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Darth Roxor

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Really, mythological references are the least of your worries. Your giant enemy wolf won't become more "respectable" because you called him Great Grey Wolf Sif instead of Fenrir.

Or trying to hide the shitty mythological reference with a shoddy letter change, producing the great wolf Renfif.
 

felipepepe

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You do realize that the average 40-year-old man reads shitty Tom Clancy and Stephen King knock-offs? That is, if he reads anything other than the front page of a newspaper on his way to the sports results and pin-ups. Assuming that the audience will grow more "sophisticated" as it matures is a mistake.

Also, vidya will never come anywhere near novels or poetry because it's pretty much impossible for them to be completely author-driven due to the way that they're produced. Indie games make up the bulk of 3deep5u titles because you can get away with a single developer (as with Braid, he basically just bought the assets he needed from online) or tiny, close-knit team. A better comparison would be film. Lo and behold, the majority of mainstream, tentpole movies are written for apes, unless someone considers romcoms or costume dramas to be significantly more mature or sophisticated than Gears of War.
"Average" being the keyword here. Yeah, the average guy will watch Big Brother 16 or After Earth, then read Stephen King while listening to Miley Cirus and feel like a truly educated person. But books, Tv shows, music and movies are not limited to that, while games are. If I want anythign a bit more elaborate than banal/shit/boirng AAA games, my choices are either a challenging hardcore/strategic game or a indie abstract artfag thing.

Really, mythological references are the least of your worries. Your giant enemy wolf won't become more "respectable" because you called him Great Grey Wolf Sif instead of Fenrir.
On the contrary, naming him Fenrir would remove any personality from him, decrease him to a mythological cliche. Sif is a giant wolf carrying a sword, with it's own story and ties to the game lore & setting, not the wolf from viking legends. The point is precisely that most games have such shitty and lazy lore/writing, that they have to use tired old cliches to pretend they have substance (oh, look, a mythological creature you know about, isn't that interesting?). The equivalent is that instead of writting a King NPC, you just name him King Arthur, even thought it has nothing to do with the story & setting, just because he's famous and spares you the trouble of coming up with something interesting.

And even so, they limit themselves to the most obvious and cliche references. Unless you're playing a game set in the same mythological setting (like God of War or Dante's Inferno), you'll never see anything beyond stuff that even a children's mythology book covers. In 1974 Gary Gygax wrote the Monster's Manual, full of exotic monsters from various mythologies and legends from all over the world. Flashforward 50 fucking years, after "Game Designer" became an actual profession and internet gave instant access to the most obscure information and here we are... stuck with the most cliche shit from Nordic & Greek mythology.
 

evdk

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Really, mythological references are the least of your worries. Your giant enemy wolf won't become more "respectable" because you called him Great Grey Wolf Sif instead of Fenrir.

Or trying to hide the shitty mythological reference with a shoddy letter change, producing the great wolf Renfif.
Renyiff?
 
In My Safe Space
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Comic books (sorry, graphic novels hurrrrrrrr)
Why "hurrrrrrrr"? It's not like "novel" is some monocle verb and doesn't include stuff like harlequins, young adult fiction, game world fiction and stuff like that. It's a good term for adaptation of novels in comic book forms or simply long comic books telling a single story. In opposition to comic strips and short-story collection style comic books.
 

Cromwell

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Comic books (sorry, graphic novels hurrrrrrrr)
Why "hurrrrrrrr"? It's not like "novel" is some monocle verb and doesn't include stuff like harlequins, young adult fiction, game world fiction and stuff like that. It's a good term for adaptation of novels in comic book forms or simply long comic books telling a single story. In opposition to comic strips and short-story collection style comic books.


yes because everyone who says "its actually a graphic novel not a comic" is very concerned about categorizing the stuff by its length and content. He surely doesnt do it just to tell you that his tastes are definetly abpve the the tastes of the unwashed masses who consume something as uncultural as mere comics.
 

evdk

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Comic books (sorry, graphic novels hurrrrrrrr)
Why "hurrrrrrrr"? It's not like "novel" is some monocle verb and doesn't include stuff like harlequins, young adult fiction, game world fiction and stuff like that. It's a good term for adaptation of novels in comic book forms or simply long comic books telling a single story. In opposition to comic strips and short-story collection style comic books.
Because of the type of persons who usually use the term "graphic novels." The same people who will throw a hissy fit if you call their funny books comics. Because those are for kids, not a mature read for mature people who are into rape, like GNs are.
 
