Indisputably a legend in the video game industry, Will Wright has now turned his attention to television production. We sat down to discuss his thoughts on co-executive producing Bar Karma. This interview is part two in a three-part series. 

Part one of this interview is available here. 

Q: “Bar Karma” is the first of the many possible Creation shows. What’s this show about?

A: The show actually came out of a treatment that the fans synergistically wrote, and it involves a bar that’s displaced from space and time. People come into this bar and there’s this karmic re-examination of their life, and the impact on the world. And in most cases, these people are downstream of the timeline of a very significant impact on the world, and they can figure out what that is when they come to the bar, and in most cases, how to prevent it.

Q: So are they traveling through time? How does this show’s theory of time travel relate to what else we’ve seen in science fiction?

A: Time travel is a very frequent subject in science fiction, and I’ve always been dissatisfied with the way it’s generally handled, so I actually kind of raised my hand at one point and said, "Let's try to make a time travel thing that has some amount of plausibility." A lot of times, time travel stories involve paradoxes, the grandfather paradox, etc. When you think about them, they don’t work -- what if you go back and meet your mother and then she doesn’t get married to your father and all of that.

So at least right now our basic premise is that we’re not going back in time. We’re branching new universes. The bar is basically a branch off a universe, and thus it avoid any paradox and it can have a sort of continuity in the space-time continuum.

Everything you’ve done back in time, back on your trip, is part of a whole new branch, and original timeline is basically untouched. So if there’s something in the original timeline, typically bad, about to happen, they bring somebody into this bar, and they have an opportunity after interacting with this person to affect the course of the new universe relative to the old one. They haven’t actually changed the future – the old future is still going to happen in the original timeline.

Q: How does the branching universe theory work then? Is it a metaverse?

A: I was dissatisfied by the idea of a metaverse, this idea of an infinite amount of universes, where every possible branch happens. That seems like way too many universes. It means it doesn’t matter what you do – it’s going to happen in one universe or another. I think creating a universe should be a much more significant endeavor. We wanted a universe with just minimal branching – one chance to take a different path. That puts a lot of drama behind every episode on the show, but it allows you to think about minor things you do in your life that can have a major impact on the world. And the branching is being controlled for a very specific reason, which is basically to preserve some version of the world that does not collapse in some way. So in some sense, it would be about emergence, it would be about chaos, where a minor tweak would send it off a completely different trajectory.

Q: The butterfly effect…

A: Yeah, that idea of butterfly effect, which is used as a label for chaos theory. But it also plays really well to that ancient idea of karma, in which little things you might do in your life compound and have amplified effects.

Q: Do you believe in karma?

A: I mean, in certain ways, yeah. I think each individual, no matter where you are or what level of society you are, you have an ability to profoundly impact the system. I don’t think we usually have the visibility on the day to day level to see the impact of our decisions – it could something you taught your kid, or some person you helped one day – but these are things that if you followed the causal chain of how it flowed out and rippled into the world, the impact is enormous. 

Q: Do you believe in fate? (Especially since time travel stories about meddling with events in the future usually boil down to a question of fate versus free will…)

A: That’s a long discussion (chuckles). The short version – with free will, you get into human psychology. I think a lot of what we’re doing in our internal decision making process is the result of a subconscious intelligence that we’re not aware of. You can also take the discussion back into quantum mechanics -- how can you ever predict the state of an electron in a shell? In some sense we live in a probabilistic universe, not a deterministic universe, and where free will comes is in our brain chemistry and a level of quantum uncertainty. Einstein used to say he didn’t believe God played with dice, and he rejected quantum mechanics for that reason. It might just be that our brains are wired to a notion where we have hope that what we do in the world is meaningful. 

Q: James, the bartender, uses cards and Bocce as metaphors to try to explain the theories linking alternate universes and karma…

A: There are a lot of metaphors about this. In some sense, they’re navigating down this river with all these rocks, and the boat is hitting these rocks, but they’re able to jump into a lifeboat and get around the rock before they hit it. And every boat has a lifeboat in it. And they’re like the lifeboat of the universe.

Q: Will we see what it’s like when they hit the rocks? See the actions outside of the bar?

A: We want to have visibility into the rock that the boat is going to hit, what that wreck looks like, and to have the opportunity to steer away from that. The format we use to illustrate that remains to be seen. 

Q: But then the question becomes -- why does the boat keep hitting all these rocks? And will the folks running this bar have a foil who seeks to ensure that they don’t avert all the rocks, that they hit certain ones that perhaps they were meant to?

A: You know, at some point, it might develop. I want the community to be very involved with this, so I don’t want to pass along too much of the “this is how things work.” We need to leave a large creative void in all of this, so they can shape what it does. I think our role is to start in a good spot, where they can then decide, and it becomes a community discussion.