We Do Not Live in a Painting

When I first got to the turn in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I was mad. Now note that the turn is not at all what it’s telegraphed to be. Or at least, not just what it’s telegraphed to be. Unfortunately, if I don’t spoil several things about the game, this will be the most annoyingly elliptical post in history. So be forewarned.

The turn is not that the plot of the game is about grief and family trauma. It’s not even something so pedestrian as the fact that Verso is the son of not just one villain, but both the villains. All of that is better telegraphed than any of the enemy’s attacks in the game. (I tell myself that I’m terrible at timing my parries because they’re all so arhythmic, and clearly it’s my background as a musician that fucks me up, since I expect them to land on a beat. That’s clearly the problem.)

No, the major turn comes in the Epilogue which, annoyingly, occurs between Act 2 and Act 3. (The game isn’t bad, I promise, it just suffers from psychosis levels of Being French.) You learn that the entire plot of the game thus far has occurred inside a painting. The painting was originally painted by the second main character, Verso, who is, in fact, dead. It’s all very complicated.

It’s Simulation Theory, but make it French.

After considering the Clair Obscur version of the theory, however, it does raise an interesting variant of a hypothesis that is otherwise as dull as it is stupid.¹ What if the simulation is, in some way, rivalrous? I don’t mean in the economic sense of agents competing for scarce resources that cannot be shared. Clearly the real world works that way. But what if there exists a world simulation in which the rules of the simulation are not controlled by a single, unified set of simulators.

(I should note here that a similar theme was hinted to at the end of AI LIMIT, but that game’s plot was such incoherent trash that I don’t even feel bad spoiling it.)

This could provide interesting explanations for a number of historical oddities. (All of these already have explanations, I’m just saying these explanations would be more fun.)

Take magic and miracles. A central tenant of any good history should be that people in history were as smart, perceptive, and rational as we are today. And yet belief in magic is pervasive across cultures throughout the entirety of human history. In a rivalrous simulation, this has a nicely parsimonious explanation: a different Simulator was more in control in the past, so magic and miracles actually worked. At some point, a rival to the Magic Simulator managed to nerf magic in a patch, and so now witch bottles no longer work and the local spirit healer can no longer cast out demons.

Demons, angels, and all sorts of other mythical beasts make sense under this model as well. A Simulator was having all sorts of fun writing in dragons and angelic wheels-within-wheels of eyes. Then a different Simulator (perhaps the Magic Simulator) changed the meta and Weird Beasts fell out of favor.

This also has the makings of a good conspiratorial omni-cause. Honey bees disappearing for unclear reasons? A new patch is rolling out that removes them and they’re disappearing as it propagates between servers. The Iberian Peninsula has a massive power outage all at once? Two Simulators are fighting over territory and one glitched the other one’s entire power grid. Rockets that would advance the billionaires’ quest to go to Mars keep blowing up? The Simulators don’t want us to find out that they downsized Mars’ servers to save on credits and it’s now really low res up there.

From the Chicxulub Impact to Kennedy’s Head Just Doing That to the fact that Bigfoot doesn’t appear on video anymore despite cellphone videos being everywhere, Rivalrous Simulation Theory, can be the cause of it all.

Just please no one explain it to Joe Rogan.