Speed, perception and social strata

In Aeon Flux's 2nd season, 1st episode, Utopia or Deuteranopia, Trevor Goodchild serves as the president after the former representative, Clavius', mysterious disappearance. Turns out, Trevor is guilty for this, and keeps Clavius in a sort of parallel dimension, barely visible from outside, accessible only when wearing a garment that allows the body to vibrate at the same frequency Clavius does. 

A few experiences driving and the memory of this episode helped a few ideas condense into this article about speed and perception, which, I hope, isn't too abstract.

Relative speed and perception

When your body moves at a certain speed, your perception is conditioned by such speed and direction of movement.

When you're driving your car, let's say at 80 km/h, and another car moves at 90 km/h, same or similar direction, it's movement will be perceived as it slowly distancing from you, as an equivalent object in speed. Somebody walking at 10 km/h, on the other hand, will be perceived, almost, as a stationary object. Greater contrast will be perceived if the difference in speed is even greater.

Other than suddenly crashing your car into some pedestrian, your chances of interacting one with each other are faint and brief, unless the driver slows down, stops the car, or either invites the other guy in. In that case, both of them would be moving at the same speed, towards the same direction, which would allow them to have a longer conversation than a few shouted words.

The above principle is similar to the one from Aeon Flux's episode: a body's speed, or vibration frequency in the first case, puts it in contact with other bodies having a similar movement.

Relative speed, perception and level design

A property deducted from what's already been exposed is that the same scenario may in fact contain many superposed planes, all of them geographically similar, but accessible one at a time, and only to bodies moving in the right speed or frequency. No body can access 2 planes at the same time, unless it's got 2 speeds, which for now would be impossible, but more on that later.

But enough abstraction for now, let's take this metaphor to games and level design. First, there are already games, like Zelda Oracle of Ages, which reuse maps, but allow Link to travel back and forth in time, letting him explore the same areas in the past and present. 

This is fine, but I'm interested in exploring this metaphor without time-travelling, and I think it can be applied to a whole different topic: how to make class and culture disparity seem real in an urban environment.

So, 2 persons of a different social class, cultures or ethnicities may share an environment, but both actually see and interact with a wholly different world. The same objects and bodies may take up different meanings according to the observer's position in society's gradient: the police, bank, school, the back alley, the highway, all of those things mean something different according to the observer. Each social stratum has blind spots: objects, places and people invisible to it, inaccessible, or insurmountable. At the same time, each stratum's ecosystem allows people sharing a social status to interact with each other, and provides them with opportunities invisible to anybody else.

Changing a body's speed

Cars sometimes have accidents and hit pedestrians, of course, and unexpected encounters between different strata may sometimes happen. This interaction should feel undesired, awkward, asymmetric, and full of misunderstandings: each of the participants is perceiving the other through the distortion of their own speed. True interaction is impossible unless one of the 2 bodies changes its vibration accordingly, but how could that happen?

It's your garments, your look and how you present to the world, overall, what places you in a social stratum. You might change your stratum by being introduced to another one by somebody else. In Oracle of Ages, you travel in time in a particular spot in the map, you can't do that everywhere. In this scenario, you couldn't just change your trappings in the street, or else people would react weirdly: are you one of us, have you been in disguise all this time, why are you naked now? Your current stratum is seen as your identity, so shifting it in plain sight will generate weird reactions.

Another scenario: you might collide with a body and suddenly find out your own speed changed, whether you wanted it or not. An unexpected experience might lead to an uncontrolled change in your stratum and your perception in the world. Such a change might be perceived by yourself and others as an affliction or lucky strike, and you'd find that transitioning back to your former speed is hard or even impossible.

A body in 2 worlds at once

Finally, an edge case I find quite interesting: what if you actually exist in 2 different strata, and are perceived as such by others? There are certain individuals that exist in a curious limbo: they can interact with 2 worlds at once, and are perceived to be neither fully here nor there, but instead as visitors or strangers in both planes.

Again, an example from an actual game: in Trollbabe, by Ron Edwards, player characters impersonate trollbabes, who exist somewhere in the spectrum between a human and a troll. They exist in an unique position that allows them to interact with both species in a non-antagonistic way (in theory, at least), but are shunned by both as strangers in their communities. Something similar happens in Monsterhearts, whose characters inhabit both the life of the schoolkid and the criminal errands of the monster, and this intersection creates trouble for them.

If we borrow these examples, we could characterize adventurers as bodies that get to change their stratum, to explore different planes by virtue of them being "native" to no world, which frankly suits what adventurers are/do in many tabletop roleplaying games.

Conclusion? None today, this article was more of a random brainstorming of ideas/thought about game design. Let me know if you enjoy this posting format! I'm kind of exploring how to keep writing in a comfortable way (that is, not feel it like an obligation), plus practicing a bit my written English, until I wait for some motivation to continue working in some of my other projects.

See you next time!