Hey there, and welcome to Play Noggin.
I’m Julian, your brain’s Player Two.
A lot of games use scientific principles to
lend their stories an air of realism.
Sometimes they don’t quite nail it -- which
keeps Neil deGrasse Tyson up at night.
Some games, however, mix and match scientific
ideas and straight science fiction in a cocktail
that’s tasty to drink, but won’t confuse
the refined palate of a scientist.
One series of games stands out in that regard,
and that’s Zero Escape.
Now, we love Zero Escape.
The mix of interesting characters and pseudo-scientific
insanity makes for fantastic storytelling
and engaging puzzle-solving.
But one thing Zero Escape is known for is
mixing truth and fiction together, potentially
confusing you about which parts are real,
and which parts are just there to convince
you an ancient Egyptian princess could be
frozen in a special form of ice to keep her
preserved despite being stored for thousands
of years in a pyramid.
These games are plot- and puzzle-heavy, and
it’s impossible to talk about the ins and
outs without giving away key information.
Consider this your spoiler warning.
Zero Escape games each feature a similar setup:
A group of nine people find themselves trapped
in some sort of facility, and they are forced
to play a deadly game by a mysterious antagonist
named Zero.
There are a ton of scientific concepts tossed
around in each game, and sometimes they’re
just red herrings that have nothing to do
with the plot, so to simplify, we’d thought
we’d talk about the most important one from
each game that makes each story possible.
In Zero Escape, the morphogenetic field is
treated as a sort of catch-all for psychic
communication between people and even across
time.
The main character of 999, Junpei, is able
to telepathically send his knowledge of the
future back in time to his friend, to help
her solve a puzzle that saves her life.
A “morphogenetic field” sounds like some
mystic mumbo-jumbo your crazy new-age aunt
believes in, but at one time it was a real
biological theory.
It was first introduced in 1910 as a way of
explaining how different cells knew what they
should do in an organism.
Biologists, for example, can take cells from,
say, the limb of an embryo, transplant them
to another embryo, and they would grow and
function as a limb.
As we learned more about chromosomes and genes,
however, this theory lost most of its support,
since we finally understood how genes function.
The Zero Escape games draw from the work of
a man named Rupert Sheldrake, who sees the
concept of morphogenetic fields, and specifically
what he refers to as morphic resonance, as
an inherent ability of organisms to share
knowledge through the ether and across generations.
His work has largely been discredited, however.
Even still, you’ll have to play 999 a bunch
even if you do everything right the first
time because they decided sending information
through the ether was a crucial game mechanic.
I’m so sick of this first room.
In Virtue’s Last Reward, as in the rest
of the trilogy, you’ll experience a story
that is told over several diverging timelines.
Because of the main character Sigma’s abilities,
he is able to pass knowledge to his other
“selves” through the morphogenetic field,
thus enabling him to solve puzzles using information
he wouldn’t otherwise have access to in
a particular timeline.
This is the game that took the often-hated
“backtracking” mechanic found in countless
other games and made it not just interesting,
but compelling.
You’ll be glad to jump back and forth along
the timelines, solving puzzles, because the
game makes it so fun.
If you don’t mind a really annoying rabbit
mocking you in the meantime.
The game brings up the concept of Schrodinger’s
Cat to help explain some of the strange, quantum
mechanics-related plot points.
Erwin Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment
wherein a cat is placed in a closed box along
with poison, a radioactive isotope, a geiger
counter, and a hammer.
There would be a 50/50 chance of the radioactive
material decaying and being detected by the
geiger counter.
If it decays, the hammer to smash the poison
bottle, killing the cat.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics
states that an object in a physical system
simultaneously exists in all possible configurations
until it is observed.
Therefore, the cat is both alive and dead
until the box is opened, at which point it
settles on a single state of being.
What you might not know is that Schrodinger
proposed this theory to point out how ridiculously
flawed the Copenhagen interpretation is.
That interpretation may hold up for electrons,
but larger and more complex systems like cats
can’t be explained so easily.
Then again who really understands cats?
Virtue’s Last Reward leans pretty heavily
on the Copenhagen interpretation, positing
that, if the box is opened and the cat is
observed alive, there must also be a universe
where the cat is observed dead.
This establishes the multiple timelines, which
become the crux of the game’s story.
So, once again, Zero Escape uses a real-world
scientific theory, but it selects the elements
that will make the most compelling science
fiction story.
Nothing wrong with that, just don’t cite
it as a source in your physics papers.
Zero Time Dilemma is the final game in the
trilogy.
This game’s Zero is the son of two characters
in his little death game.
That’s no way to treat your parents, who
raised you?
Part of Zero’s plan is to give himself the
ability to “mind hack,” which amounts
to about what it sounds like and is pure science
fiction.
But the way he goes about giving himself these
powers is through epigenetics.
That is, the study of heritable changes in
gene expression that don’t actually change
the DNA sequence itself so, a change in phenotype,
without a change in genotype.
The cells then read the genetic code differently,
which can lead to both positive and negative
changes.
Epigenetics is controlled by a several different
modifiers, called “tags.”
The two biggest, though, are methyl groups
and histones.
Methyl groups function by switching different
genes on or off.
Histones, on the other hand, control the degree
to which a gene is expressed.
Sort of like a volume knob for your body.
Delta uses the stress of the Decision Game
in Zero Time Dilemma to forcibly alter the
genetic expression of his parents, which,
in turn, blesses him with psychic powers.
Obviously.
In reality, epigenetics does have a sizable
impact on your life.
Too much stress, lack of sleep, and substance
abuse can all rewrite your genetic code in
some pretty negative ways we’re talking
Alzheimer’s, cancer, things like that.
But positive actions, like eating better,
getting more sleep, and even mindfulness meditation,
has been shown to alter our genetic expression
in some pretty great ways.
And our epigenetic changes have the potential
to last for generations.
So Delta had the right idea, but maybe he
could have done it in a less gruesome and
murder-y way?
I dunno, I’m just throwing out suggestions
here.
Thanks for watching.
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