What’s with all the time loops?

What’s with all the Time Loops?

What’s with all the time loops? Whether it’s Deathloop, 12 Minutes, The Forgotten City, Lemnis Gate or Hades the genre of entertainment revolving around loops or time loops is all the rage lately. This ‘recursive genre’ lends itself to the video game format because the point of contemporary video games is to endlessly repeat a sequence until you have completed it, no matter how many times you fail or ‘die’. This is one of the apparent appeals vaunted by the rather unpleasant and gatekeepy fan community of Dark Souls insisting that this repeated loop of ‘try, die, try again’ is the pathway to “git gud” as if they were the first people to understand that practice makes perfect. But it is interesting then that films like Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, Tenet and even Doctor Strange have adopted this framework too over the years but less as a mechanical necessity but more as a way of exploring its psychological effects on the characters. What the genre almost always prompts at some point in the narrative is a descent into nihilism due to the character’s belief that their actions are meaningless resulting in either gross excess like over consumption of alcohol and drugs or a lack of respect for life itself resulting in either repeated suicide attempts or outright murder which is where a lot of these time loop mechanics in video games start. This is nothing new, however, with the idea of endless repetition going back even as far as Greek mythology.

At this point everyone knows about Sisyphus, right? The man cursed to roll a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down again and repeat the process for eternity? Or what about Prometheus? Who stole from the Gods and was cursed to have his liver pecked out by an eagle again and again, forever? The allegory that life repeats and recurs is pervasive throughout different cultures across the world because it is a great truth. Life is repetitive. And the more something repeats the more used to it you become and, ultimately, familiarity breeds contempt. It’s why most people hate their job (and are finally comfortable admitting that it seems, seen in the “nobody wants to work” rhetoric spouted by exploitative employers at the moment) given that most jobs require the repetition of the same task, day in, day out. But in the…