The Alters

On the wall of the quantum computer room, Jan Dolski's life is drawn as a tree. The trunk is the childhood every version of him shares. The branches are the decisions: each fork a place where the life could have gone two ways and went one. Jan can select a fork and instruct the machine to grow the man who went the other way. He does this because he is alone on a planet whose sunrise will burn him alive, because his home is a wheel-shaped base that has to keep rolling to stay inside the shrinking band of shadow, and because one man cannot keep a wheel that size rolling. So he staffs the base with himself. The miner who never got out of the mines. The scientist who stayed in school. The technician who took the safe job and the refiner who did not. Each of them is Jan Dolski. None of them is the Jan standing at the console deciding which of them to make.

The Alters, made by the Warsaw studio 11 bit and released in 2025, is organized around a mechanic that externalizes something nearly everyone does in private and nearly no one does aloud. Everyone keeps a roster of the people they did not become. The one who stayed. The one who left. The one who said yes to the offer, or no to it, or who never got the offer because an earlier fork had gone the other way. These figures live at the edge of ordinary thought, consulted at three in the morning and after funerals and whenever a life feels like the wrong branch of a tree that had better branches. The game takes that private roster and gives it a payroll. The counterfactual self, the person one would have been had a single decision gone differently, is here a coworker who eats the rations, contests the schedule, and questions the leadership.

The frame this essay wants to give the reader is that The Alters is a playable thought experiment about personal identity, and that its real subject is not the science fiction but the ordinary problem of being one person across a life of forks. The philosophers have a long literature on this. The game, without citing any of it, stages that literature's central cases with a fidelity most deliberate adaptations never reach.

Start with the question the game cannot avoid asking: are the alters the same person as Jan, or different people. Derek Parfit spent the middle of Reasons and Persons, published in 1984, dismantling the assumption that this question has a clean answer. His method was the thought experiment carried to its breaking point. His most famous case is fission. Imagine that the two hemispheres of a person's brain are each able to support the whole psychology, and that each is transplanted into a waiting body. Two people wake up, each remembering that life, each psychologically continuous with the person who went under. Which of them is the original. Parfit's answer is that the question has no answer, and that this should trouble us less than it does, because identity was never the thing that mattered. What matters, in his vocabulary, is Relation R: psychological continuity and connectedness, the overlapping chains of memory, intention, and character that link a person across time. Relation R can hold between one earlier person and two later people. It comes in degrees. It does not require a single owner.

The alters are a fission case run backward. They do not split from Jan at the operating table and diverge into the future; they split from him at a fork decades in the past and were grown, from a strange mineral the game calls Rapidium, along the branch he did not take. At the root they are strongly connected to him: they share the childhood, the dead father, the same early griefs. At the present moment they are weakly connected: the miner has spent an imagined adult life underground that Jan never lived, and carries its resentments and its calluses. On Parfit's account this is exactly what a person is when it is seen honestly. Not a hard little pearl of identity that either is present or is not, but a bundle of continuities that can be strong or weak, shared or divided, which we round up to a single self for convenience. The game refuses the rounding. It makes the bundle visible by splitting it into men and sending them to work.

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, drew a line through the middle of the single self that the alters make external. He distinguished the experiencing self, which lives through each moment, from the remembering self, which narrates those moments afterward and, being the one that keeps the records, wins every argument about what the life was like. The two are not the same and do not want the same things. Each alter arrives as a finished remembering self: the machine has handed him a complete alternate biography, already narrated, already sorted into the story of a man who chose the mines or the lab. Then the game drops that remembering self into a shared present where it has to experience anew, beside other remembering selves who narrated the identical childhood in incompatible ways. The friction between the alters, which the game plays as workplace tension and occasional mutiny, is the friction between remembering selves that cannot agree on what the first shared chapter meant, because each has spent a different life reinterpreting it.

