I feel the need to preface this with a bit of a warning: on occasion, I will delve into topics that some might consider “out there” or even “kooky”. Others won’t find them such, but some will, and I would hate for the overall point to be lost in such cases due to guilt by association. What I would ask the reader to keep in mind is that I just enjoy exploring ideas to see where they lead, traipsing along twisty paths and down blind alleys, passing through arches leading to fields of violent purple, without necessarily attributing reality to any of them in particular. So if your take on “reality” is such that even contemplating other formulations causes you any emotional or psychic stress, feel free to (as the song says) “walk on by” – though there will be an interactive fiction connection before we’re through.

Having gotten that out of the way…

A number of years ago, I came across a book called “The Secret”. The underlying principle of this book is something called “the law of attraction”, which states (more or less) that you can draw (attract) the things to you that you want in your life simply by “making a wish to the universe” and then basically acting as if you already have them. In other words, what you imagine becomes real. But you have to, basically, believe and, then, be grateful.

This idea isn’t that new. I had come across it before in the writings of Richard Bach, just without all the hype.

There are some things interesting about this. Taken from a broader vantage, it’s more or less a secular equivalent of prayer. Ask and ye shall receive. If you view that all as nonsense, then the ships sink together. If you have any affinity for it, then it could be hinting at a broader truth that nobody has quite gotten right yet. It also means that those people who don’t like contemplating negative things for fear it will “bring then on” may have been right all along.

There were two things about the treatment of this in “The Secret” that didn’t sit well with me, though. Not to say that I was on board otherwise, but these were two that really stood out.

First, there is the problem with competing wishes. What happens if two people send out cosmic requests that conflict? I want rain, and you want sun. Sally wants Tommy, but Lisa does as well. How is it possible for us all to get what we want? And yet “The Secret” says not to worry, you can all have what you want. Just keep positive thoughts! Something doesn’t add up. (Bill Cosby has a great bit where he’s describing all the people in a casino sending requests up to God, wanting a seven in a dice roll or the next card to be a queen, on and on. And of course, God can’t deal with all these requests coming up at once, so God just goes, “BUST EVERYBODY!” )

Second, there was this notion that wasn’t even hinted at but was explicitly stated: all the bad things that happen to you or have happened to you in your life are, basically, your fault. You weren’t thinking positively. You drew them to yourself. If you’re in a car crash and wind up in a wheelchair for life, it’s your fault. If a loved one dies and you’re left inconsolable, it’s your fault. If the money you always wanted and worked hard for all those years never came through, well, then it’s just because there’s some part of your psyche that’s undermining you and keeping you from achieving the results you want. And from what I’ve seen, an entire industry has popped up around this where, if you simply max out your credit cards and give all your money to these certain people, then they will help you get past what is keeping you from prosperity. What’s a little money spent when you’ll be reaping the results later? And you have to prove to the Universe that you’re serious… Run away as fast as you can.

I’m going into this because, being the kind of person I am, I began trying to reconcile some of what I had read and make it all make sense. Again, not that it’s reality, but that it could at least be made to be consistent. And this is where another concept came in, one I have toyed with in both my thoughts and my writing in the past (and seen in various sci-fi movies and television shows), and which, for me, seemed to resolve the major issues into a nice neat little package.

The idea is one from physics, that of multiple universes. The basic idea behind this is that when a quantum event can go one way or the other, it ends up going both. The wave equation may collapse in a particular way in your Universe, but there’s another where it went the other way. All things that can happen, do happen, in an ever-growing infinity of universes,

I was pleasantly surprised recently to discover this concept in the Myst universe, expressed in the D’ni concept of the “Great Tree of Possibilities”. This ever branching set of Universes (Universi?) can be viewed as the branches of a great tree. And by writing a “descriptive book”, you create a connection to one of those possibilities. I used the tree metaphor in one of my own stories once.

To me, this concept solved the issues I had with “The Secret”. Interestingly enough, I came across a book a little while ago, where the author was more or less espousing what I had worked out in my head. (You don’t need to look for it.) So maybe I’m not that original, eh?

