgia generally. Once you've overwritten that section of tape, what had been there before no longer exists - the entirety of the medium it was on now only bears the marks of what you have done just now in the revision.
(I have heard some tapes may continue to have some residual data from whatever you've overwritten, and the sounds from the previous recording may bleed into the new one. But the point of the analogy still stands: the residual data is on the same tape as the changes, not on an old discarded copy while the revised new copy is clean of it, and in the case of LiS we do see some persistent old data - wholly contained in Max's time-bubble and clearly accessible to and inseparable from the world of the revised timeline.)
Given the concerns about wearing out tapes, and applying them to this analogy, Max's overall concerns about breaking time take on a whole new context - but not one that has much to do with splintering alternate realities.
Conclusion
Everything about the way the story is written presupposes that no real alternate universes are created by the rewind, although at least one instance of it is mildly suggestive of such a creation in a manner similar to focus - which shall be dealt with in the next entry.
We see two distinct time travel abilities in the game: focus and rewind. Max's questions of alternate realities mostly come up in the context of a focus, though there is no inherent reason why this cannot be a concern for rewinds as well.
It is possibe that Max creates a new alternate reality with each press by the player of either rewind button - or even every frame of a continuous rewind. This has consequences that are quite unfortunate, and I dare to submit both therefore and despite, unlikely.
Consequences of the model versus meaning of the story
As discussed in the last post, I am basing this analysis on an assumption that the folks at Dontnod are not intending to create an utterly, irredeemably bleak work the core message of which is that all endeavour to avoid or mitigate suffering will only multiply it.
If each rewind were to create a new timeline, assuming the player is playing for the first time and does not already know where the hammer is, we finish the first challenge with at least 3-5 timelines where Chloe is shot in the bathroom (including the very first one that can't be avoided; double these numbers for anyone who didn't immediately catch that anything Max has picked up isn't put back where it was in a rewind). This would mean that basic fairness would require choosing Bae, because we already have several Bay endings where all those not-Chloes are living in their intact Arcadiae happily(???) ever after, while the clifftop would be Chloe's first chance to die (hopefully many, many years later) having reconciled with Max.
But also consider:
- All the time you spent fussing around with bottles and guns and tables would mean a large number of dead Davids and Maxes (and Chloes and Nathans for that matter).
- Depending on how you understand the nature of the never-repeated, never-explained time freeze, this can be anywhere between three and thousands of dead Kates.
All of whom would still have died those miserable deaths even if you were to choose the Bay ending.
The way I get the thousands of dead Kates is based on a theory that the time-freeze is actually a pulsing pattern of tiny, rapid unconscious rewinds. If we assume it takes 3 minutes of Max's time to get up to the roof, and 30 micro-rewinds per second each of which branches off into an alternate reality, that's 5,400 worlds where Kate killed herself with no one present to intervene. The problem with this is that it fails to account for Max immediately rewinding after each "fail" branch and increasing the number of worlds exponentially again. Assuming these retries are not instantaneous (which would mean an infinite number of worlds are being recursively created at each rewind, micro or otherwise) each rewind to stop something Max cannot bear to allow will end up creating at least one world where Max has exhausted her resources and is no longer in a position to prevent the unacceptable event.
I don't think this is what anyone responsible for this game intended to model.
According to the directors' commentary the game is designed to encourage the player to experiment and rewind at leisure. The commentary contains nothing that even begins to suggest that this is intended as a Spec Ops: The Line-style setup to shame the player for making everything immeasurably worse by doing exactly what was required of them to advance the story - at least not without the "out" provided by the Bay Ending. (And of course, at minimum, the ventrally-blue, definitely-not-an-invasive-Morpho spirit butterfly at the coffin is an unequivocal refutation of any "you were hallucinating the whole time" interpretation.)
Consequences of the model versus Max's intuitions of what is going on
I am assuming that Max is subconsciously receiving some extrasensory insight into the nature of her powers. The clifftop scene suggests that at least Chloe has received something of this sort by that point, just to establish that going back and refusing to save her life would in fact stop the storm (and not, say, another storm hitting Seattle instead, or Nathan being disbelieved as a delusional psychotic and Jefferson giving Max the Dark Room treatment while David is too busy mourning Chloe's loss to intervene, all the baddies being caught but the storm coming anyway, everything happening as planned but David getting shot in the spine during the raid, etc., following the pattern of the other photo jumps).
By the time Max steps out into the front of the school in Episode 1 she's already commenting on the ambiguity of whether Nathan could rightly be said to have in any way really shot Chloe. However, she only references a single alternate timeline where he did, whereas the encounter is balanced with the expectation that the player will need to rewind at least once.
It is of note that the very first, involuntary rewind which creates this apparent alternate timeline:
- goes much further back than Max's rewind power usually allows;
- does not preserve anything other than Max's memory, unlike the usual protective "bubble" preserving everything on her person; and
- does not show the entire rewind, instead cutting right back to the classroom after a fraction of a second establishing the backwards movement.
