What is the lock for this thread and where was it communicated to the audience?
(Edit: I’m afraid that looks like I’m trying to have a ‘come back’ or something. Just to be clear, that’s not the intention. I’m just not sure why this thread would have a lock on it at all at this point).
The thread doesn’t have a lock at all because it’s not really a story. What are the stakes, for instance?
That aside, what everyone is doing in the thread is trying out options for how to understand limits. We can test out story ideas. We can list definitions. Etc. (One of those options is “listen to Chris” but we all seem to have skipped over that one for some reason.)
I guess where it fails to have a true limit is that we don’t have a fixed number of options we can explore.
As for the physics, I know what you are saying.
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What??!! Most of this thread is me doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to make my thinking line up with you and Chris! Lol.
If you’re talking about the advice that we’re all making it too difficult, you should know that if it weren’t for making things more difficult than they should be I probably wouldn’t do anything at all.
And I figured the lock was going to be Jims patience since he’s the one with access to a button to actually lock the thread!
This sounds like a wonderful character in some book.
Timelock:
One Character: “When do we have to get this accomplished by?”
Second Character: “By ___.”
Optionlock:
One Character: “What kinds of things do we have to do before we can’t do any more?”
Second Character: “You’ll just know!”
[Note: this is not the official definition, and is in fact wrong, yet it works mostly. I think the need for people to get the optionlock down cold is what leads people to say “all stories are quests”, because those have a clear path laid out.]
New Option: “Hey Jim, can you lock the thread please?”
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Probably time for a start/stop thread anyway. Can a character start stopping or stop starting? Let’s discuss!
LOL.
No, what everyone is doing in this thread is blending Space and Time–essentially illustrating the Linear (Male) blindspot for all to see 
I should retitle it “Come on in and see Desireability at work!”
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So which one’d you go with and why?
The local university has three, separate core classes for art majors…space, time and surface. They are considered distinct and different in the arts, I guess.
I guess, when you get down to brass tacks, here’s my issue. We have two categories: Timelock and Optionlock. Here are three story examples:
- A bomb is planted in the middle of the room. A digital timer is counting down, and when it hits zero, the bomb goes boom.
- A bomb is planted in the middle of the room. A little green indicator is slowly draining, and when it hits zero, the bomb goes boom.
- A bomb is planted in the middle of the room. It has a proximity sensor, so getting too close to the bomb will cause it to explode. But you can’t exactly defuse a bomb while standing 30 feet away from it…
I hope the first is unequivocally a Timelock, constrained by the ticking clock. I hope the third is unequivocally an Optionlock, constrained by distance between the characters and the bomb. What I’m trying to argue, I suppose, is that the second story is more like the first than the third. The third example doesn’t need a timer because time doesn’t matter, but in the second example, we don’t need a timer because the green indicator is an analogue for time. I can plot the first two stories the exact same way, with the same beats and the same urgent feeling. But the feeling of the third story is not one of urgency, but of trepidation. The characters are afraid to act, because going towards the bomb threatens causing it to explode. In the others, screw it! Get as close as you like to the bomb; we need to get it defused now, before the timer (or the indicator) run down to zero!
To say examples 2 and 3 are the same because… they both involve space?.. seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand what the point of a Limit is. Or to put it another way, it doesn’t “carve reality at its joints,” to quote Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Storyforms are an attempt to establish meaning. Part of that meaning lies in the difference between Time and Space, exemplified by the Story Limit.
This discussion sounds a lot like the Story Driver Action/Decision discussions where writers struggle with their perception of reality vs. the storyform construct.
Like the Story Driver’s purpose of setting causality, the Story Limit sets the scope of the efforts to problem-solve.
I wasn’t being facetious with pointing out the proclivity for Males to blend time and space. You’ll notice there’s a complete absence of the Female voice in this discussion—probably because they tuned out 60 posts ago.
Option two is not a Timelock because as an Audience member I have no idea how much time is left. This is important because I need to understand the meaning of the story you’re trying to tell and part of that meaning comes from a baseline from which to evaluate the actions and decisions taken to resolve that problem.
So if it’s not a Timelock, it’s an Optionlock? It belongs in the same category as the third example? If I were to write this story:
“911? Help! I’m trapped in a room with a bomb, and there’s a [timer] on it. But you’ve got to hurry–there’s only [30 seconds] left!”
but on a whim, I changed it to:
“911? Help! I’m trapped in a room with a bomb, and there’s a [green indicator] on it. But you’ve got to hurry–there’s only [a teeny-tiny sliver] left!”
Now it’s an entirely different category of story?
Hmm. I actually find your argument compelling. Not the part about urgency vs. trepidation (characters’ subjective viewpoint doesn’t hold a lot of weight in Dramatica), but the idea that the green indicator is as good as a clock. Specifically:
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A Timelock requires a deadline or a fixed amount of time
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Dramatica cannot reasonably specify that only certain units of time are allowed, like only days/hours/minutes and nothing else. An Author could certainly invent units of time, say for a sci-fi, fantasy, or ancient history story.
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Illustrated properly, the bars or pixels on your green indicator would make a reasonable unit of time to communicate. “Uh oh, it took us 10 pixels to get the cover off the bomb. We only have 20 pixels left!”
- (Hmm. You might need to translate it to time the audience & author understand though, like early on someone realizing each pixel is one minute, and then they all talk about the number of minutes left.)
Thus I think it comes down to how you illustrate the green indicator, as time or space. Both ways of illustrating it might have the same feeling of urgency, but that feeling is not what distinguishes a Timelock from an Optionlock.
EDIT: crossposted with @jhull. I agree with all your points Jim, except that I believe there is a way you could communicate the green indicator as time.
