Rift

(above graphic is from BlakeMaloof.com)

Last time, we went on a creative flight of fancy where we equated Love with Extra-Dimensional Gravity. As blog entries in this series go, it went out on a limb where not everyone might have been willing to follow, but I'm grateful to see how many people liked that particular entry and took the time to tell me so. At the end of that entry I mentioned that July 3 2006 was the day that the internet first discovered Imagining the Tenth Dimension, so this month we're celebrating four years of creative explorations of the nature of reality. This time around, I'd like to talk about a video game demo created by one of the fans of Imagining the Tenth Dimension, but before I do I'd like to quote a paragraph from my book, this is from the chapter on "The Paradoxes of Time Travel":

Here’s a completely shameless and self-serving proposition: “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” should be required reading for any writers planning on creating a story about time travel. The basic concepts from chapter one give a framework for how time can be manipulated, or moved within, and there are many ideas within the chapters that follow which could be excellent jumping off points for new fiction. Whether anyone chooses to play by these rules will, of course, be up to them (and Audrey Niffenegger would be an example of someone who probably would have chosen not to follow this book’s line of reasoning even if she had been shown it). Nonetheless, there could well be moments within the telling of a new time travel story where this book’s ideas could provide some useful input.

Time travel is, of course, only one aspect of what we're talking about with this project - the parallel universes of Everett's Many Worlds, the multiverse landscape of string theory and cosmology, the 'spooky' world of quantum mechanics, and the information patterns that connect us all together in ways unseen are all part of this way of visualizing where our reality comes from.

A couple of weeks ago I received the following email from Blake Maloof:

Dear Rob,

I've been watching your videos for a few years now, and they have been very inspiring in the way that I perceive my existence and the universe. I just recently graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a degree in game design. For my final project I gathered a team to develop a prototype for a game I have been designing called Rift. The story involves beings from a parallel dimension experimenting with trans-dimensional manipulation. An experiment goes terribly wrong and ruptures the fabric of reality, causing dimensions in that location in space to bleed together and overlap. One of the affected dimensions was our own, located outside the house of a young boy. The player takes the role of this boy as he witnesses his home begin to collapse and reality as he knows it begin to merge with other dimensions.

I love the theories you propose as a way of imagining the complex universe we live in, but they are possibly even more fascinating as the basis for fiction. Your theories provide a scientific/philosophical explanation for travel and interaction across not only the 4th, 5th and 6th dimensions well explored by movies like Back to the Future, but travel across the 7th 8th and 9th dimensions where initial conditions differ from our own and therefore have different laws of physics.

I would love to talk with you about ways that your theories can be explored in games. I believe that along with 3 dimensional diagrams explaining travel across the higher dimensions, allowing players to interact with these concepts could help them better visualize the concepts of the higher dimensions which we can not directly observe.

If you check out Blake's website, you'll see that he's a talented artist and has some interesting game designs already in the works. By all means, Blake, I wish you every success and would be happy to stay in touch as your work progresses. Here's a trailer for the game Blake and his team at the college put together, which went on to win Best Digital Game Prototype and Best of Show in Savannah College of Art and Design's annual Entellechy game design awards: "Rift".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e5n8K-BhtA


Four years ago, people around the world began embracing my "new way of thinking about time and space", and now talented individuals like Blake Maloof are incorporating these ideas into their own creative projects. Am I enjoying the journey? Absolutely!

Rob

Next: You Can't Get There From Here - with Polish Subtitles