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Feels like the Tauren and Night Elves have largely resolved the idea that they worship the same entity but interpret it in different ways. Like Mu'sha and Elune are the same being, just interpreted in different cultures.
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Aug 30, 2023 09:41
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Religion in fantasy generally greatly needs more schisms of people disagreeing with one another. There should be at the very least the reform Church of the Holy Light, Orthodox Church of the Holy Light, Church of the Holy Light where Troll Loas are looked at as like Catholic saints, Church of the Holy Light but the only difference is we pray with our fingers clasped instead of our fingers flat, but millions have died for this minor difference. This is less me trying to be EDGY ATHIEST(on the last one anyway) and more that yes, realistically, people are going to do things differently and at the very least have friendly verbal arguments about it. It'd be a super easy world building hook for Warcraft for priests of the holy light to say, be troubled by their faith and that the light continues to fuel the scarlet crusade. They can have conflicting opinions on why the Light hasn't abandoned them. Not that I trust Blizz to have a sensible theological discussion, but it'd definitely be something that happened. Fantasy religion also tends to have the yoke that the God is undeniably real, and to be an Athiest would be akin to being a flat-earther in our world. We don't have God or Jesus physically interjecting on what we do and telling us to cut it out. Not to say that this can't be worked around - in the above example, if the Holy Light were a guy, some Cleric reaches out to him, finds out he literally does not care if you revere troll loa too, how you hold your hands, or whatever else. Maybe they only care for their given value of goodness, but this, of course, doesn't stop people from fighting over petty things. They only step in if things get really bad maybe. It goes back to the lazy 'people are a monolith' trope that Blizzard worships ultimately. That there aren't more rear end in a top hat Tauren causing problems is just as lazy writing as them all being chill - and putting the few rear end in a top hat tauren there are in one specific clan of them certainly doesn't help things.
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Aug 30, 2023 11:16
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NameHurtBrain posted:
atheism in this context probably wouldn't center around 'does this being exist' but rather 'are they divine;- the difference between a powerful being that can/should/must be appeased or entreated with, versus something that, I suppose, entitles it to worship of whatever sort by its nature
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Aug 30, 2023 11:21
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Mazerunner posted:atheism in this context probably wouldn't center around 'does this being exist' but rather 'are they divine;- the difference between a powerful being that can/should/must be appeased or entreated with, versus something that, I suppose, entitles it to worship of whatever sort by its nature Something like the Planescape Athar: The Gods definitely exist, but they don't deserve worship because they're assholes. Also if said source of power doesn't actually show up somewhere, then it's still possible to argue that "yes, you're doing miracles, but they're through your own power, not because some outside agency is granting you said ability."
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Aug 30, 2023 12:46
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Well, we also know from Shadowlands that one of the biggest things about real world religion - the question of what happens when you die - is a settled question in the Warcraft setting and it's established fact that religion has nothing to do with what happens when you die. Unless you're the one race that Blizzard's writers hate more than any other, in which case your entire species is getting it in the shorts whether you share their traditional belief system or not. But we'll get to that in detail later. Edit: Since I've gotten a few people asking on discord, I am not concerned about the hurricane. I live well out of the storm's path and am expecting nothing but heavier than normal wind and rain. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Aug 30, 2023 |
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Aug 30, 2023 12:52
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NameHurtBrain posted:Fantasy religion also tends to have the yoke that the God is undeniably real, and to be an Athiest would be akin to being a flat-earther in our world. We don't have God or Jesus physically interjecting on what we do and telling us to cut it out. Not to say that this can't be worked around - in the above example, if the Holy Light were a guy, some Cleric reaches out to him, finds out he literally does not care if you revere troll loa too, how you hold your hands, or whatever else. Maybe they only care for their given value of goodness, but this, of course, doesn't stop people from fighting over petty things. They only step in if things get really bad maybe. You can have the fantasy atheists swing other arguments, such as a moral opposition to the ideas of moral transcendence and divine right. And the rest of the time you can have the various religions interacting as polytheistic religions tend to, sure the priest of Sobek seems to be a weirdo to your Hittite self, but he still has divine favour and healing rituals, and your fantasy (not quite) atheist can come back around, sure, she says that the idea of gods is inherently offensive and that they merely are people like us, perhaps more powerful, and shouldn't pretend to be morally higher, and sure, she regularly has arguments with the voices in her head, but she'll still weld arms and legs and teeth back on, and unpop eyes and "definitely not" bless crops ", just encourage them, you know" so who cares, works for her, she's clearly got someone's favour.
