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Strap into your DeLorean, and accelerate to 88 miles per hour, 'cause we're talking about time travel!
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[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]
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Hello Internet, and welcome to Game Theory! Gaming's tangential learning experience!
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Through these videos, we hope you'll find more reasons to appreciate some of your favorite games,
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While sparking some interest in new real-world topics.
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On this, our inaugural episode, We'll be looking at one of my all-time favorite RPGs, Chrono Trigger,
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And analyzing what - if anything - the game can teach us about its core gameplay mechanic: Time travel.
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We'll start off by looking at the first method of time travel used in the game.
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The adventure kicks off with a science experiment gone wrong.
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Take one teleportation pod, throw in a magical pendant, and --bada bing, bada boom!-- You've accidentally torn the time space continuum.
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The characters eventually refer to these fourth dimensional portals as "Time Gates."
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But is it fact or fiction? Are there any real-world equivalents to these phenomena?
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Well, Square, Chrono's developer, knows what they were talking about; because, believe it or not, there have been reports of real-world "Time Gates."
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They're officially called "Time Slips." Paranormal events where a group of people travel through time via some unknown, accidental, or mystical way.
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The reports are...
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...well, I'll let you be the judge.
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This link will take you to some videos outlining a few of these stories.
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Specifically, one from 1979 about a time-tripping hotel.
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Chrono's time gates are also very reminiscent of wormholes.
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Specifically, traversable wormholes.
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A theoretical physics concept that is thought to serve as a shortcut through time and space.
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The Morris-Thorne wormhole, the first ever proposed, was thought to be held open by some "Spherical, exotic matter."
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And, surprisingly, look very similar to the ones found in the game.
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Point: Chrono.
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That covers one mode of transportation found in the game, but what about the time machine, the aptly-named "Epoch"?
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Well, to analyze this, we need to examine how it works.
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And to do that, let's look at its animation.
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When you set a course for another era, the Epoch speeds up, presumably flies around the world -
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- Because it disappears on one half of the screen only to reappear on the other side -
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- and then vanishes into a flash of light.
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So how accurate is it?
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Once again, I am happy to say that it's really not that far from the truth!
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According to Einstein's theories of relativity, if we could achieve a speed approaching the speed of light,
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a dilation of time would occur,
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causing time to pass slower on the moving body relative to that on Earth,
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technically making it possible to travel into the future.
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So let's take it one step further: Does the Epoch actually reach these enormous speeds?
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The whole animation takes 3 seconds,
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so figuring that the circumference of the Earth is about 24,900 miles at the equator,
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you're traveling at speeds around 8,300 miles per second!
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Now compare that to the speed of light, which is 186...thousand miles per second, and Chrono and the gang don't come close.
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But, I would hazard to say that, even at their speeds, some time dilation effects would occur.
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And now it's time for a segment I like to call: DEEP THOUGHTS IN GAMING
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This week's deep thought is a point in the Chrono story that I skimmed over when I was 9 years old playing the game for the first time.
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Let's set the scene.
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So, upon arriving in the middle ages, your party member, Marle, from the present, is mistaken for the kingdom's kidnapped queen.
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Thinking that their lost queen has returned, the medieval search party ends.
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Thus, ensuring the death of the real queen.
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As a result, Marle, who was really a princess, and the descendant of the lost queen, disappears completely.
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In essence, what my impatient 9-year old mind couldn't understand at the time,
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was the game designers setting up what is called a "Grandfather Paradox."
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It goes something like this:
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A time traveler goes back in time to kill his grandfather before the grandfather meets his future wife.
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This murder would then prevent one of the time traveler's parents from being born,
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and thus, the time traveler himself from being born,
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which in turn, means that he could never go back in time to kill the grandfather in the first place.
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Tricky, right?
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But what's it mean?
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Some use the Grandfather Paradox as evidence that time travel is impossible,
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while others, like physicists Igor Novikov and Kip Thorne, resolve the paradox by proposing that all time travel must be self-consistent.
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That is, anything a time traveler does has always been a part of history, or - in other words - that past events cannot be changed.
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Only altered toward the same conclusion.
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So, when Chrono and the team rescue the real queen, they preserve the original timeline, but alter slightly the way it was achieved.
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There is, of course, a third option: The possibility of parallel universes and alternate timelines, but now is not the time to touch on string theory.
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We'll save that for when we talk about Kirby's Epic Yarn.
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[BU-DUM TSS] [LAUGHTER]
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And now it's time for my final thought.
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To this day, I love Chrono Trigger.
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The time mechanic is ingenious and brilliantly implemented,
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the story is epic,
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and the worlds you explore are all fully realized.
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But, beyond that, we've seen today that it definitely provides a fairly accurate portrayal of time travel as it's currently envisioned.
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But here's the take home question: Is it possible?
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Will we be able to fly to the past to save our prehistoric ancestors, or jump forward to fight in post-apocalyptic futures?
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The answer to that comes in 2 parts: Probably not, and maybe, but probably not.
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It's currently unknown if backwards time travel is possible.
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Just look at the Grandfather Paradox and you'll see just one, of many, of its complications.
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Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist, said it best: "If travel to the past is possible, then where are all the tourists from the future?"
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Well, it's either that it's not possible, or we live in a time that no one wants to visit.
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So, seeing dinosaurs or visiting King Arthur's court probably won't be happening without going to a museum,
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but that doesn't rule out time travel completely.
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Einstein's theory of relativity showed the world a possible doorway to the future,
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and some small-scale experiments have actually verified that velocity-based time travel is possible.
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In short, there's a lot of complicated theories, and we're a long way off technologically,
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but who knows what tomorrow may bring? I mean, you don't find the time machine in the game until the year 2300, so we have a while to wait.
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But, then again, the world was supposed to end in 1999...
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Anyway, what comes next? Only time will tell. Thanks for watching!
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