This is basically what they do in Ex Machina.
What exactly constitutes “a day” is not really specific, nor is the arrival/departure of the helicopter.
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Except, your post doesn’t really go against what I was trying to say. In fact, I read the entire post as validating what I was trying to argue. It says the same thing in a different way.
Except that this:
is precision.
Unfortunately, in day-to-day parlance, “precision” and “accuracy” are mixed around. In technical terms, though, precision means able to repeat something consistently, while accuracy means matching it to “the true value”, whatever that might be.
I feel like what you describe is that a Timelock needs to be precise, but not necessarily accurate. Though, I’m not entirely sure whether I believe that it doesn’t need both to within some limit. (Especially now that I read back on the post, and see that it could be seen as either.)
All that said, I’ve never cared for stories that use the obvious Timelock, so… Grain of salt?
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Depends on how the story measures a sun-turning. Even without words for time, as humans this audience should still be able to handle timelocks. They should still be able to take the perspective of a numbered sequence passing independently of space. If the audience doesn’t have words for or a concept of time, then perhaps the audience would translate this to an optionlock and misunderstand its meaning to the story. Or maybe they would have difficulty understanding how a sun-turning is a number and not the place where the sun meets the horizon and think the story lacks a meaningful limit. Or maybe something else. And yet that story, regardless of the language of the audience or author, is still coming to end when time runs out.
Depends on how the story sees it, doesn’t it? The story could take the perspective of the characters not on the ship and say that they’ve found a way to stretch out time in which case you a have a space lock. Or the story could take the perspective of the character on the ship in which case the other character hasn’t stretched out time but found a way to cover much more space in that time in which case you have a time lock (presumably the bomb is defused but as time is still running, the bomb could still be reset to go off, story can’t end until that time runs out).
As long as it’s treated as a moment of time, right? Doesn’t matter as long as we know the story ended because we reached day five.
Does the story end when they maintain it for a certain distance, or a certain time?
Just thinking out loud here. Speed isnt space or time. it’s a rate of movement usually described as a measure of space compared against a measure of time. But it could just as easily…well, er, just as accurately, I guess…be described by the increased energy an object carries as it nears the speed of light if one did not want to use measures of space and time. Of course the only reason I can think of to do that would be in an attempt to clarify whether your story had a spacelock or a timelock. 
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Sorry @Hunter! I cross-posted with you. After I saw your post I should have said something, because you’re right, I did notice that you were making the same points.
I also ended up not going against what earlier posts were saying very much either … I had initially thought I disagreed but in the process of writing my post and organizing my thoughts, I came around to clearer thinking.
Regarding precision vs. accuracy, I was going back to my days as a physics major in university. In the sciences, precision has to do with the amount of uncertainty in the measurement, and accuracy describes how close the measurement is to the true value. So you could have a very precise measurement of say 10cm plus/minus 1 nanometre, which is not very accurate if the thing you measured is actually 5cm. Meanwhile, the measurement of 4.9cm plus/minus 1.0cm is much less precise, but much more accurate.
So all I meant there is how precisely is the time limit defined – to the millisecond vs. minute vs. day vs. month…
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Just watched it. Just the movie I needed, so I say totally worth the price of admission.
When do we start the discussion? Tomorrow when the sun goes down, or 18 hours from now? Your choice.
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I guess we’re moving on to Fight Club so I’m going to add that I think the creators of the movie also don’t know if the sun setting is a timelock or an optionlock, based on how they introduce it and then wrap it up.
Importantly, this has no bearing on the effect of the Limit. At least not on me when I watched it.
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We don’t have to do Fight Club - we could start with this one. Much more cheerier to be sure. I actually missed the first 15 min. so I’ll have to watch it again, but I just liked the idea of the Limit, and thought it would be a good place to start.
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We should wait until it’s free. I won’t have a chance to watch it again before the rental runs out.
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Just got early access! Watching it later today. I do agree that we should wait to discuss though, for those who need to wait until it’s available on Disney+.
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It has a bad case of the spacetimes. But I think it’s a spacelock that feels like it’s running out of time.
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Totally agree.
Doesn’t help that they start a 24hr clock tho…
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No, but it seems like they only look at the watch to talk about how they’re running out of time. And I don’t remember seeing it at all when the sun actually goes down…though to be fair, I don’t recall seeing the sun go down either. Just the father fading away.