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Aug 30, 2023 13:12
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NameHurtBrain posted:Religion in fantasy generally greatly needs more schisms of people disagreeing with one another. There should be at the very least the reform Church of the Holy Light, Orthodox Church of the Holy Light, Church of the Holy Light where Troll Loas are looked at as like Catholic saints, Church of the Holy Light but the only difference is we pray with our fingers clasped instead of our fingers flat, but millions have died for this minor difference. The church of the holy light does have a schism eventually but I'll leave that for midway through the expansion content.
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Aug 30, 2023 13:15
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Honestly the only thing I remember about the scarlet folks is that they always had a bunch of wool and silk on hand and were thus very helpful for tailoring.
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Aug 30, 2023 13:23
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Cythereal posted:Well, we also know from Shadowlands that one of the biggest things about real world religion - the question of what happens when you die - is a settled question in the Warcraft setting and it's established fact that religion has nothing to do with what happens when you die. I mean, there's at least two examples of your religion in fact modifying your afterlife (the race you're mentioning and the Trolls). But yes, generally speaking the Shadowlands sorts you based on the life you lived and who you are, not the faith you had. Which personally I feel is how heaven/hell should work anyway, as a Christian who dislikes people who hide behind being religious whilst doing monstrous acts. I think that there is still interventionism in general, from the powers other than death. Also that was settled before Shadowlands (for the aforementioned race in particular). Not the fine details, but it was a known detail for a long time that when you die you go to the Shadowlands unless some other arrangement is set up (the Demons returning to the Twisting Nether for example). The Undead all remember the Shadowlands (to some extent) just not any of the details. Edit: Shadowlands still hosed with it all, to be clear, and made a lot of it worse. But the question of what happens when you die was settled for a long time in terms of lore (Shadowlands, just like almost everything else it touched, just made it worse). Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Aug 30, 2023 |
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Aug 30, 2023 13:29
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Cythereal posted:I'm seldom happy with depictions of religion in video games in general, in large part because I don't map cleanly into traditionally conservative or traditionally liberal stereotypes regarding religion, and it's a subject that I'm sensitive to. I'm deeply religious in a monotheistic way, but also very liberal in my social values. I despise both 'attack and dethrone God' plots and 'Deus Vult!' plots. Why is attack and dethrone God a bad idea? I mean I know I'm an atheist and don't really have a deep connection to religion, but it seems like a more "the structure deserves both critique and eventual dismantling" point of view rather than the, often awful "Deus Vult" idea.
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Aug 30, 2023 15:01
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Josef bugman posted:Why is attack and dethrone God a bad idea? I mean I know I'm an atheist and don't really have a deep connection to religion, but it seems like a more "the structure deserves both critique and eventual dismantling" point of view rather than the, often awful "Deus Vult" idea. Because I happen to believe in a theistic system and hate seeing the aesthetics and language of faith - especially the faith I personally hold - being used as props for bad guys. I hate what I see as these things being abused in real life and I hate it when video games take the trappings and sometimes so far as the explicit names of things I value deeply and venerate, and make them into bags of xp that drop loot. Shockingly enough, I do in fact believe in my religious faith and believe it to be a good thing, and do not at all appreciate yet another 'lol the church/God is evil, go kill em' plot. I find it downright offensive when a video game takes the trappings of one of the foundations of my outlook on the world and goes "This is evil, God deals 2d6 damage with a basic attack." Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Aug 30, 2023 |
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Aug 30, 2023 15:12
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I am kinda the same way but I have an extreme distrust of organized religion(ex-Roman Catholic, LGBT, was an altar server for 10 years, and spent 15 years in Catholic schools). I know it's unfair as I know there are organized religions who do good, I just haven't found one that kinda matches my beliefs. Which would be something interesting to see in WoW. A Paladin who isn't part of any church, just has their own views on the Light, and them still having powers causing the powers that be some concertation.
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Aug 30, 2023 15:17
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One difference between real-life religion and Warcraft ones is that in Warcraft, the gods can often manifest themselves in actual actions (whether approval or disapproval). There is no misinterpretation (intentional or otherwise) of any message they want to spread. Arthas started turning away from the Light, and so the Light stopped working through him. When the orcs on Draenor started taking actions that displeased the spirits, they stopped letting the shamans call on them. Of course there are those who would obfuscate and lie about them (see Kil'Jaeden and the corruption of the orcs), but typically, all the facts are laid out for individuals to follow. If one started doing deeds falsely in the name of a certain religion, chances are they wouldn't be able to back it up with actual powers (again, outside of trickery or sleight of hand).
