Historical Potential Energy

So, this idea was also discussed in the regulars-only chat room on the intfiction.org Forum some time ago, but that really wasn't public, so I feel it's fair game.

Alright, so when a rock is up on the edge of a cliff, it has a high gravitational potential energy. If you nudge it, off it falls. If you have a stick of dynamite, it also has high potential energy, just chemical. One spark, boom, right?

Well, in history there's a bunch of wild chance. A radio fails in a battle and all is lost. A politician is hit by a car walking their dog, and now an opportunity opens for a newcomer that would have likely never occurred. The academy of fine arts in Vienna rejecting the same applicant in 1907 and 1908. Deciding to stop off for a sandwich at a random cafe after your opponents’ assassination attempt goes awry. Or dying from a heart attack on the eve of leading your horde to invade what is now Germany and then, presumably, the rest of Western Europe. (Please note that some of these examples are apocryphal, but useful for demonstration.) 

All chance events that could have gone either way, leading to massive consequences, right?

But most sandwiches and heart attacks don't change the world.

Which means, some objects might have a greater historical potential energy than others.

For example, let’s examine the open/closed sign on Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen on June 28th, 1914.

That is (allegedly, and in actuality probably not, but we’ll just roll with it) where the guy who failed to kill the archduke earlier that day stopped for a sandwich.

He was enjoying his lunch when, lo and behold, the Archduke pulls up in front of the cafe!

He walked out with a pistol and changed history.

If, instead, someone had flipped that sign on the door that day, history would be dramatically different.

Our assassin would have eaten elsewhere. 

So, ostensibly, that object would have an insanely high historical potential energy.

Whereas, the open/close sign on a business across town wouldn’t have such a high level.

(A counter of this would be that someone else would end up murdering the Archduke, but if that were the case, then an object we would expect to have a high historical potential energy, like this sign, would suspiciously have none. Which would still be telling for our historians/time travelers.)

Follow so far? 

So, what if time travelers in the future can measure this potential energy as easily as I would determine an object's gravitational or chemical potential energy? (I’ll get to why they would have such a thing in a minute)

Well, imagine that they have a device that can do this on the fly. Now imagine this device can be dialed in to a specific range.

You can have it look for things that are off the scale, like that cafe sign, or you can have it look for less impactful things, stuff with higher than average background historical potential energy (HPE from here on out), but lower than civilization altering.

Let me give an example of something smaller than diverting WWI.

Imagine you see a paperclip sitting on a counter that your detector is indicating has an elevated HPE.

There’s no indication why the HPE level is elevated, or in what way interacting with the paperclip will change events. It’s just glowing with a higher than average level.

You don't know the impact, only that it would be significant in terms of potential change.

So, you decide to pick it up and pocket it.

Moments later, the Cafe owner walks out with some loose papers, looks around at the counter and grunts, and then turns back to the kitchen where he runs directly into a waiter carrying food, soiling his clothes. He leaves to go home to shower and change. The waiter is now a dishwasher.

If you had left the paperclip alone, as soon as the owner scooped it off the counter, it’s HPE would plummet. An object’s HPE is dynamic over time.

The Cafe owner going home to change is significant, but not world altering, but still an impressive HPE attached to a paperclip.

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As for the setup of how and why such a device enters the world of our plot, I was going to have a time traveler simply slip and break their neck. Their time machine auto returns to their time when they don't return to it in time, but this tool is found on their person.

A time traveler is ostensibly still human and humans do randomly die from inane accidents.

You, as the player, are not a time traveler, you do not have a time machine.

You simply find the dead guy and his stuff.

Our dead time traveler guy had a manual/journal written in an unfamiliar language and an unfamiliar device (maybe lightly sketched around either a tricorder or the sonic screwdriver).

You will begin to figure out the journal with help later.

But, before you figure it out, you casually use the device, notice an object glowing perhaps? And, as you pick it up out of curiosity, which is a standard thing to do in parser games, it causes a Rube Goldberg series of events each time.

As you begin to catch on, you start asking questions about certain objects and looking for context before touching them, but sometimes you can draw wildly incorrect assumptions.

In actuality, this device is meant to aid time traveling Historians in their attempt to determine how history turned out and why while avoiding an inadvertent impact on history themselves.

This is how I expect things to come to a head, as the protagonist is followed by the missing professor's overworked grad students trying to return University property before anyone notices it's missing.

Either they're trying to capture/kill the protagonist, or the protagonist simply assumes they are. Either way, the protagonist runs.

Then the device is used to aid your escape.

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I slowly wanted to escalate the stakes.

To solve some problems with typical parser player kleptomania, many of the high HPE "objects" wouldn't be takeable by design. Like a lightswitch or a car door.

It plays on the groundhog day trope. Where someone with foreknowledge can make small incremental changes to great effect, but the protagonist doesn’t get to replay the day if they don’t like the results, they have to live with them.

You know the objects and their HPE level, but not how one should interact with the object to make a change or what that change might be. In fact, how you interact with that object might change the effect.

Going back to the archduke Cafe sign example (assuming for a second it was true) simply stealing the sign would do nothing. The door isn’t marked “closed,” so the assassin would simply try the door, see that it was unlocked, and walk in anyway.

However, flipping it to closed position alters history enormously.

Or looking back at the paperclip example.

Let’s say you bent the paperclip instead of taking it. Perhaps the Cafe owner now pauses and takes the time to bend it back, causing them to linger long enough for old man Tim to wander in and see him, causing him to bend his ear for 20 minutes, etc, etc.

Do nothing to the paperclip, and the owner avoids the clumsy waiter andold man Tim.

Everyone likes it when their actions have outsized impacts.

It's gratifying to make a small nudge and watch the dominoes fall.

It might be fun if a game focused on that element of gaming.

