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Topic: Announcing the Ultronomicon (Read 7106 times)
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I have no problem with a style guide. You probably already know my objections to the content guides listed here.
Primarily, I should say that I dislike the idea of treating the game as a game within the encyclopedia. Explanations of how to play the game and what choices you have within the game are out there in the many walkthroughs and strategy guides; the fun part of playing this kind of intellectual game with an "encyclopedia" for an imaginary world is pretending that the world is real and the story has actually already happened.
If necessary things that are truly ambiguous in the game can be referred to as "uncertain" within the game's world, but, especially when the game gives us specific "default" information, I think we should treat the defaults as canon. So, for example, you *can* change the captain's name and the starship's name, but the names the game gives you, Zelnick and Vindicator, are the names the game intends the captain and starship to have, the names TFB had in mind when writing the game's story. You can personalize the names to make your playing experience more fun for you, but we're telling the story of the originally plotted-out story of the game as TFB wrote it, not the story of your personal (or all of our personal) game experiences. You could make the case for a neutral reference to the two better if there *were* no default, but there is, implying that those are the real, canon names, and "personalizing" the game is just that -- changing the game to make your personal experience more fun, not changing what the real names are. (Take the other tack and you could argue, for instance, that most of the main characters in Squaresoft's RPGs have no names at all, since most of the names are customizable.)
I think this is even more true for story elements; SC2 is not a game where strong choices are actually possible, unlike other games with true branching paths; there's a main way to get through the game with a single good ending, and the alternate things you can do usually either have no effect or are mistakes that make winning the game harder. There is a fairly linear storyline you can see in SC2, and that's the one we should assume TFB intended for the story of SC2. (So that Zelnick does, for instance, save the Shofixti rather than killing Tanaka, does get the Spawner to QuasiSpace instead of antagonizing the Arilou and refusing to use QuasiSpace, and, of course, does end up beating the Ur-Quan and saving the sector rather than allowing the Vindicator to get blown up by the Ilwrath at the very beginning.)
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Culture20
Enlightened
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Posts: 917
Thraddash Flower Child
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Because refining/editing text is harder than getting it written the way you want the first time. Without a universal find/replace option (except perhaps on the server level [sed]), imagine how hard it would be to just replace all occurances of "SIS" with "Precursor Ship". Using a style guide woud allow the Ultronomicon to appear as a profesional work without the need for a team of editors.
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Art
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Yeah, see, if it were the sort of game where the Captain *had* no name unless you gave him one, or it explicitly asked you to name the Captain and the flagship at the very beginning (as some Japanese RPGs do: "What shall we call you?") then I'd feel differently. But the game just starts you off with the names Zelnick and Vindicator; changing the names is a special option that you have to go into the menu to do, and I think of it as an option to make the game more fun for you, not a basic part of the game.
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Culture20
Enlightened
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Posts: 917
Thraddash Flower Child
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Well, for those of us that remember SC2 on the PC much better than UQM (or SC2 on the 3DO), the player was forced to name The Captain and The Flagship (or Mark I) at the start of play. The names Zelnick and Vindicator can't be found even with "find SC2_dir -exec strings {} \;". I was taken aback on first playing UQM. "Zelnick!?" said I, "that's not even a German name! Who thought that up?" I assumed it was a joke intended for alpha-testers. :-/
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Art
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You are right, sir. Touche.
As far as I know Zelnick is a German name, or rather a German Jewish name, though someone can certainly correct me on this. (Then again, Burton, Farnsworth and Chi aren't German names either.)
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Art
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There are, I think, a few references to the Unzervalt colonists being primarily of German stock. Most notable is the fact that the name Unzervalt ("unzer" = our, "valt" = world) itself is German.
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meep-eep
Forum Admin
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Posts: 2847
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Primarily, I should say that I dislike the idea of treating the game as a game within the encyclopedia. Explanations of how to play the game and what choices you have within the game are out there in the many walkthroughs and strategy guides; the fun part of playing this kind of intellectual game with an "encyclopedia" for an imaginary world is pretending that the world is real and the story has actually already happened. The problem with that is that there are many ways that the game could have happened. You may perform educated guesses to what would be the actual story, but an encyclopedia article should never make guesses, however educated they may be. I would also like to document every aspect of the game. Even those that would not be part of the story line that would be the "real" story.
You could make the case for a neutral reference to the two better if there *were* no default, but there is, implying that those are the real, canon names, and "personalizing" the game is just that -- changing the game to make your personal experience more fun, not changing what the real names are. I understand your point, and with any other game I might agree. But the PC version didn't have a default, and I suspect the only reason the 3DO version did is that it is rather annoying to enter text with a game pad.
There is a fairly linear storyline you can see in SC2, and that's the one we should assume TFB intended for the story of SC2. I do not have any problem with accepting any action that is necessary for succesful completion of the game as the "real" story. But for the rest there should be made no assumptions, IMO, including the ones you mention above. There are two reasons I have for this: - I would like the Ultronomicon document everything in the game, which means every possible story line. It would be inconsistent and even confusing to do that and yet assume one specific story line. - You do not know what TFB intend for the actual story to be. What I try to imagine is with what history a TFB SC3 would start. I think a good story would have some setbacks. Something to contrast the final victory. So perhaps you would kill the first Shofixti before getting to reason with the second. Or perhaps you do ask the Orz about the Androsynth too much. That is why until a TFB makes it clear what story line is the real story no assumptions about this should be made.
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete when at last there is no Void, no Non when the Creators return then we can finally rest.”
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Culture20
Enlightened
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Thraddash Flower Child
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Hmm, maybe Unzervalt is Dutch then? Dutch and German (Deutch) have more than a few words that are spelled and pronounced similarly and mean the same thing (much more than German & English that is). Of course since Meep-eep didn't bring it up, that theory's probably kaput (this forum being hosted in the Netherlands).
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