In My Safe Space
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Because of the type of persons who usually use the term "graphic novels." The same people who will throw a hissy fit if you call their funny books comics. Because those are for kids, not a mature read for mature people who are into rape, like GNs are.
I think it's a problem mostly with Kwazoos where comic books were crushed under the Comic Authority Code.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Because of the type of persons who usually use the term "graphic novels." The same people who will throw a hissy fit if you call their funny books comics. Because those are for kids, not a mature read for mature people who are into rape, like GNs are.
I think it's a problem mostly with Kwazoos where comic books were crushed under the Comic Authority Code.
It is a primarily English-speaking problem, and yes it's roots are in the CCA-caused stigma. Marketing speak for people who take themselves too seriously. Graphic novel does serve a handy function to describe a particular type of collected edition for comics though.
 

Machocruz

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I never liked the term "comic book" either, as a general label. And that has nothing to do with judgments of maturity or quality, but content. Groo the Wanderer is comic, From Hell not so much. Pedantic maybe, but to me it makes about as much sense as calling all comic books "scary books" or "melancholic books"
 

Machocruz

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And the "How cum game storees dunna get rispect lyke buks and movees?" crowd seem to be ignorant of economics and motivation. It is said that "the cream rises to the top," but I say the cream goes for the top from the start. Talent goes where the prestige and/or money is first, and when it comes to writing the prestige and/or money are not in video games, but in novels and screen-writing. And without the talent and the money to lure that talent, video games won't get the prestige. It's very simple really. Maybe stop throwing your limited resources at Hollywood voice actors and try to attract talent to the areas that have been suffering for so long. I've never heard anyone say "Yeah, that Simon Templeman is o.k. I guess, but games need some big names reading the shitty dialogue if they are to evolve!"

The problem isn't the medium itself, it's the kinds of people we have producing and curating the medium right now. I don't know if it's age difference or the usual cultural shifts, but the way people talk and write now....where are the professional adults? Where are the men and women? Most of the males seem effeminate and adolescent, and the females just adolescent. So much of their writing and speech is laced with irony, snark, passive-aggressiveness, slang, memes, facetiousness. Non-stop. And lest you make comparisons to how we roll on the Codex, these people do it on the job where there should be different standards. Do any of these people sound like they could be a Hemingway, Twain, Kafka, Shelley, Blake in the making? Or if more modern examples are more appropriate, William Gibson, Ellison, Murakami? On the critical side, are any of these hipsters with in light years of Pauline Kael or John Ruskin? Do we have the journalistic equivalence of 60 minutes (sorry, I don't know of many journalists) or even Larry King? And the good, sincere game criticism I have seen is unanimously focused on play. And then there is life experience: think any Herman Melvilles will be coming out of the generations who spent all of their free time on pop-culture? Even old game designers successes were built upon life experience or at least study. Legend of Zelda is a result of Miyamoto's ventures into the countryside combined with fairy tales. Think you can make a Sim City without looking into urban planning? (Will Wright went to technical university with focus on architecture and engineering, btw.). I wouldn't be surprised if the people who made Gauntlet spent time in actual dungeons, so atmospheric and tonally "correct" it was for a game back then, or at least played a lot of DnD, which beats watching Pewdiepie and playing Bioshock in terms of edutainment.

