Anonymous asked:

So, this artist Penelope Umbrico made a collage of the incredibly large number of portraits people had posted to flickr of themselves standing in front of the sunset, and put it up as an exhibit for an art gallery. Unsurprisingly, this apparent tendency for people to take pictures of themselves standing in front of sunsets and posting them to flickr has inspired others to take pictures of themselves in front of the collage, and posting it to flickr.

argumate answered:

It’s like the tension in MMORPG design: if everyone does the same quest it destroys the logic of the game world to some degree (the bad guy is beaten millions of times!) but if quests have to be unique for each player you can’t share the experience.

[mitigatedchaos]

* twitches *

Time.  The answer is Time.

Set the MMORPG in a world where the timelines are divergent and there are thousands or millions of them, and the world itself is broken into thousands of planes/zones/worlds spread across a vast and diverse cosmos in a state of multiversal war.

The players are warrior-chrononauts, members of various factions in this cosmic war across universes and timelines.  Many of the same worlds, however, occur again and again, and thus they have a shared experience of intervening in them.  There isn’t just one Space Hitler, there are thousands or millions echoing out into the cosmic void.

Video games are almost perfect for this, since single-player games do the multiple timelines branching thing intuitively just by their structure, with saves and replays!

[argumate]

oh sure you can do that for one game, just gets a bit painful when you have to resort to it for all games.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, but thanks to Death of the Author, I already did.