The emotional engine underneath all of this is regret, and regret has its own science. Neal Roese, who has studied counterfactual thinking for decades, distinguishes upward counterfactuals, which imagine how things could have gone better, from downward ones, which imagine how they could have gone worse. Upward counterfactuals are the ones that sting; they are also, Roese argues, the ones that instruct, because a vivid image of the better path is data about what to do next time. The trouble is that in ordinary life the better self stays hypothetical. The Alters removes the hypothetical. When Jan grows the version who stayed in school and finds him steadier, more accomplished, less bruised, the upward counterfactual is no longer a three-in-the-morning image; it is a man at the next workstation who is visibly the person Jan failed to become, and who knows it. The game turns regret from a private ache into a labor-management problem, which is a more honest picture of what regret actually is: the constant, low-grade administration of the selves one passed over.

There is a widely held answer to the problem the alters pose, and the game puts it under unusual pressure. The answer is that a self is a story. Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue that a human life becomes intelligible only as a narrative, a single story running from birth to death with the shape of a quest; Paul Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another, made the subtler claim that we constitute ourselves by emplotting our lives, turning the scatter of events into a story one can be at once the author and the character of. On this view the continuous self is not discovered under the forks; it is written across them. The self is single because the story is single. The alters break this. Each is a different, equally coherent story told from the same opening pages. If the self is the story, and one childhood supports a dozen well-formed stories, then the narrative view has produced not one self but a shelf of them, each convinced it is the true continuation. The thing meant to unify the forks has instead multiplied. Jan wants his life to have been one story with reasons, a quest that had to go the way it went; the alters are standing proof that it was only ever one traversal of a branching space that would have supported many.

Galen Strawson offered the other exit. In an essay called "Against Narrativity," published in 2004, he attacked the assumption that a good or truthful human life must take narrative form. Strawson distinguished the Diachronic person, who experiences the self as something that persists across time and gathers into a story, from the Episodic person, who does not, who feels the self as a succession of present moments without a strong thread running through them, and who is not thereby damaged or shallow. The Narrativity thesis, Strawson argued, is a local temperament that some minds mistake for a universal law. Read through Strawson, the alters are not a scandal. They are what a life looks like once one stops insisting it was a single arc: a set of episodes that could have been assembled many ways, no assembly more truly the self than any other. Jan's anguish is the Diachronic person's anguish, meeting proof that the story he needed to have been necessary was contingent all along.

Standing at the console before the tree of his own forks, Jan is in the situation Kierkegaard named more than a century before anyone could build the machine. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom: the vertigo that comes not from any present threat but from the sheer openness of possibility, the awareness that one could have done and could still do otherwise. The tree on the wall is that dizziness rendered as an interface. Every branch is a possibility that was once real, a self that could have been actual, and the machine's particular cruelty is that it can make any of them actual now, so that the possibilities Jan spent a life closing off come back through the airlock with grievances and skills.

This frame travels, because the medium is full of forks. Every branching-narrative game, every dialogue tree with mutually exclusive endings, every role-playing system that makes a player spend a finite pool of points and thereby become one build and not another, is a small machine for generating counterfactual selves. Players feel this. The save reloaded to take the other path, the second run that romances the other character, the long forum threads about the build one did not make, are all the same reflex the alters literalize: the refusal to let the branches not taken simply die. Most games let the player mourn those branches offscreen. The Alters brings them onscreen and makes the player share a hull with them. It converts the ordinary ghost of the alternate playthrough into a body at the table, and in doing so it says something about all the other games too, which is that the roster of selves one did not build has been standing just outside every save file the whole time.

The frame travels past games entirely, because the roster is not a player's peculiarity. Everyone runs the branching machine, without the vat and the mineral, every time they wonder who they would have been. What the game contributes is to give that wordless, universal habit a mechanic, and a mechanic can be examined in a way a private ache cannot. It can be walked around. It can be argued with over dinner. It can refuse an order.

Outside, the base rolls on through the band of shadow, one man's several lives crewing it together, staying just ahead of a sunrise that would end all of them at once. It is a strange image of a self: not a single continuous traveler but a crew of divergent ones, sharing a childhood and a hull, kept in motion by the same emergency, none of them able to say with certainty which is the original and which the alternate, or whether the distinction was ever as solid as the man at the console needs it to be. Everyone is running that base. Most people only ever crew it with the one self they became, and keep the others as ghosts at the edge of the console. The Alters is the rare work that grows the ghosts, hands them tools, and asks the oldest question about the self in the plainest possible terms: with all of them here, doing the work, which one is the person whose life this was.