In these respects it almost resembles a focus, except everything else (including its permanent, unbound nature once the travel is complete) identifying it as a rewind.
If too many people are left dead in the game, Max will comment about seeing too much death when Jefferson dies. This does not happen if you just, say, see David getting killed over and over again due to incompetent (or morbidly curious) playing of the rescue.
In a playthrough where David had killed Jefferson and I rewound to lie to him instead, Max's journal only has a comment on the final decision. Killing Jefferson is presented purely as a counterfactual what-if, and she never even tells Chloe about how David (before the rewind) actually broke when hearing of her death.
Conversely, Max does record Principal Wells catching her trying to leave the dorm and her observations of him in doing so. But the main thrust of this paragraph is to note her having seen a different side of him, whereas David was at all times assumed to be capable of both lethal violence and extrapolating the worst of a situation. (Note also that this encounter is hard-coded to require a rewind - you get caught even if you run straight for the exit as soon as the scene starts - and once you've succeeded the area in front of Principal Wells is treated as out-of-bounds, so the last 3 events of the scene are always 1 rewind, sneak past, escape, in that order.)
You are never given an option to rewind immediately after you've successfully saved Max's, Chloe's or David's life. Not even to relive the catharsis of succeeding, it's just you've done it, it's done, move on. This means the metagame specifically prohibits the one thing you can do to make the diegetic reality as a whole better by spamming rewinds to ensure that the maximum number of iterations of people-you're-supposed-to-care-about do not suffer a horrific death under your watch. Arguably Max simply has no desire to relive such traumatic moments any more than necessary to get the desired result, but that also means she has no intuitive feeling that this might even be a possibly good idea.
Similarly, Max never rewinds any positive experience for Chloe's or anyone else's benefit except her own. Only her own memory being immune to being reversed, this is compatible with single-timeline thinking as only her experiences would actually add up if repeated using rewind.
Consequences of the model versus clues within the game itself
If rewinds had such devastating consequences, we should be expecting some kind of penalty for each rewind. Instead, Max is consistently penalized more for longer rewinds rather than numerous smaller ones, which is consistent with it being portrayed at all times as being merely a stress on her body.
There is no Steam achievement associated with completing any task without rewinding, and the game's own stats do nothing to track your rewinds. Rescuing Chloe from Nathan (theoretically possible but I can't do it, might be easier on a gamepad) or the train (trivially easy once you've memorized the steps) without any rewinds has no consequences beyond bragging rights.
Continuity: item fetch puzzles
Imagine entering a room and picking up a key from a table. Now imagine travelling across time and probabilistic space, taking with you all objects on your person, and enter an alternate universe, identical to your own, but a minute before you had come in and picked up that key. All common sense should suggest that you should have the original key you took in hand, and another key, the one from this new alternate universe, on the table untouched. In fact, another you should be walking in any minute now to take it...
This is not what we see in LiS. Instead, you pick up the key, then cause time to flow in reverse for everything that isn't you or the key (or anything else on your person, in the same time-bubble that keeps this from happening). Once you stop rewinding time resumes flowing normally, but the table no longer has a key on it, while the key you took remains on your person. The only coherent inference is that the key that is missing in this post-rewind universe is one and the same as the key that you have - and that "other you" has already shown up, in the form of you. The corollary is, of course, that the key that you took, you had taken from this universe, and all this time we have been dealing with the object permanence of a single object within a single universe.
Extending this logic to the very first involuntary rewind, we don't have any foreign objects being preserved but we do have Max's consciousness and memory - but at no point are we given any candidate entity for an "alternative Max" this early in the game. It can't possibly be the tornado vision since the event being rewound from predates the tornado so no tornado itself would have been in "either" Max's experience anyway. Everything points to the same scenario as the keys, but this time only with Max's memory and consciousness and the memory of new experiences instead of the additional physical displacement.
Symbolism: why "rewind"?
The alternative-universe model makes even less sense on a symbolic level if we take the rewind image more literally - or rather more strongly metaphorically. To rewind and continue with alterations is clearly evocative of recording on a cassette tape - a technology we see Max and Chloe using frequently in their pirate years in BtS, in line with the game's relentless millennial technostalgia generally. Once you've overwritten that section of tape, what had been there before no longer exists - the entirety of the medium it was on now only bears the marks of what you have done just now in the revision.
(I have heard some tapes may continue to have some residual data from whatever you've overwritten, and the sounds from the previous recording may bleed into the new one. But the point of the analogy still stands: the residual data is on the same tape as the changes, not on an old discarded copy while the revised new copy is clean of it, and in the case of LiS we do see some persistent old data - wholly contained in Max's time-bubble and clearly accessible to and inseparable from the world of the revised timeline.)
Given the concerns about wearing out tapes, and applying them to this analogy, Max's overall concerns about breaking time take on a whole new context - but not one that has much to do with splintering alternate realities.
Conclusion
Everything about the way the story is written presupposes that no real alternate universes are created by the rewind, although at least one instance of it is mildly suggestive of such a creation in a manner similar to focus - which shall be dealt with in the next entry.