Back when we used to "author" scripts for training scenarios, we used to "make" them realistic by having them "branch" depending on what the trainee did, according to the path that the trainee "chose." I think they do very similar stuff in video games nowadays. The really good ones have dozens if not hundreds of possible branches and by the time you raise the number of choices at one branch node to the power of the number at the last one, the possibilities seem infinite---and they kind of are---but the outcomes don't seem to be. The array of details associated with the outcomes are mind-boggling in diversity, but the outcomes are all related in a sense. Even the winning and losing scenarios are related. They're different roles in the same play. In the end, Cat Woman is not going to swoop down and same-sex-marry Lois Lane and go off and produce identical twin baboons from two separate wombs. The possibilities aren't really infinite; the possible outcomes are innumerable within certain limits or guidelines. It's like the old deal about there being an infinite number of points between any two points on a line. There are an infinite number of places to land between the two points, but each one, like the infinity of others, is on the line and between the two points. They all have that in common.
So, could you have a relationship with someone you like, a partnership as it were, that was not stuck in a bunch of predetermined creek beds and arroyos that, however diverse, all flowed downhill to the same river? Could you have a "meta-relationship" that occurred on the level of the people who wrote the damn video game, not at the level of the characters contained within it?
I must think. But first I must eat . . .
