Dreams
I had a long nightmare about being in a video game. This game took place in a strange old house which was supposedly a college dorm or the house of a friend from college or something. We thought in the beginning that the point of the game was simply to be able to leave the house -- since the exit door was locked -- but this itself was quite complicated. It turned out that it was possible to leave the house by finding a pair of glasses which one woman had owned and had lost years before; if they were returned to her, she would turn out to have the needed key, or she would know where it was, or something.
However, this was where the real troubles began: the game became a horror story as different approaches to actually leaving went wrong in various ways -- in one case by encountering a powerful monster who slaughtered the entire group of people in the house, but in the more common case by discovering, just as the game was about to be won (or so we thought), that one character had been murdered mysteriously.
This was entirely deterministic: what we did directly decided which character was murdered, how, and when, even though the characters were definitely not murdered by other characters but by some evil forces within the house. But if a character was found dead, it was necessary to start over again and try a different strategy; having someone in the party killed was tantamount to losing. Because the results were deterministic, we could try a different approach and see what difference it made.
Actually, it was a big logic problem, quite possibly the infamous SATISFIABILITY. The odd thing was that the inputs here were things like "my character takes the golden key", "my character remembers to obtain the rope", "my character finds the spectacles", "my character gives the spectacles back to the woman", "my character also finds the comb"... there was rarely actually a visible connection of any sort between our actions and the results. (Some actions, like obtaining keys and unlocking doors, were actually targeted specifically to accomplish something in a way that we could see. However, almost all actions had hidden effects which had no apparent connection to the actions themselves: for example, when you take the comb, your friend is subsequently found strangled in a different room on the other side of the house, even though taking the comb was not visible to anyone -- still, somehow, it led to or allowed your friend's murder. It seemed that the game was one big Butterfly Effect demonstration, except that you could repeat it and try something else. "Opening that door at the beginning seems to result in the presence of this monster later on -- though for no apparent reason -- so we'd better not do that next time. Except, wait, it wasn't a controlled experiment, because we also tried retrieving the spectacles first, before obtaining the other key. That was another change, maybe that was what did it."
It was very scary; we had to do the same thing over and over again, like the movie Groundhog Day, except instead of outcomes like the girl not liking the main character, the bad outcomes always involved the death of some character. (The main character in Groundhog Day almost never died accidentally.) And unlike the movie, the things we did rarely had any apparent connection to the outcome, except for the two rules that performing the same actions a second time would still result in the same outcome, and that some combination of actions existed which would produce a successful outcome.
We also had the sense that what we did was related to the outcome by some Boolean logic expression, or a family of them: if you've taken the spectacles and the rope but not the comb and you have the silver key and the rotten floor hasn't collapsed yet, and you try to give the spectacles to the woman, then this one character will die at that moment in the far room. And so on. The thought that the death of all of us in the scary house was actually determined through simple Boolean algebra was not in any way comforting to us as we were immersed in the game. It was still terrifying.
It's also pretty clear that, if you have an unknown expression you're trying to satisfy, there isn't any strategy other than brute force which is guaranteed to work. In theory, this meant that we might be in the house, dying in strange ways, for thousands of years, until we finally hit upon the particular random combination of actions which alone allowed everyone to survive and escape. (What was worse, we didn't necessarily know about certain variables until we had tried a number of combinations of other variables: the fact that whether or not you picked up the comb caused someone to die didn't even come up as an issue until we had already done the things that were necessary in order to discover the comb.)
Most adventure games which are deterministic are fun or interesting to play because you can use logic and reason to solve puzzles. In this one, you use brute force to solve puzzles, and meanwhile, this being a dream, there wasn't a clear division between the player outside the game and the players inside the game, so when you found your friend lying on a platform with a rope drawn tight around his neck, you didn't say "Aha, the logical expression has failed to be satisfied this time and we'll have to start over and try the next combination"; you said "Oh my God, he's been murdered!".
I never got out of the house with everyone alive; instead, I woke up, and that was a different ending for those characters, like turning the computer off.
There was a definite sense that there was an "underlying reality" within which an omniscient observer could see that everything was happening for a perfectly sensible reason. At the same time, it wasn't clear at all whether the game had been structured so that we would eventually gain any real knowledge of that reality; the source code was completely closed off to us.