Uh oh. Your space and time are starting to run together, Mike!
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Of course there’s a way you could communicate it as time, but it’s clearly not.
@actingpower your second example is almost an Optionlock, but one option is not an Optionlock.
Also, I would have to see it in context of an entire story and how the limit affects everyone.
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Yes, thank you! Your second point is what I meant by “time isn’t sacrosanct,” and your third point is what I meant by “an analogue of time.” I’m glad it makes sense in your own words. 
I guess “urgency” and “trepidation” don’t quite map to what I mean. Let me try a model I’ve used before. Let’s imagine you’re playing on a game show, kind of like Deal or No Deal. There are twenty briefcases in front of you, and one of them contains $1,000,000. Now, I could set you off onto the briefcases, but as it stands, there’s no tension to the game. You can just check each case, one by one, until you find the right one. Now imagine I set the following Limits on your search:
1. You only get 1 minute to open as many cases as you can. (Or you get until a big meter drains, or until the sun sets, or whatever). Imagine this game in your head. How does it feel? The moment I say “go,” what are you going to do? You’re going to race to the closest case and start prying it open! As soon as it’s open, and you know it’s a dud, you’re going to race to the next one. You can’t spend any time looking at the briefcases, because any time spent measuring or analyzing the cases is time you could be spending opening them. That’s what I mean by “urgency.”
EDIT: Now, as you’re imagining this, look up at the timing mechanism. It says some time, or the meter is so full, or the sun is at such a position. Now, as much as you hate to do it, stand still for a short amount of time. Look up again. The timer has lowered, the meter has drained, and the sun has lowered. You don’t need a numerical value to understand that your situation has worsened significantly.
2. Instead of the previous example, I say you can only open three cases. Now how do you feel? When I say “go,” do you immediately jump to the first case and pry it open? No, that would be a waste of one of your three cases. Instead, you’re going to stop and look at each case super-carefully. This one has a red tag on it, and you’ve heard those are slightly more likely to be winners–but this one over here is scuffed on the bottom. Is that because it’s heavier with all the money, and the producer dragged it on the ground? Maybe it’s the one farthest away, or maybe the producers wanted to be sneaky and put it right next to you, knowing you’d overlook it as “too obvious.” That’s what I mean by “trepidation.”
@actingpower, those are cool examples, but I still don’t think “how it feels” has any bearing on whether it’s a Timelock or Optionlock. What matters is how the audience can tell when the story will be over.
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I found this, so Melanie is influencing my views about the flexibility of time units:
Early man was almost all optionlock. The seasons are more conditions than specific times. Even looking at a solstice being marked by ancient stones, is it really a time or set of conditions. Timelock requires a regular repeating time that is independent of what is being measured and used as a temporal measuring stick. So, a solstice or equinox is what is being measured and cannot therefore also be the measuring stick. Planting and harvest are not tied to solstice and equinox, but are around them, one way or the other, more analog than discrete.
Sundials provide true timelocks, but hour glasses do not, unless they are truly an hour, calibrated against a sundial, for example. Otherwise, they can be arbitrary in time and are optionlock devices instead, such as “when the sand runs out.”
So there is still some flexibility, but not a lot. Interesting!
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So much of this is based on how the Audience feels.
Storyforms—of which the Story Limit are a part of—do not describe or correlate to how an Audience feels.
I… I hate this. 
I come to understand this Dramatica theory so clearly, and somehow both creators have this strange, alien interpretation of it! If Space was all that mattered, why didn’t you call it Spacelock?! How can adding a single grain of sand to an hourglass suddenly make it an entirely different breed of story?! How is an anumerical timer somehow more closely related to Aladdin’s 3 wishes than a numerical timer?! The thing that makes “3 days” different from “3 wishes” is that 3 days are constantly ticking by, whereas 3 wishes only tick by when Aladdin takes the Option of using them!
I’m just… I’m just so confused, because the relationship between an anumerical timer and a numerical timer is so obvious to me, and it’s all because I refuse to use the word “Space” to describe a Limit that doesn’t even have the word Space in it! That moment when a character collects one of the seven Chaos Emeralds, or when a murder suspect turns out to be innocent, or when the character takes a step closer to the bomb… those moments feel so distinctive to me as a reader, and it’s completely different from how a Timelock feels. Like in “To Build a Fire.” I don’t know how long it takes to die of hypothermia, but the longer the stranger takes to build the fire, the closer he is to death.
It… It is obvious what I’m feeling, right? Timelock stories are about rate of change, whereas Optionlock stories are about discrete, sudden jumps. That feeling where you’re falling, and you can see the ground coming towards you, and you know your hitting the ground is beyond your control, versus the feeling of Dante descending into Hell, step by step, each Circle like a sudden slap in the face because nothing compelled them to go further down but sheer curiosity. They’re… they’re different, aren’t they? Surely those aren’t the same thing because they’re both going downwards!
FAKE EDIT: I don’t know how to explain this in any other words except for “feel,” but maybe that’s because I’m an INFP. Call it what you like: the structure of the story, the pacing, the character motivation. It’s different, in a way I can’t explain.
I’d like to try an exercise based on Jim and Chris’ idea that you and I, and now Mike to some degree it seems, are blending space and time. It may turn out dumb, but oh well, hasn’t stopped me yet.
Take your green indicator. The indicator alone is clearly a spatial construct. There are ten sections lit up and every ten minutes one will go dark such that at the end of one hundred minutes, something has to happen. That changing of the light is an indication of the flow of time. The flow of time is a temporal construct. But the changing of the green light is a spatiotemporal construct, right? So how can we divide the spatiotemporal construct of a light that changes every ten minutes into two columns, it’s spatial parts and its temporal parts? What would go in each column?