Needless to say, the current
ambassadors of video games are not going to be producing meritorious works in video game writing any time soon. And we've already seen how video games can not only have A.) good writing, but B.) tell stories in a manner complimentary to the function of the form. See: Planescape and it's Q&A dialogue tree approach of expressing ideas and the death-resurrection mechanic; Silent Hill 2 using in-game antagonists as symbols of theme; even goddamned Super Metroid, with its almost operatic/silent picture use of music, rising crescendo of a beginning, into-the-rabbit-hole progression of the middle meat of the game, late game twist (assumed foe becomes friend), climax (Mother Brain fight and exodus from the planet). So there is no excuse for not getting 'er done. Except talent. Full circle, baby.
 
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I felt the term 'graphic novel' made sense for a short period of works that:

1. Reversed the usual comic emphasis, with the prose taking precedence over the art.

and

2. Were limited runs - i.e. they told a complete story, instead of launching a franchise.
 

GarfunkeL

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Because of the type of persons who usually use the term "graphic novels." The same people who will throw a hissy fit if you call their funny books comics. Because those are for kids, not a mature read for mature people who are into rape, like GNs are.
I think it's a problem mostly with Kwazoos where comic books were crushed under the Comic Authority Code.
It is a primarily English-speaking problem, and yes it's roots are in the CCA-caused stigma. Marketing speak for people who take themselves too seriously. Graphic novel does serve a handy function to describe a particular type of collected edition for comics though.
Absolutely. The French have been doing mature and intelligent comic books for decades, not to mention having a massive lead on the artsy-fartsy stuff as well.
 
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I never liked the term "comic book" either, as a general label. And that has nothing to do with judgments of maturity or quality, but content. Groo the Wanderer is comic, From Hell not so much. Pedantic maybe, but to me it makes about as much sense as calling all comic books "scary books" or "melancholic books"

I thought the term was supposed to be interchangeable with "cartoon". Since most of those were humorous, it became the name of those "story told via pictures and text" regardless of the content, instead of having to come up with a new name depending on the content of the story.

Also, I don't play videogames, I play interactive experiences. Duh.
 

Ninjerk

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I never liked the term "comic book" either, as a general label. And that has nothing to do with judgments of maturity or quality, but content. Groo the Wanderer is comic, From Hell not so much. Pedantic maybe, but to me it makes about as much sense as calling all comic books "scary books" or "melancholic books"

I thought the term was supposed to be interchangeable with "cartoon". Since most of those were humorous, it became the name of those "story told via pictures and text" regardless of the content, instead of having to come up with a new name depending on the content of the story.

Also, I don't play videogames, I play interactive experiences. Duh.
I believe the word "cartoon" referring to children's content is fairly recent. The oldest meaning for the cartoon that I'm aware of is synonymous with "sketch." Lots of art books will refer to plates of grayscale value studies and red chalk drawings by Renaissance artists (and those that followed in their footsteps) as cartoons.
 

Machocruz

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I never liked the term "comic book" either, as a general label. And that has nothing to do with judgments of maturity or quality, but content. Groo the Wanderer is comic, From Hell not so much. Pedantic maybe, but to me it makes about as much sense as calling all comic books "scary books" or "melancholic books"

I thought the term was supposed to be interchangeable with "cartoon". Since most of those were humorous, it became the name of those "story told via pictures and text" regardless of the content, instead of having to come up with a new name depending on the content of the story.

Also, I don't play videogames, I play interactive experiences. Duh.
I believe the word "cartoon" referring to children's content is fairly recent. The oldest meaning for the cartoon that I'm aware of is synonymous with "sketch." Lots of art books will refer to plates of grayscale value studies and red chalk drawings by Renaissance artists (and those that followed in their footsteps) as cartoons.
A cartoon used to be a final, preparatory drawing used to layout and transfer a composition to a painting surface. They'd poke a series of holes along the major lines of the drawing, and than dust over those with charcoal with a tool called a "pounce," which was basically wadded up fabric, and then connect-the-dots with ink or paint lines forming the contours of the composition on the painting surface. Then cartoon became a humorous drawing. Then it became animated humorous drawings. At some point it became to encompass any non-realistic drawing.

Comic books have their origins in comic strips, which were humorous in nature, which is why they were also called funnies.
 

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