... So we've all just decided to ignore the fact that the game's entire conceit goes out the window almost immediately? The older woman's memories get downloaded, and instead we're bombarded with scenes from a different character's perspective, many of which the woman/girl herself would never have experienced at all, never mind not from those angles.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Why would a writer perform such a colossal and obvious self-own?
While I personally feel like this was explained well enough in the game, maybe some feel otherwise. The concept is meant to be that the memories are downloaded and stored, but then (especially based on the doctor's video game idea) there's an
extrapolation of and
expansion on the actual memories. That allows it to be a navigable, interactable world for the one viewing the rendered model of the past. My understanding was that the idea isn't
to be the memories' owner, but to be an active part of the environment (i.e., a person / character) in which those memories take place.
While the game does specify it's a simulation, maybe that doesn't clarify things enough. Typically, though, a simulation (like a flight simulator) involves data from real experience as a base, and then adds details that may or may not have actually existed in any single given flight. Bushes might be in different places, or even absent when they were there before; birds fly by when maybe in certain individual real-life flights there weren't any; the weather might be stormy instead of clear (or vice-versa); etc.
Another aspect of this simulation is to have it interactive (thus the whole video game idea at the beginning). If it was 100% only memory, it couldn't really be interactive. The viewer could maybe sense (feel, smell, etc.) things from the memory, but they would be just along for the ride, with no autonomy and so no interaction. It would be an experience for sure, but it would also be far less valuable / useful than something where each time you might choose different outcomes based on how you interact. This was never to be from the perspective of the memories' owner (Cecelia, in this case) only.