I did hear about some odd sleeping pill, not sure if it existed or if it was just a concept someone thought about…
The pill was a normal sleeping pill, but with a core of cafffine, it would be designed so that it would take X hours to dissolve and once it got to the core, the caffine would wake you up on time.
The more I think about it, the less I believe it would ever work.
I do this the manual way. Set alarm half-an-hour early for coffee, drink it and go back to sleep. Wake up moderately more awake 45 minutes later. Doesnt always work. 4/10
Saves, especially save states/quicksave. Some kind of way to tell you what is actually the correct answer, not just what someone thinks is, or wants to be, the correct answer. Enough predictability to give you a reasonable shot at things.
But would we remember between quicksaves? Would other people? If my boss quicksaves before our meetings and then I quicksave and honestly tell him what I think about this job, whose quicksave would take precedence?
I just thought "hur hur, Nazeem" and save scumming skill checks, dice rolls and tricky input in mostly singleplayer games, without any nasty precedence or concurrency issues. Extending it to multiplayer and also being inside the game seems, uh, complicated. I'll give it an undercaffeinated try:
Each player gets an individual "marker" they can place at their current time, and a function to restore the entire universe state to that point.
"Whose marker is when" seems like it needs to be part of that state. Otherwise, reverting and then having someone else reload a formerly earlier, now future/orphaned state... just sounds like a clusterfuck. Or it's unproblematic and just weird, I'm not sure.
Keeping memories across reloads would at least not happen "naturally", since everyone has their exact brain state reverted. You could just say it does for the purposes of the experiment, but it seems like it makes things more complicated.
At least, remembering stuff through someone else's reload is right out: everyone on the planet quickly ends up with a bunch of memories that have no longer happened, and no way to tell what's what. Psych horror time!
Whoever saves first does get to revert everything since then, but assuming no memory retention, you could still safely shit talk your boss all day long, at least. If their checkpoint reverts yours, they will forget the rant, you can still revert. It would be further back than you intended then, but you would be blissfully unaware of that fact. Of course, you also wouldn't remember the rant, so it doesn't sound very cathartic either.
But, if memories are retained, Boss could reload on you - they now remember the rant and you don't, which sounds like a bad Christmas Party. While reloading would still be a win for you, you wouldn't know to actually do it, and could risk saving at a position where you've screwed yourself. Common risk of save scumming.
I would assume there is an order of operations to the madness. And quicksaves are stored globally, so whoever quicksaves first is able to undo the later quicksaves. In this scenario, if your boss quickloads before you do, then they would retain their memories and go back to before the meeting knowing you were going to insult them in it before you even did the first quicksave.
The oldest quicksave point takes precedence. Nobody actually experiences anything until the player with the earliest quicksave establishes a new save point, or otherwise becomes permanently incapable of restoring that earliest point. Whatever was experienced between the oldest and second oldest quicksave then becomes the unalterable historic record. Everything else is an aborted timeline that never actually exists.
If it existed you’d never know. Unless you add an additional feature of preserving your characters memories across game loads. But then it’s not a common game feature.
Instant constructions and destructions. City needs a new road? Done in a second. Wind turbines and solar panels? Plopped before you could finish blinking. Pipe network to get water in and sewage out? There, it’s already flowing beneath you.
With a proper mayor, said Karen will be elevated into a 4m² mountain, over 2km above the rest of the place, where her ego from “being atop everyone else” will keep her from realizing nobody can hear her screams.
Also, “building” an entire forest also happens in a snap
Infinite wealth exploits that the average person can exploit without getting into trouble. I could especially use this feature.
Though, a more serious answer would probably be something like infinite resources you find in certain games. For example, infinite weapons in games like Fallout 3, NV, and 4 from enemies periodically respawning when you’re gone. Or in sandbox games like minecraft, how you can easily get seemingly infinite trees and bonemeal without completely destroying the ecosystem.
A challenge most people fail in video games for unfair reasons will generally be considered a badly designed element of that game by fans and critics.
Meanwhile the challenge of making it ahead in modern life, which most people fail at out of no fault of their own even if they play the cards they were dealt as smartly as possible… is considered a perfectly good design element of adult life.
🫤
On a lighter note I really wish the pinging system in games like Alex legends could be combined with a simple face recognition overlay (that only pulls from your semiprivate private network of photos with friends under certain sharing conditions) that just reminded you of people’s names and maybe very succinctly their connection with you.
I’ve been noticing a lot of movies and TV shows now adopt a video-gamey behind the car view sometimes, mostly due to how cheap and good drone footage has gotten lately
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