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Aug 30, 2023 15:47
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ApplesandOranges posted:One difference between real-life religion and Warcraft ones is that in Warcraft, the gods can often manifest themselves in actual actions (whether approval or disapproval). There is no misinterpretation (intentional or otherwise) of any message they want to spread. Eh. Not really. The light doesn't care what you use it for, it cares about your mentality. You need to believe that you're doing the light's will, but what you're doing with it is really, really irrelevant. Arthas couldn't use the light anymore because he did not believe he was doing the light's work anymore.
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Aug 30, 2023 15:50
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Mazerunner posted:atheism in this context probably wouldn't center around 'does this being exist' but rather 'are they divine;- the difference between a powerful being that can/should/must be appeased or entreated with, versus something that, I suppose, entitles it to worship of whatever sort by its nature Once in Pathfinder my friend was running a Dragonlance campaign, which was a setting I knew nothing about, but he emphasized this world-building element that the Gods are dead but that there is evidence that they're starting to come back. I played a Kender Druid and my whole concept was that the character was kind of a New Age Athiest who believed that Nature had kind of a divine collective consciousness rather than being a "god" per se, and all "gods" were nothing but Sufficiently Advanced Beings like powerful Elementals or Dragons playing their worshipers for suckers. The DM had intended to lock PCs with Divine spellcasting at a certain level of power until they became a servant of one of these returning Gods and grant them spells based on that, but my character steadfastly refused because nothing that had happened came even close to disabusing her believes. Leveling up became a fun challenge for me as I tried to work around my limits in the normal spell pool, and I was brainstorming all kinds of different story arcs to give her alternative paths to power based on multi-classing or specific Druid archetypes that aren't reliant on spellcasting. Later I found out that what was a blast for me was driving the DM insane and he felt like I was wrecking his story. He was going through a thing where he was rapidly becoming more religious and I think that campaign was an outlet for creativity that was coming from that change. This culminated in a moment where my character off-handedly mocked a god inside their own temple and was instantly killed by GM Decree for that, which pissed me off hugely and led me to walk out of the house, I think because my friend didn't realize how much fun I was having and how attached I'd grown to that character. This in turn led to an incredibly wholesome scene where the God of Death came upon my character's soul in transition to the afterlife and made her realize that even if that God she insulted wasn't a God, she had no reason to be needlessly antagonistic and rude to that being, especially not in their own house. Being a Kender, my character deeply and sincerely apologized to the offended deity, with no expectation of reward, simply because it was the way one living being ought to treat another, with basic dignity and respect. The God of Death rewarded her by restoring her life and placing a mark of magic upon her, making her an Agent rather than Worshipper, and unlocking the Death Druid archetype's abilities as well as my upper level spell slots. I'm so sad we never got to the end of that Campaign... Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Aug 30, 2023 |
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Aug 30, 2023 16:23
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It's something I brought up before, but I like to talk about Six Ages/KODP and it's tabletop rpg base, Runequest and Heroquest. In those games, the relationship between people and gods is at the core of it, and they're made by people who understand religion, modern and ancient. The core of six ages part 1 is a fight between two cultures who have different perspectives on the same religious event, but do not share a religion. Yelm, who your people worshipped as the just and divine ruler of the golden age of peace, was slain by a being they claim to be Orlanth. Their justification is that Yelm was a tyrant and Orlanth slew him to free the world. The fun thing is that these two perspectives are almost but not quite compatible in many ways. And this extends to every factor, not just of your beliefs, but of your culture. And the way it portrays your people's relationship to the god is one that is often transactional, but still filled with belief and piety. You grant them sacrifice and they give to you magic. You follow them and emulate them because not only did they do good things, but they taught you what good things are. Without them, you wouldn't have learned to forage or ride or anything you need to exist as a people right now. They're entities that can be like humans in a lot of ways, but fundamentally are not. But their relationship with humans is one of mutual dependence, a great good for both. Then there's the matter of spirits. Spirits are not like gods. They're often small beings, that you have to go out and find. You have to deal with each of them, individually, on their own merits and your relationship with them is one of "being who works for me" as much as it is one of religion in a conventional sense. What I'm getting at is there's a sense of hetereodoxy and an understanding of the boundaries of myths, religion and culture and how they intertwine that is not found elsewhere. And runequest was literally the second tabletop rpg ever made!
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Aug 30, 2023 18:16
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Glorantha is like the only ttrpg to get European polytheism right.
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Aug 30, 2023 18:35
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On the subject of religion, it's also the source of one of my habits and outlooks that I've noticed over the years confuses a lot of goons: whenever I feel like a game is inviting me to make my own character and put myself in the characters shoes, stakes of 'You have to win or you'll die!' simply don't work for me. I strive to live my life with serenity and peace, and death is a natural and inevitable part of life. If I die, so what? I've lived my life as best I could and trust that my friends and family will continue on. To be so worked up about my own existence to me feels selfish, and I tend to assume that any character I play who is supposed to be a player surrogate is the same way. It's part of my standard idealization of myself, imagining that someone like me could be a hero. A lot of goons who have seen me remark on this over the years have said I sound depressed and fatalistic, but to me nothing could be further from the truth. It's striving to be content with the life I've lead and not being worked up about the fact that that life will eventually end. Just another one of those things that so often jolts me out of video game stories.
