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.
The monkey paw here is that you are loading the world state and that includes you and your memories. You would never remember using this ability. Maybe you already have it!
People who take time to formulate a sentence before speaking are actually infuriating on some level. Like I've got this friend, son of a diplomat, NEVER puts his foot in his mouth. Can you imagine trying to have a fast argument with someone who considers everything they say!
I can say from experience that it is discomfiting, and maddening if you're actually passionate about the topic.
I despise Fast Travel in video games, to me it's a feature that appears necessary because no thoughts were given about making the environment interesting to traverse
But in real life ? I crave the time saving it offers
If there's enough offer to avoid overcrowding, public transport feels like that. You get into a special room, you have a loading screen where you can listen to some music, read a book, or even just have a small nap, and then you get out in your destination.
In Rimworld you can click on a pawn and see all of its health stats, stuff like heart blockages, leg and arm injuries, immunity progress of diseases and other things like that. It would make things so much easier. I'd look at my health panel and see "Common Cold (87% immunity)"
No one has said a HUD yet? Being able to instantly recall information about objects in your environment, how to use them, red outline for nearby dangers, etc? Wouldn't even have to be Terminator T800 level for it to be immensely useful. Google Glass didn't get there, but maybe Apple Vision Pro can help pave the way.
Vision Pro lacks the sensors for that. They skimped out on direction finding capabilities, despite already having the tech in their phones (for their tags)
In their infinite wisdom they built it as a standalone single user sandbox instead of as an environmentally aware terminal
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?
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.
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.
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'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
Also high frequency trading generating money from dips/spikes in stocks' values that are too short lived to affect anything on a human scale. And banks lending money (and thus generating interests from it) they don't actually have yet but I think it's related to the fiat currency thing ?
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.
That would also be awesome. Also just walking normally. I broke my ankle/leg severely in October while walking my puppy and my gait is going to be slightly fucked up forever from it. But I'm a cyborg now, which is dope.
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
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.
On the one hand, yes, but on the other I'm a real dick when I know I can save scum consequences away. I wouldn't go totally nuts in real life with real people, but you know someone would keep a save they shoot up over and over again like it's Black Mirror.
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.
Difficulty setting. I play on easy mode and DGAF what anyone thinks because my time is precious and I’m playing for fun. I decide what’s fun.
Creative/cheat mode…let me just pause, build myself a fantastic 10 story house… Open inventory and spawn a wife, 3 kids, a dog and 2 billion dollars in my pocket. Oh no, does that mean I can't get achievements because I cheated? Oh well.
Steal a car, lose the cops and it’s mine now. No consequences.
Important story moments of your life play as cutscenes which you have no control over…so you can’t mess it up and know you’re exactly where you should be. This would be peaceful.
Hints & tutorials.
Play as a different character.
Choose your appearance instantly -gender, body shape, skin/eye/hair color, size of nose/ears/eyebrows, clothes, accessories
Things you buy spawn instantly wherever you are
Change tattoos instantly, including removing
Closed captioning for all dialogue and other sounds
Increase skills simply by grinding, even for things like skateboarding, singing, playing music, acrobatics etc that require raw talent and YEARS of training/practice
Important story moments of your life play as cutscenes which you have no control over…so you can’t mess it up and know you’re exactly where you should be. This would be peaceful.
This would be great, but imagine being in a cutscene and realizing you're the antagonist and that you're going to be killed by some brat with a sword.
Or, like you can unpause, but also everyone else can also pause. You're just going about your day, eating some soup, and someone in India is in the middle of an exam and wants to take an extra moment to think.
So you and everyone else is frozen in time while they search their recollection for some bit of trivia they are supposed to know. Your spoon, full of yummy soup, is inches from your mouth, but you can't even smell it because the air is paused, too. Time has stopped, but not your consciousness.
Unpause, your spoon finishes its trip to your mouth. Time pauses again before you get a chance to swallow, because someone in Canada is on a date and is nervous about asking too many questions.
This is life, now. Pause, unpause, pause, unpause, nobody knowing why or when someone else will hit pause, or how long it will last.
Just being able to dump hundreds of items into my backpack and have them automatically sorted and being able to find what I want instantly by typing into a search field will make my day.
Running and jumping all the time without issue. I'm not old per se, but I'm no spring chicken. I'm only 35, in decent shape, and I have a pretty active job, but I still cringe at the thought of the sheer impact of landing from jumping as high as I can. I was not kind to my knees in my late teens and early twenties. And I'm so goddamn tired.
Private maps that show you where you've been and what missions you need to complete there.
Right now, all I have is the thermal map of photos linked to a Google account, and that is way too creepy because the location-based data is housed with a transnational corporation and is dependent on photos I feed to the machine.
It would be pretty much full at all times in the first world, but would gradually get shorter. And then when it's someone really old every damn thing would like halve their health.
It would make life easier for medical people, though.