Time Loop Nihilism

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I'm gonna be the guy who brings up Undertale and say that Jacob's ruminations on what happens when the looper spends so much of their time being evil and finally gets out of the loop reminds me of the consequences of murdering everyone in the Underground, where the True Pacifist ending is forever spoiled because the player demonstrated that they see the characters for their gameplay functions and not their personalities by displaying zero empathy toward them.

Jacob, I'm sorry, but you couldn't pad an extra 10 seconds to the first half to make it so you say "12 minutes" at exactly 12 minutes into the video? I'll never forgive you

The worst part about a time loop is, you don’t know if it will stop. If the loop stops on the one time where you commit a mass genocide or the time that you killed your loved ones, how could you possibly live with yourself? And what if you don’t know if the loop has even ended or not? The only way to know - is if you die.

You know what's a revelatory moment in Deathloop?
When you're playing multiplayer with a friend, and you realise nothing is forcing you to kill the other player
And suddenly you decide to turn the game into a cooperative experience with Julianna and colt working together to set up fun things.

The author of the novel Edge of Tomorrow is based on was also heavily inspired by his experiences dying in video games over and over again. So the comparison is perfectly apt.

The best time loop story I've experienced was a tabletop RPG game my best friend ran. We were a group of normal people who happened to be returning to the small remote town (in the south-western USA in 1947) we grew up in on the same train. Things went fairly normally, with us catching up with our families, making progress on the various tasks that brought us back to town (my character was an architect returning home to execute his parent's estate, another was a soldier home on leave, another was a reporter following a hot story, another a travelling salesman). The next day was the yearly town harvest festival with a fete, party etc, which we all attended. There was an unseasonable fog which worsened over the course of the evening, until just as the party was due to start in earnest great tentacles and mouths made of solid mist materialised from the sky and started killing everyone in town. Beckoned by a strange hooded figure we fled to the town's clock tower, where we found an incongruous piano, which the monk played for us as the mist creatures came crashing in and killed us....then we found ourselves stood on the train platform on the morning of the previous day as if nothing had happened. Over about 6 months of play we killed people and saw them killed, uncovered horrific secrets about the town going back generations, had our loved ones wiped from existence by a monster that preyed on loneliness, uncovered a cult that worshipped that monster, found their lair under the town, saw the hundreds of thousands of human teeth that they had ripped from the screaming mouths of their sacrifices that now covered the floor of the cave like gravel.

What really made it work was the system the GM had picked- we were playing Unknown Armies 3rd edition, which is completely focused on mechanically representing how your characters changed when exposed to horrible stimuli. You don't have stats like in D&D, you have seven 'meters', which are like little progress bars for different types of trauma. Each meter has a 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' skill attached, which are inversely proportionate to each other based on how full that trauma meter is- for example, one of the meters is Violence. Its associated skills are Connect (empathy, persuasion) and Struggle (aptitude for physical violence). As your characters experience/commit more violent events their violence meter will fill, raising their Struggle and lowering their Connect skills. In other words in the actual mechanics of the game the more violence you witness and commit the better you get at solving problems with violence and and the worse you get at talking things out like empathetic human beings. Our characters were completely different people when we finished, not just in roleplay but actually in the mechanics of the game. My character had fled the town decades ago to escape his family's obsession with the occult, but by the time we were done he had become quite the scholar of forgotten lore at the expense of losing the reputation, status and prestige that he had enjoyed at the start of the game. The soldier character had started with a few violence notches already ticked- by the end of the game he had filled his violence meter and basically couldn't function in normal society. Unfortunately for Jacob, we made some bad choices and believed the wrong people and while we were able to break the loop and save the town our characters ended up getting unpersoned like the monster's victims so we didn't get to find out how they coped with the post-loop world. I remember saying it was for the best that my character had been erased because his wife back in New York would never have taken back the man he had become.

"I could kill all one hundred and sixteen people on my cluster in one hour and twenty-two minutes."
That wording is chillingly reminiscent of a speedrun.

"If I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter" is an interesting quote because it's applicable to time loops.

It hasn't been mentionned, but undertale talk about time loop nihilism. Flowey and Chara are reflections of the player dealing with time loop nihilism.
One of the best example is the first boss, Toriel. A new player, used to how games usually works will kill her. Then flowey appears, mocks the player for having murdered her. A clever new player will reload his last save and repeat until he finds out how to spare her and continue his adventure. Then flowey appears again and say "I know what you did. You murdered her.".

"At first, I used my powers for good. I became 'friends' with everyone. I solved all their problems flawlessly. Their companionship was amusing... For a while. As time repeated, people proved themselves predictable. What would this person say if I gave them this? What would they do if I said this to them? Once you know the answer, that's it. That's all they are.