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The player quickly learns to investigate before taking action. 

Perhaps a parking ticket on the windshield of a car had high HPE. Asking about the car sitting in front of the Cafe with a parking ticket might reveal its the Mayor's wife's pink Cadillac. And reading the ticket (without taking it) might reveal the citing officer's name, who you can go and find and question.

It’s important to remember the player is using the device in a fashion it wasn’t meant to be used.

It’s meant to help time-traveling historians figure out HOW not to effect history in a meaningful way.

As long as the people and objects you interact with have a low HPE, you won't alter history. Any changes you cause will be inconsequential.

This allows you to interview and spectate without stepping on the butterfly that'll cause next month's hurricane.

Very useful tool for time traveling historians.

They don't use it to make changes, they use it to avoid significant changes and to also identify which things in history are actually significant and which are overblown (like, perhaps, the Cafe sign from earlier. As many believe, maybe he never went in and the Cafe being open or closed was irrelevant.)

Without this tool, time travel is too dangerous. You might order some tea and inadvertently wipe out your future birth. 

Quite frankly, it’s the perfect excuse for such a device existing in the first place.

The more accidental and surprising and butterfly-effect-like the causality is, the less one would be able to find out about it by standard investigation.

The player being led to incorrect expectations would be a running gag, tbh.

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I expect save scumming to be prevalent, of course.

Back to the parking ticket, let's say the Mayor's Wife simply pays the ticket from immense wealth and just parks wherever she wishes to the officer’s great chagrin.

He remarks it’s a shame she always pays her tickets, because if she failed to pay one, that's a civil infraction and a warrant could be issued.

So, by stealing the ticket, the player would assume that the Mayor's wife wouldn't know to pay it.

Thus leading to her arrest.

Buuuuuutttt....

Instead.

The officer's boss walks past the car flagrantly parked next to the fire hydrant without a ticket and goes into a rage and fires the officer on the spot (This is the last straw! You had one job!). This leads the officer to get drunk at the local bar that night. He drives home drunk and accidentally runs over the Mayor himself walking home from a late night at the office.

It wouldn't always be dark, of course, but often unexpected.

I was thinking a partner NPC could encourage you to try harder next time.

They'd be the person saying, hey, maybe we should figure out what swiping the ticket, or flipping the sign, or bending the paperclip will do before just doing it?

The Historians don't mess with high HPE objects for a reason. They're dangerous. They simply document HPE levels or the unexpected lack of them.

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A scientist uses a Geiger counter to know what to avoid at all costs. An otherwise ignorant medieval adventurer might use it to find “glowing” treasures to sell to the nobility for great profit.

The player would have ways of finding out stuff beforehand by doing detective-type work and then they could do something or purposefully not doing something and see how it plays out. If the outcome is not a game-ending catastrophe, one could decide to go on with the story or reload a save game on the spot if one is dissatisfied.

I was also planning on tying the original visit of the time-traveler into the plot. Why would a time traveling historian visit a relatively unimportant point in time? (I’d purposely avoid a known “crossroads” in history.)

Turns out there was an extremely high-level HPE object detected nearby by sensitive equipment in the future, like Archduke sandwiches or Vienna Art School rejection levels, but there's nothing in the history books to correlate with it. It’s an aberrant unexplained super high level HPE object. The time traveler came back to investigate.

I'd want no causal chain to be game ending, per se. Let's take the Mayor's tragic demise, for example. Many players may choose to reload, but the game would be written as to allow the player to continue playing anyway.

Allow them to accept the consequences and roll with the punches, or not.

I was contemplating hosting a special version of the game that is a YOLO (you only live once) version of the game. Save and undo would be disallowed and it being hosted prevents interpreter hacks. The full downloadable game would be available with saves and undos, but this special version is an optional commitment by the player.

Completing the YOLO version allows you to put your name on a list of Honorary Time-Traveler's research assistants.

Or maybe as contributing authors to the Research paper?

Like a roguelike challenge version.

I was also planning on how you finished the YOLO game to play into how the player's name appeared.

Much more nuanced than this, but, as a general idea, good ending: research assistant, bad ending, list of defendants on a laundry list of time-crime charges.

Regarding the device that measures historical potential energy: The user of said device would have to be careful to not examine themselves with that device, as they're ostensibly a time traveler and/or someone possessing an HPE reader allowing them to impact the flow of time as opposed to simply being swept along with it in their assigned roles. This might mean their HPE might be insanely high... perhaps high enough to damage the device itself?

Kinda reminds me of the original Ghostbusters ending, i.e. crossing the streams.

Might be fun to put a warning on the device to absolutely never, in any circumstance, ever examine yourself with the device, while not specifying what would happen if you did. If you try this earlier in the game, the protagonist could decline out of concern. Which could leave it for a nice end game climax, like shooting the moon with a portal gun.

Also, some final points, the journal written in a foreign language would be included as a feelie, and the ability to slowly translate it from information you glean in the game would help you piece things together. I would like to make this feelie as a standalone Twine game functioning as a feelie on steroids.

Also, it would be MUCH easier to change history by manipulating an object instead of trying to manipulate the actor directly, and the person making the change would not be directly linked to the change made.

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For example, if a standard time traveler went back in time to prevent the Archduke’s death, they might approach the Archduke directly… and get shot in the head by a skittish guard. Whereas, simply flipping the sign to close 10 minutes before the assassin happens by would be far less messy.

I like this idea, because it’s a time travel game that has no time travel and you are not a time traveler either. Has a certain Fantasia element to it.

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Final point, this whole idea was made better by lots of suggestions made by the regular crowd that happened to be in chat that day, including Manon, St. John Limbo, Mike Russo, Onno, Stephen, Rileypb, Mathbrush, and probably others I no longer recall at this point (sorry)