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Aug 30, 2023 18:43
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Josef bugman posted:Why is attack and dethrone God a bad idea? I mean I know I'm an atheist and don't really have a deep connection to religion, but it seems like a more "the structure deserves both critique and eventual dismantling" point of view rather than the, often awful "Deus Vult" idea.
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Aug 30, 2023 19:54
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I feel like this analysis ("Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs?", by Moon Channel) is relevant here, if anyone got time this evening.
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Aug 30, 2023 19:58
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Cythereal posted:A lot of goons who have seen me remark on this over the years have said I sound depressed and fatalistic, but to me nothing could be further from the truth. It's striving to be content with the life I've lead and not being worked up about the fact that that life will eventually end.  This comes up about our politics "Doom" threads. I call it being happy on Hardcore difficulty setting
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Aug 30, 2023 20:03
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Gun Jam posted:I feel like this analysis ("Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs?", by Moon Channel) is relevant here, if anyone got time this evening. Oh I watched this one a few months ago.
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Aug 30, 2023 20:09
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Cythereal posted:On the subject of religion, it's also the source of one of my habits and outlooks that I've noticed over the years confuses a lot of goons: whenever I feel like a game is inviting me to make my own character and put myself in the characters shoes, stakes of 'You have to win or you'll die!' simply don't work for me. I strive to live my life with serenity and peace, and death is a natural and inevitable part of life. If I die, so what? I've lived my life as best I could and trust that my friends and family will continue on. To be so worked up about my own existence to me feels selfish, and I tend to assume that any character I play who is supposed to be a player surrogate is the same way. It's part of my standard idealization of myself, imagining that someone like me could be a hero. I think the thing that separates you from a lot of people in that regard is that they enjoy life so much that they would prefer to have as much of it as possible, and also the fact that "dying" usually in these cases isn't an off-switch, but more like John Villainman will put you through the Hero Deboner slowly over the course of ten months after first letting you watch your entire family and everyone you like go through it. Even someone who's resigned to "well, I will die at some point" would generally prefer to die peacefully surrounded by their friends and family rather than in a bloody crater while a mad wizard slowly peels them alive so he can turn them into a piece of meaty abstract art. If you can still serenely accept that sort of thing, then, you know what? You have more mental fortitude than me and I don't think I'll ever understand you. But I think your reductionism here is leaving out some important details that affect other people's opinions.
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Aug 30, 2023 20:38
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PurpleXVI posted:I think the thing that separates you from a lot of people in that regard is that they enjoy life so much that they would prefer to have as much of it as possible, and also the fact that "dying" usually in these cases isn't an off-switch, but more like John Villainman will put you through the Hero Deboner slowly over the course of ten months after first letting you watch your entire family and everyone you like go through it. Even someone who's resigned to "well, I will die at some point" would generally prefer to die peacefully surrounded by their friends and family rather than in a bloody crater while a mad wizard slowly peels them alive so he can turn them into a piece of meaty abstract art. I'm just saying how I personally see things. Of course in real life I'd be terrified. I aspire not to be, though. But I like to play video games as escapism. The first and foremost thing I seek in most video games, especially RPGs, is trying to imagine that someone like me could be a hero. One of the main criteria I judge story-heavy games by is whether, as appropriate for the kind of game, there's either a faction I'm comfortable rooting for and could see myself being part of, having the freedom to direct and play a character in a manner I can identify with, or a pre-set protagonist being close enough that I can easily imagine the protagonist being someone like me. The majority of video games still trip over the bar set into the ground of 'let me play as a woman,' and even many that technically give you the option will universally put a dude on the marketing. I'm weird and I know it.
