Alias (Game Jam Edition)

Game jam submission.

Thought experiment on the illusion of free choice. Incomplete and without any levels. This will be in further development and a post-jam version with dialogue, playable levels, and a metanarrative stitched together by simple rules and impossible decisions will be released later. Hopefully within a couple of weeks.

In concept: The only way to win a level is to predict perfectly what will happen or get lucky, but predicting perfectly what will happen requires prime factorization (or really good spatial intuition about roots of unity toward the same mechanism) and other feats of mental simulation. Regardless of what you do though, you will never get a perfect outcome. The eventual result is that you lose everything or you lose enough that the ideal outcome is impossible. This is interspersed with quotes from Spinoza's Ethics, D&G's A Thousand Plateaus (in particlar the passages Memories of a Spinozan, I & II) and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus papers. A sampling of the most significant are as follows.

"...all things have necessarily flowed forth in an infinite number of ways, or always flow from the same necessity; in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows from eternity and for eternity, that its three interior angles are equal to two right angles." - The Ethics

"...he goes beyond organs and functions to abstract elements he terms "anatomical," even to particles, pure materials that enter into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given function depending on their degree of speed or slowness. Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structure but also the types of development."  - Memories of a Spinozan, I. (A Thousand Plateaus)

"To every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these intensities come from external parts or from the individual's own parts. Affects are becomings." - Memories of a Spinozan, II. (A Thousand Plateaus)

"Every machine has a sort of code built into it, stored up inside it. This code is inseparable not only from the way in which it is recorded and transmitted to each of the different regions of the body, but also from the way in which the relations of each of the regions with all the others are recorded...All sorts of functional questions thus arise...The data, the bits of information recorded, and their transmission form a grid of disjunctions...A code of the unconscious, incorporating the entire chain - or several chains - of meaning...But how very strange this domain seems, simply because of its multiplicity...so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even of one code of desire." - Anti-Oedipus