: ...I kinda bought into Grasshopper/Mark Levin/Steve Levinson's idea that you
: yourself are using your own cybernetic junction to jump around in time and
: between timelines. It just sounds nice because for once, it's you who is
: truly in charge (and the real kicker is that all the while other people
: assume they're leading you around when you're just manipulating them).
Ironically, my biggest objection* to that is sort of the same thing you were saying about Roots and Radicals; it's putting words into the player's mouth, so to speak; or choices into his name. The actual people playing Infinity don't have the option to either play through a timeline until it reaches disastrous ends, or to travel back in time to try something different; they just find themselves suddenly teleported back in time. Unless there's actually an ability to make a choice, it seems like a stretch to infer that players made a choice there.
Even in Eternal, where I try to give players actual choices in the branch levels (even though only one answer is "correct")... on Roots and Radicals it felt kind of forced to have Hathor rant at you to make it explicit that, story-wise at least, you (or the character you're controlling) have made some decision, even though you-the-guy-at-the-keyboard were never really presented with any real choice to make. Since nobody in Infinity ever acts in such a way as to imply that you made some decision, and there's no actual decisions presented to the player, it seems like a stretch to infer that the player-character has made such decisions.
(*actually my biggest objection is that it seemed blatantly obvious to me, until I heard the Levin-Levinson interpretation, that Thoth was sending you back, since you always leave a timeline right as Thoth is uncovered in that timeline, and always right after reading a terminal from him).