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Aug 30, 2023 20:45
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Religions in western video games are usually written by people who never really think about religion. They likely see themselves as "not very religious" but don't put themselves into the atheist category, and were raised culturally Christian, and that is about all they've ever thought about religion. So the religions the write about are a mix of what they grew up with and pop culture about religion, which was, again, mostly written by people who don't actually think about religion that much. You end up with a lot of "this religion is basically Christianity but with certain bits filed down. And this bit is...what Christians think paganism is! And this religion here is what Christians think 'nature worship' is!" In Japan, well, there's a bit of historical context for why the western flavored organized religion that's popped up suddenly and is trying to convert the populace is usually seen as a bad guy. This also pops up in western indie games with more leftist leanings. In fact, on note for killing gods and sundering thrones and whatnot, one interesting historical snag was that this was in fact a favored tactic of early Christian missionaries as they moved eastward. In order to help convert pagans, missionaries would fell or deface sacred objects, trees in particular, as proof that their own god(s) offered no protection. Organized religion gets a bad rep in a lot of games because their historical primary interaction with it was the cross being spread by blade and bullet, and/or foreign missionaries entering the country and fermenting rebellion. I will note that, absent later events, so far Warcraft stands out at least a little in none of their religions being evangelical; normally a setting like this would put significantly more emphasis on religious worship of the Light amongst humans. But the story of Arthas basically never brings up his religious beliefs at all, which I feel again points to most in-game religious stuff being written by people who just don't really think about religion in the first place. It reminds me a bit of how often D&D, both through players and game materials, somehow has a religion that everyone believes, but nobody ever actually references.
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Aug 30, 2023 21:21
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ProfessorCirno posted:I will note that, absent later events, so far Warcraft stands out at least a little in none of their religions being evangelical; normally a setting like this would put significantly more emphasis on religious worship of the Light amongst humans. But the story of Arthas basically never brings up his religious beliefs at all, which I feel again points to most in-game religious stuff being written by people who just don't really think about religion in the first place. It reminds me a bit of how often D&D, both through players and game materials, somehow has a religion that everyone believes, but nobody ever actually references. It does at least put a lot of emphasis on the teachings of the Paladins and that they are in some degrees distinct from the laws of men. See e.g. Uther reminding his student that Paladins aren't supposed to be bloodthirsty and to think in terms of compassion and mercy even when dealing with the Orcs that still openly worship demons and Uther pronouncing that even if Arthas WERE King he would never obey the order to purge Stratholm.
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Aug 30, 2023 21:24
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NameHurtBrain posted:It goes back to the lazy 'people are a monolith' trope that Blizzard worships ultimately. That there aren't more rear end in a top hat Tauren causing problems is just as lazy writing as them all being chill - and putting the few rear end in a top hat tauren there are in one specific clan of them certainly doesn't help things. Ethic groups in this game are monolithic because the amount of screen time is already cramped with a strictly enforced limit of between zero and one culture per set of models. There are 8 maps per campaign with about 300 words of spoken dialogue in each one, which is shared with the main plot and stuff like characters calling out attack waves. As a result, most extraneous world building is going to get shunted off to the manual, tie-in books or design docs for future games and fall afoul of "show, don't tell".
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Aug 31, 2023 00:31
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Asehujiko posted:This is projecting problems with the Chronicle books or later WoW expansion that have practically limitless ability to do lore dumps on cultural intricacies or retcon dumb poo poo that stopped being acceptable in the meantime but choose not to and/or stick their feet in their mouths instead, onto Warcraft III, a game that was barely finished in time as is. Not my problem. Blizzard made their choices, and the knock-on effects are a result of their choices. My purpose with this LP is to present and criticize the end product that Blizzard created. If someone at Blizzard doesn't like what they're seeing here, everything about Warcraft is within Blizzard's power to change if they wish it. Blizzard could have fixed many of these issues with Reforged, and they chose not to (I do mean Blizzard at large, not Reforged's team specifically). Every word I've set about Warcraft is subject to change, if Blizzard wishes it. They can fix things if they want to. Whether or not they choose to do so is their lookout. As it is, the next update may be delayed. The game's suddenly having some severe graphics bugs that I'm working to diagnose and fix.
