I am a lonely little probe, sent deep into space, for there’s a menacing anomaly on the space-time horizon and I must investigate it. I have journeyed for hundreds of years. Are my creators still alive, is their civilization still alive? For I exist outside of their cycles of life and their experiences of time. I last. It’s why I was sent here. I drift, listening and scanning planets to hear what they have to say. And sometimes they speak back.
This is the opening concept of a very small, very short, free Itch.io game called Lone Signal. It’s a game that doesn’t do much, it’s mostly text, but what it does do is ask you to consider death and how we deal with it, and it’s poignant in that regard.
But it wasn’t so much the pondering on death that grabbed me as the significant passing of time. To all of a sudden be told I had – my probe had – ‘slept’ for 400-odd years shook something inside me. Probably it’s because I can’t, as a human, understand time passing on that scale – it’s so far beyond what I will experience that I can only try and imagine it. That’s why it was so striking to be told, matter of fact, I had already broken a fundamental truth about who I am and what I can do.
And it made me wonder: why don’t games play around with time more? We don’t have to be human in them. We don’t have to be constrained by the timelines we, every day, live within. Yet, even when we cast players as fictional beings we’ve created to explore these ideas of immortality – beings like elves and vampires – we’re still, it seems, shackled to telling stories within human lifetimes. Why?