But if you look at everything in the story and not just the end, the tendency of the story is for things to come to an end because of space. Not only is the sun setting, but they run out of gas, the rope falls off, Ian masters a series of spells (extending their options), they come to the end of the water, they follow the map all the way back to where they started, and Ian has a list of options that he goes to check off and realizes he got to do all of them…just not how he thought.
And I can’t think of anything else in the story that came to an end because of time or felt like it had to be done in time. Like, if the story limit were time, maybe the Manticore’s Tavern could have been visited during happy hour and she couldn’t help not because she was afraid of a lawsuit but because she still had 49 more minutes before her shift ended, or maybe they could have had to rush to the Pawn Shop because it closes at 6, or instead of using everything he’d learned in previous spells to do the hardest ones Ian would have had to have trained for a certain amount of time first, or could only use the staff for a certain amount of time before it stopped working without a new Phoenix gem.
Not that it couldn’t be a timelock and still have them running out of gas, etc, but with the story limit being somewhat confused, I think you can look at the tendency of the rest of the story and make a pretty good case for space.
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Yes, agree on both. They are pretty lax about a hard deadline.
This is really interesting! I’m not sure this matters, but it feels like this must matter!
Thinking about the end of the water… the water was the “room” they were looking in, and what he finds is “played catch with dad” (though he doesn’t recognize it at first).
Now that I’ve typed this out, this seems like a Requirement or Prerequisite, not an option. Or maybe an Option (water) + Requirement (item on checklist).
Only thing that comes to mind: taking the freeway is faster, taking the Road of Peril costs them time. Interestingly, they end up doing both (so, both options) and realize that they right way to think about the problem was to ask “what are my options?” and not “what is the fastest way to do this?”
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Saw it the other night. Great movie! Whole family enjoyed it.
I was thinking this too, that the supposed timelock is actually part of the story’s message, i.e. an illustration of the perspective that needs to change.
And although there are several moments in the movie where characters are concerned about the remaining time … time never seems to “force the story to a close” or “bring about the story’s conclusion” which are the usual definitions of Story Limit.
Meanwhile, running out of space on their journey, of different places / options to find the Phoenix Stone, does bring about the story’s conclusion. Once they end up back in their neighbourhood, their options have dwindled (seemingly to zero, but actually there’s one place left to look).
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I’m thinking it could either be that we are just watching options run out—we’re told up front that there’s one option and that it’s the sun going down, but there are actually more options than that—or it could be that the Storymind has taken the perspective that things are limited by space. Not just the story as a whole, but individual acts and scenes as well.
Or it could be me looking for something that isn’t there. But I believe the story limit is supposed to affect things in the story at a level not offered by the Dramatica software, but at a level that the software does calculate nonetheless. So even if you can’t point to a clear story limit because of confused storytelling, assuming there is a story limit in the story you should still be able to look at the rest of the story for clues to what the limit is. And that’s all I was doing.
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It probably affects the story at the level beneath the Plot Sequence Report, which is actually programmed into the Dramatica Story Engine but isn’t available to the users as it’s in deeper than anyone would ever need to go in order to communicate their story.
By the way, congratulations on joining the team at NarrativeFirst, @Greg!
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A Theme Sequence? Could be. Or maybe it could affect the temporal order of how the Issues and Counter issues play out, or maybe PRCO. Could be a couple places, I spose.
Thanks, @RailwayAdventurer. I’m super excited about it! You can find me occasionally replying to questions emailed in through Subtext so send all your theory related questions and keep me busy!
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I think the premise of this statement is wrong. The characters cannot affect any story point, including the Limit, because they are inside the story. A limit can only be understood ‘outside’ of the story – objectively. Limits are, not may be. Characters are constructs of storytelling used to relate the narrative to an audience. By definition, a Limit brings about the climax because a limit has been reached where there is nothing new to try that doesn’t involve repeating. The end of the Limit is the “Shit or get off the pot” moment in the story.
The purpose of a Limit is to provide a defined context within which the narrative may be explored in a closed system.
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A timelock is a Limit that uses units of time (of whatever size) and once exhausted brings about the climax.
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An optionlock is a Limit that uses units of space or options (of whatever number) and once explored brings about the climax.
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Thanks Chris. I think I was trying to make the same point you were making in the below post when you said “the story limit was not locked”. But you’re right, I was looking at it backwards.