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Aug 31, 2023 02:12
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I'm not a wiki-editing turbofan but I do like Brandon Sanderson's fantasy works and a big part of them is often treatment of religion. Of particular note is that Sanderson is a Mormon, and more so he is a privileged Mormon (and a white man) and so is personally insulated from the issues many others have with that faith and organisation. While he sparks nerdfights around magic systems a lot of his works feature heroic characters of faith who I would presume are at least partially inspired by his own thoughts on his faith. Elantris features Hrathen as a priest of what is an (institutionally) evil religion. He's relatively high-ranking but isn't privy to the inner/darker mysteries of his church's plans. Hrathen preaches based on what he feels is the logic and order of his religion rather than fanaticism and he's a genuine true believer in the religion's trappings (the 'armor of faith' he wears is fully functional metal rather than ceremonial foil) and he's overall the most interesting character in the novel. Warbreaker has people who are resurrected as basically 'supermen' worshipped as living gods in an empire and we see what it's like for them. That said we don't get much of a POV of someone who's actually a believer (the god we get the POV of is bemused about the whole business), so there's not that much to discuss offhand. edit to add: Looking back on it, the 'Cult of the Returned' is basically an evil religion from the POV of outsiders to that culture in terms of the drain they are on the society they're a part of and I think it's mentioned that's the view, but we get the view of the person on top and so it's normalised. It's entirely up to any given Returned on whether the resources they're able to requisition or command as willing gods is distributed to the needy (as one of them explicitly spends time doing) or is spent on feasts and parties. Mistborn has as a prominent character Sazed who tries to 'collect religions' and preserve them in a world that is dominated by an Emperor and an Imperial Cult. There's a point where someone tells Sazed that there's a quality he's looking for in a satisfying religion that he's not going to find and when he asks "one that's true?" the response is "one that does not require faith" and I feel like that's basically BrandoSando speaking to the camera on his thoughts. The sequel series has three major religions - a more benevolent Imperial Cult, and then inspired by events from the prior books, Survivorism and the Path. While having the same root scripture and having the main character be a Pathian, Survivorism is more popular, more evangelical and more conservative (and from the reader's persective, less 'true'). There's certainly some authorial thoughts on different religions inspired by the same text there. Stormlight Archives has Vorinism (and other religions, but Vorinism is the focus) which is probably the least Christian/Mormon of the religions in his works though there's definitely some Mormon influence in there while trying to create a dominant religion Sanderson finds satisfying from the ground up. The Vorin societies are caste-based and influenced by real-world Indian and far East Asian cultures, and Vorinism is basically about both staying in your lane, as well as finding an appropriate 'calling' in life that benefits society. The priesthood's nominal role is to guide people to their calling and guide them in it. If you perform well in your calling in life, you get to go join the army of the Almighty in death to reclaim the 'Tranquilline Halls' and you get superpowers appropriate to your calling (warriors getting super-strength, farmers raising crops instantly). Stormlight also features writing (and not doing badly) at writing a character who is an intelligent atheist in a fantasy world where Vorinism has some clear nuggets of truth in it, even if twisted. Should you (general you, not Cythereal) read a Sanderson series? I dunno, maybe, they're not for everyone. But given the author's perspective I think they handle religion in a more interesting way than most. Since they are fantasy in worlds where discovering the "truth behind everything" is a common element of his plots, it is certainly an aspect that (other than Path-ianism) none of the religions he writes are 'correct', though they may have been inspired by truth and gotten twisted. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 10:51 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 10:46
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In any event, technical issues resolved by rolling back my drivers. WC3 doesn't seem to like the newest Nvidia drivers. I will be free of this purgatory one day, but that day is not today. And in the off chance Melth reads this LP, thank you for giving me a wonderful idea to spice up the next mission, it worked nicely.
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Aug 31, 2023 13:55
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Oh, boy. This should be good
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Aug 31, 2023 14:02
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Cythereal posted:Not my problem. Blizzard made their choices, and the knock-on effects are a result of their choices. My purpose with this LP is to present and criticize the end product that Blizzard created. If someone at Blizzard doesn't like what they're seeing here, everything about Warcraft is within Blizzard's power to change if they wish it. Blizzard could have fixed many of these issues with Reforged, and they chose not to (I do mean Blizzard at large, not Reforged's team specifically).
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Aug 31, 2023 18:41
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Asehujiko posted:Deliberately ignoring the context in which the original Warcraft III was made does make it your problem though. Writing choices in 2020 don't happen in a vacuum, they are informed by writing choices in the original game from 2002 and those were in turn, informed by the realities of game development around that time. The current Blizzard model of unaccountable rockstar creative leads and executives decreeing a plot and setting that the rest of the game is to be designed around did not start happening until 2008-2010, half a decade after development on Warcraft III ceased. You appear to be laboring under the impression that I care about context and am inclined to treat with Blizzard in good faith. You are incorrect. Blizzard burned any desire I had to consider their actions in good faith or give them the benefit of the doubt. If they want to correct that and improve their games, they have the power to do so. Every time I rag on Blizzard for their misogyny, their racism, their glorification of genocidal violence, their love of sexual violence and horrific violence for shock value, their awful and misguided cultural stereotypes, and their shoddy plotting full of contrived stupidity and nonsensical villains... these are all things that Blizzard can change, if they wish. They're the ones in control of this setting. They can write whatever they want. They could wake up tomorrow and decide that the entire World of Warcraft was a prolonged vision from Medivh about what will happen if the Alliance and the Horde don't cut this poo poo out. They can change for the better anytime they want to. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 18:46
