Wishes

I've said before that time travel is always a bad plot point. Writers can use it for suspense, but as soon as you step back and analyze the logic of a story that uses time travel, you end up seeing major problems, all boiling down to the question of "Why didn't they use it to solve that?" And that's to say nothing about causality loops.

Well I've decided that using wishes are just as bad, if not worse. (And by "wish", I mean that a character gets to specify some nearly-unlimited action as a reward for something they did.) Wishes pretty much guarantee that the viewer/reader/player will come up with a better, obvious wish that the character could have used. And then it's just annoying. I recently finished a game that ended with a wish that made most things better, but had one very obvious and terrible side effect. Why didn't the character just say "except for this thing" at the end? And then there's Aladdin - I'm sure we can all think of more effective ways that Aladdin could have used his wishes. And why didn't Jasmine take a few wishes before Aladdin made his third? Wind Waker is another game that completely botches it.

To be fair, there might be a few exceptions. Wishes might be okay if they have very strict limits, or guaranteed side effects (like a malicious wish-giver who will look for loopholes). And I'm okay with a wish as a plot ender if the wish is just "fix everything", and everything does get fixed, like in A Link to the Past. (In general, I feel like there are some implied restrictions on Triforce wishes.)

 

That said…

 

The idea of wishes does raise an interesting question: if you were given the chance, what would you wish for?

 

Again, there have to be limits. If there aren't, your wish would have to be "maximize overall happiness for me and as many other good people as possible, for the greatest amount of time possible". Of course, if you're looking at the eternal perspective, God will make that happen anyway, so that would sort of be a wasted wish, but you could iterate on the exact wording. But to be interesting, the scenario has to have things scoped down. No asking for multiple wishes of course.

 

I think you'd want to disallow general commands, like "whatever will make me happy" - it has to be specified. Also it should have to be something that can take effect in an instant, and then be over. That would make the wisher think about long-term effects.

 

You'd probably also want to disallow the word "and", and maybe limit the number of words. Someone told me about a character in Dungeons and Dragons who was granted a wish. He presented a list of very specific things. The dungeon master (acting as the wish giver) didn't even read it, they just said "yep". Very effective in that context, but not a very good story element, so if you're designing the question, you'd want to disallow that.

 

One more limitation would be useful, I think: you might want to limit the scope of its effects. See, if you can create world peace, then morally you must do it, right? Like if you're Superman, then you'd feel guilty doing anything other than rushing around saving people. So if you want a character to make a more relatable decision, you sort of need to force them to have a certain amount of self-interest in the request. "No affecting the lives of others in ways that don't directly involve a benefit to you", or something like that.

 

So what would I wish for, given all of those limitations? My gut reaction would be to make me a Plasma Master. (That does have the risk of approaching the Superman problem, but I could set limitations that would reduce the scope of power.) If I had to scope it down even more, I might go for some localized mutant power, like not needing to sleep, or perfect health until the instant I would have died of old age. (But that would have the side effect of making you outlive your kids, which would be lame.) Flight is always a good option. Of course a billion dollars in an unhackable, untaxable bank account would be pretty life changing too, but that's boring. (Plus a well thought-out superpower could make you money - teleportation, for example.) You'd have to use a wish on something that no one could acquire in any other way.

 

But dude, whatever you wish for, don't make it stupid. Don't be like the time travelers.