The concept of the multi-verse solves the problems with “The Secret” by turning the law of attraction on its head. It’s not so much that you attract things to you in this world that you want – it’s that you draw yourself to the Universe you imagine where the things you want exist for you, along the ever branching pathways of infinite possibility. As such, there is no possibility of conflicting desires – contrary wishes simply end up in different Universes.

(An aside: the multiple universe theory in general has a whole bunch of hairy – and interesting – ramifications having to do with “which one is really me?” It might not seem so shocking when Spock has a beard or Worf is married to Deanna, but when we contemplate it for ourselves, it suddenly becomes more personal. Because if I get what I want in universe A, and she gets what she wants in universe B, then there are still a “her” and “me” in those universes that didn’t get what we wanted. But that’s ok, because I’m looking out through the eyes of the one who did get what he wanted, and… It’s all a bit complicated. The same issue comes up in a different form if you ponder what it would mean if the state of your brain could be transferred into a machine. How do you define yourself? Are you more than just patterns in a substrate? And yet, if who I am fundamentally as “me” is through memory, if my sense of identity comes largely from what I know of my past, then at the end of such a transfer, what ends up would be “me”, as far as it was concerned.)

Back to the main thrust: For the second concern, if we view it as you bounce more or less randomly along the quantum pathways unless you explicitly direct yourself, then the bad things that happen to you are really due to the random nature of the universe. You can take steps to avoid them by consciously navigating the quantum possibilities, but you don’t necessarily take the blame for all the bad that has come into your life as being an explicit manifestation of wrong thinking.

So after all this, you might be wondering what this has to do with IF. Perhaps it has already taken form in your mind…

The IF sub-genre of “choose your own adventure” games – which has branched out in the past few years into much more, no pun intended – is based, at its crudest, on having a branching tree in front of you, and you make choices to move yourself down either this branch or that branch, where you then make another choice, on and on. There is some limit to this: an infinite branching tree structure is obviously impossible, but even a relatively dense one can be a major feat to create. There have been volumes written about how to create games like this, so I won’t delve into the design side. Ignoring the challenges of creating such works, we can see that the structure is a bit like that I described above, with a bunch of possibilities laid out in front of you and you having to make decisions about which way to go to explore a different area of the “great tree”.

There is one key difference, though, and this is what I found really interesting and worthy of writing about here, after all this, as it pertains to IF.

When I think about the notion of the “the Secret plus the multi-verse”, it’s not so much that you are making explicit decisions at each quantum branch point. That’s effectively impossible and probably inconsistent to even contemplate (since your knowledge of the quantum branch to any sort of detail would influence it in a way that would make it not what you thought it was anyway. It might even turn it into a cat). What it is, really, is that what you create in your mind gives you a destination among the branches. You are then drawn toward that universe where what you contemplate exists. It’s not that you push your way through the branches. You are pulled.

I had been researching various path following algorithms for something I was working on when the light bulb went off, and the connection was made.

What if, instead of structuring a CYOA game as a bunch of nodes where the player makes a choice at each node to move on to some subsequent branch, pushing their way through the web, the game is set up as a “tree of possibilities” where each choice the player makes gives them an affinity for some further along tree location? And the engine then moves the player step by step at each game turn along different branches until they reach there, but all the while giving the player choices that influence both the destinations and the path.

As the player makes more and more choices, the future target, as well as the path, change as they’re drawn toward different things based on their choices. Different choices provide different gravity. It’s a bit like Google Maps, where you say “I want to get from point A to point B”, but then you can drag the path around a bit where it might pass right by the old historic site you wanted to see, or it might go near the river, or it might go through the seedy part of town. The path you end up taking would be the sum total of the dynamically changing influences created by the choices you make, not just the instantaneous next step based on your choice and some state. Even making some of the same choices in a replay might not cause the same result, as the other choices you make could pull you along a different path.

The acronym could still be the same but with different words: Choose Your Own Attraction.

I don’t know if such a game engine would be viable or if it would be humanly possible to create a game in it if it were to actually come into being. Rather than thinking about what the player does at each fork in the road and where each fork leads next, you set up a large map and decide how the choices a player makes determine the paths through that map based on what they’re attracted to.

As I said, it might not make sense. I just like the idea of turning things on their heads a bit – or perhaps just myself – and seeing how things look. Exploring my own “tree of possibilities” existing in my own head…