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Asehujiko posted:Deliberately ignoring the context in which the original Warcraft III was made does make it your problem though. Writing choices in 2020 don't happen in a vacuum, they are informed by writing choices in the original game from 2002 and those were in turn, informed by the realities of game development around that time. The current Blizzard model of unaccountable rockstar creative leads and executives decreeing a plot and setting that the rest of the game is to be designed around did not start happening until 2008-2010, half a decade after development on Warcraft III ceased. I personally think there's a lot of interesting push-and-pull in the question of context, especially for long-running legacy franchises and brands. It's 100% worth critiquing things that are gross or horrible even if they were normal for their time, but there is also some merit in acknowledging intent, like if what was written was awful by our standards but was an earnest attempt at being progressive from the writer's perspective. There is equal merit in applying a read that deliberately refuses to acknowledge intent, to apply the personal lens and see how a narrative might resonate with a group that it wasn't intended for. And there's merit in speculating about intent when said intent is an unknown. Take Dracula for example. I've read takes on the original text that range from it being deliberate anti-Eastern Europe propaganda stoking fears of the other for cheap horror to it being a critique of the British imperial project because it portrays an Imperial invader attempting to colonize Britain, to it being a generalized metaphor for either the 1) the benefits and dangers of female sexual liberation or 2) the specific plight of queer people attempting to live in a society that vilifies them and treats them as inhuman monsters or 3) the even MORE specific plight of Oscar Wilde when he was imprisoned on Sodomy charges. Some of those reads demand the acknowledgment of historical context or author intent, others demand the Death of the Author. All of them are potentially valid, and all of them can be readily criticized and counter-argued. Warcraft is a particularly interesting example to me. It has parts that are just ghastly in terms of what's actually being portrayed on screen, then it has other parts that people find really exciting, progressive and empowering. All those parts have context vis a vis the culture of the time they were made, the intent of the writers, and the further fact of it being a long-running continuous story and the powers in charge of that story having various philosophies about how important continuity is and for what specific aspects. It's possible to come to an opinion of the text while acknowledging that context or leaving it completely by the wayside, and that choice is going to inform a lot about your opinion. Marvel and DC Comics have a lot of similar points of interest when you read them as a single grand collective story of a shared universe, which is why I always say "Warcraft is a Comic Book universe." Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 19:59
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Sanguinia posted:I personally think there's a lot of interesting push-and-pull in the question of context, especially for long-running legacy franchises and brands. In general, I'm strongly in favor of death of the author as my default position. I feel like I have to be, to get any enjoyment out of things. To name one example of what I mean, there is not a single mode of depiction of women that men have not claimed as being sexist to women. A strong, badass fighter? Male fanservice and either looking for an even stronger male partner to dominate her, or a lesbian (and yes, I default to assuming that queer women in media are meant to please male viewers/players). A demure, pacifist healer? Get a tiara you walking stereotype! A withdraw, intellectual nerd? A girlfriend for male nerds to fantasize over! I could go on, but I hope I don't need to. There's a long trend of male writers and critics asserting authority over all depictions of women and what they represent, and the only way I stay sane as someone who critically engages with most of the media I consume is with a persistent and systemic level of 'gently caress You.' And that's not even getting into the fact that I'm queer, religious, and otherwise decidedly not a majority demographic in pretty much anything. I do not, and can not for my own mental health, care much about context when I consider media, especially interactive media like video games. All I can care about is how I feel in response to the product presented to me, and I will judge that media on that basis. Fair of me? No. But life isn't fair.
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Aug 31, 2023 22:14
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Sanguinia posted:Take Dracula for example. I've read takes on the original text that range from it being deliberate anti-Eastern Europe propaganda stoking fears of the other for cheap horror to it being a critique of the British imperial project because it portrays an Imperial invader attempting to colonize Britain, to it being a generalized metaphor for either the 1) the benefits and dangers of female sexual liberation or 2) the specific plight of queer people attempting to live in a society that vilifies them and treats them as inhuman monsters or 3) the even MORE specific plight of Oscar Wilde when he was imprisoned on Sodomy charges. Some of those reads demand the acknowledgment of historical context or author intent, others demand the Death of the Author. All of them are potentially valid, and all of them can be readily criticized and counter-argued. ....is it time to talk about the Orangutan?