It all started because I was curious. Curious what would happen if I killed them. 'I don't like this', I told myself, 'I'm just doing this because I HAVE to know what happens.' Ha ha ha... What an excuse.


Nowadays, even that's grown tiring. You understand, I've done everything this world has to offer. I've read every book. I've burned every book. I've won every game. I've lost every game. I've appeased everyone. I've killed everyone. Sets of numbers... Lines of dialogue... I've seen them all..."

-an evil flower.

I actually think the idea of someone being stuck in a death loop kinda situation by the government as a way to forcefully train him into being a super soldier would be an interesting idea for a story.

I sometimes lay awake at night and think "I have to be me for the rest of my life, huh?" and this video got that exact feeling in by the end.

"i've felt silly...spending so much time thinking about the ramifications of a situation that none of us will ever face." Isnt that just philosophy?

I think Outer Wilds is a really interesting contrast to the games mentioned here - in deathloop you have to become the perfect murderer, figure out how to precisely weave your way through a bloody battlefield and execute your targets. In 12 minutes the mystery is different, but the methods are much the same. You become callous and content with killing or torturing your way through the conundrum, doing horrible cruelty in the hopes that you might get a scrap of new information.

In Outer Wilds, there's a mystery, but to solve it you have to become the perfect scholar. You need to be a historian, an explorer, a pilot, but not once does the game ask you (or, indeed, allow you) to kill. And I think because of this, instead of seeing the loop as a playground I started to see it as a kind of meditation. I explored all of the planets, seeing every island on Giant's Deep, every building on Brittle Hollow, every nook and cranny of Ember Twin.

There is death present, sure, but it's in the form of the Nomai skeletons laying around in almost random places. I grew to be attached to the Nomai in a way, even being a species wiped out thousands or millions of years ago. Some of the skeletons I could name, some I could only guess. I mourned these people, rich with culture and thoughts and feelings of their own, who I would never get to meet.

Instead of figuring out which ways I could best kill people, I had to figure out which parts of the planets I was yet to explore, which records I hadn't read. And in all of these, I couldn't help but become enamoured with the tiny little slice of the universe I was confined to. All of these little planets and moons and buildings were brimming with details, and I learned all of them eventually. The time loop gave me freedom to appreciate the world in all of its little parts, the parts that we often have to skip over and ignore, pushed ever forwards as we are. If the end music started while I was on one of the Hourglass Twins, I'd go and comfort Chert, roasting a couple marshmallows by the fire before watching the supernova. If I was on Brittle Hollow, I'd often jump through the black hole to watch it happen. I usually only had about 3 minutes of oxygen left and little fuel, but 3 minutes of oxygen might as well be a hundred years for all that it would change. I'd sit there, out by the white hole, and just watch the sun expand and consume, in a kind of contented, complacent way.

SPOILERS: I think that's partially why, in the ending, I was so able to die. I had explored the loop to its fullest, had seen all there was to see. I had become one of the only living people bearing the memory of the Nomai, and I was sort of... done? Having seen all I could, I was happy to simply pack up and leave all of it to whoever came next.

Hey Jacob! I just came back from an interview with the author of the Through the Flash story! It was one of the books selected for us to read for one of our english classes. He mentioned your video in the interview and how much he loves your work. I just wanted you to know that the person whose work you love, also loves your work. Cheers and keep it up!

Sometimes i forgot how little media reflects on the aftereffects of time loops. I’ve been spoiled by the hundreds of time loop fanfics that deal with those ramifications so if anyone ever gets that desire then that’s where I’d recommend you go. It’s all the nihilism, trauma, horror, and introspection you could ever want and usually at least 50k words!

"When they cry," the anime is a time loop with a girl that's lived thousands of years of seeing her family and friends killed in horrific ways. After the time loop is stopped at the end of the series, there is an extra ova of her life after. She suffers from ptsd and the anime trys to see if it's possible to restore her childlike innocence.

Theres a fantastic story that covers this in the SCP mythos called "The Last Things Dr. Darryl Loyd Ever Did, in Chronological Order". It treads similar ground of 12 Minutes, but it explores how two people can spend their last 24 hours alive while also escaping a compromised SCP laboratory. It's a must read from me if you enjoy time loop stories about planning against the impossible, alongside some actual character development.

My personal favourite type of time loop is one introduced to me in a Creepypasta: Each day can repeat any number of times, so any given day could be the last time that particular one is repeated, which will be the "real" one going forward, so there is always a chance that your actions could have lasting consequences