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Sep 1, 2023 02:24
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Sanguinia posted:I personally think there's a lot of interesting push-and-pull in the question of context, especially for long-running legacy franchises and brands. It's 100% worth critiquing things that are gross or horrible even if they were normal for their time, but there is also some merit in acknowledging intent, like if what was written was awful by our standards but was an earnest attempt at being progressive from the writer's perspective. There is equal merit in applying a read that deliberately refuses to acknowledge intent, to apply the personal lens and see how a narrative might resonate with a group that it wasn't intended for. And there's merit in speculating about intent when said intent is an unknown Diablo 4, the most recent Blizzard release, has 9169 people listed in the credits, of which only twelve are credited as either narrative lead, writer or creative development writer. I'll be ignoring the two technical writers as technical writing means things like installation booklets that have no bearing on the narrative. Even assuming the most generous working environment where everybody puts in the exact same hours and no such thing as continuous 80 hour crunch in the QA departments(as if...) , the game's writing represents 0.13% of the total development effort. The most up to date version of Dragonflight's credits that I could find show a writer's room of one lead narrative designer, seven narrative designers, four creative development writers and one lead cinematic narrative designer but nobody has tallied up the total number so I can't give an exact ratio. For comparison, Disco Elysium is a famously wordy game, with a full 6 out of it's 271 listed contributors doing the writing, about 2.2%. They're still outnumbered more than 5 to 1 by their 33 playtesters alone. As such, I see analyses that treat the rest of the development team as purely as extensions of the writers to be misguided at best and dehumanizing towards everybody else on the team at worst. A great many ideas that sound clever on paper end up not being practical to implement, hard to balance, taking too much time and effort to implement within a release deadline, leading to all kinds of compromises to be made, in both gameplay and story. Of the part of the game that's been shown in the LP, I'd like to point out the fourth undead map as fairly obvious filler standing in for an idea that either never materialized or was cut. Did Metzen originally intend for 1/8th of the undead campaign's story to be nothing but Arthas grumbling about elven resilience, something that also happens in both the levels before and after it? Clearly not, but there was a gap in the map list that needed filling urgently and no time or resources for coming up with something better.
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Sep 1, 2023 03:02
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Asehujiko posted:As such, I see analyses that treat the rest of the development team as purely as extensions of the writers to be misguided at best and dehumanizing towards everybody else on the team at worst. A great many ideas that sound clever on paper end up not being practical to implement, hard to balance, taking too much time and effort to implement within a release deadline, leading to all kinds of compromises to be made, in both gameplay and story. Of the part of the game that's been shown in the LP, I'd like to point out the fourth undead map as fairly obvious filler standing in for an idea that either never materialized or was cut. Did Metzen originally intend for 1/8th of the undead campaign's story to be nothing but Arthas grumbling about elven resilience, something that also happens in both the levels before and after it? Clearly not, but there was a gap in the map list that needed filling urgently and no time or resources for coming up with something better. I truly do not give a poo poo about the process of making video games and the compromises and constraints and whatever the hell else goes into it. I care about the [hopefully] finished product in front of me, and will judge the product delivered. If you're so aggrieved about my presentation and criticism of Warcraft, you know where the new thread button is.
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Sep 1, 2023 03:06
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Asehujiko posted:The issue with examining videogame writing as one would do with literature is that for a book, the words on the page represents nearly 100% of the effort behind it, or maybe 90% if you've got an especially proactive and involved editor. For videogames though, the ratios are reversed. When I think about the creative intent and context of a video game in literary terms, I always tend to think of them in the same terms I would a film, that there is collaborative creativity at every step of the process. There are a few prominent individuals steering the ship (Lead Writer, Director, Executive Producer, Lead Editor, Lead Actors, etc) and they should necessarily get the lion's share of the praise and blame, but everyone on the team is part of the creative process. In my FF14 LP I rarely say things like "I think Yoshida intended X" or "I think Ishikawa was going for Y." I say things like "The Dev Team," or "The Writing Team" or "The Dungeon Design Team" or "The Environmental Art Team."
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Sep 1, 2023 03:13
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Sanguinia posted:When I think about the creative intent and context of a video game in literary terms, I always tend to think of them in the same terms I would a film, that there is collaborative creativity at every step of the process. There are a few prominent individuals steering the ship (Lead Writer, Director, Executive Producer, Lead Editor, Lead Actors, etc) and they should necessarily get the lion's share of the praise and blame, but everyone on the team is part of the creative process. In my FF14 LP I rarely say things like "I think Yoshida intended X" or "I think Ishikawa was going for Y." I say things like "The Dev Team," or "The Writing Team" or "The Dungeon Design Team" or "The Environmental Art Team." Well, yes. The rock star developer stuff really only works with small dev teams. I think the only AAA dev that got that sort of treatment recently was Jake Solomon with the firaxcom games. Pretty much everyone else I can think of got that reputation when dev teams were small enough 1 person had a significantly more sizable impact. Chris Sawyer, Sid Meyer, Romero, Kojima, Miyamoto, Metzen, and so on. You still see some of that today, but it's all limited to the Indy scene where the dev teams stay small, or even solo, for cost reasons.
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Sep 1, 2023 03:37
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