Amentep

Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

I read that as "chicken stir fry with Confucius" which gave me a pause...

"Is that light supposed to be blinking?" "What's the worst that could happen?" "I don't NEED to read the instructions!" Raithe - couldn't find the exact Wilde quote so I had to go on second-hand info.

I always admire the classics like "I told you I was ill" or "Either those curtains go or I do". That said, I'd be tempted with an Airplane! quote like "Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue..." too.

Thisis Mychar and Dunwana Fytr are awesome character names.

Well it has less full-frontal John Gielgud than Prospero's Books which I think is the only other adaption of the Tempest I've sat through, so points for that. I find it interesting that the composers of the electronic soundtrack were pretty much denied credit for doing music. But the "Electronic tonalities" are pretty awesome - particularly considering the difficulty in doing such stuff at the time.

I thought Wals was tripping out on drugs and seeing insect people...

But what are the odds the tombstone says "I spent $1000 dollars and all I got was this lousy tombstone"* *Although since its personalized, I guess it could say that

But making those game is also much easier now days. Really? I'd heard it was harder - larger teams, more expense on middleware so you don't have to program all the 3D/Physics bits yourself.

Wouldn't the cactus look out of place anywhere but the desert?

Especially if they don't post a photo immediately following that statement. Since we'd be then unable to even do as they said. And after the post and the picture would be followed by the "if you have 10K to throw around can you loan me a buck" and "you made a mistake stepping in this dark alleyway - this is a stickup. I know you have money because you pledged 10K to a Kickstarter campaign". Just doesn't end well...

DVDs were cheaper to produce than cartridges when console gaming changed to optical discs for games but the price didn't change. The general attitude at the time was that the market supported a certain price point, and if you went too far below it or above it people perceived the product negatively (too low and it was a cheap product - shovelware; too high and it was greedy developers extorting the fans). That said, the production values on games have increased incredibly, I can't imagine the production costs haven't increased as well - possibly well past the comfortable profit margins of the mid-90s.

Well good to hear it's not an immediate problem, but I'm sure you're hoping to know what it is.

Yeah I did a bad job on it, apparently. Sorry again.

There's a tremendous amount of "garbage" in all of the entertainment fields; it comes part and parcel to the concept of the arts as well. That doesn't mean it can't be fun or what not. I think that often what appeals to people reading Lord Foul's Bane is probably not the same thing that people read Ethan Frome for.

Was SOZ where your companions could take over dialogue if they had better skills? If so I liked that too.

I never finished SOZ (my computer gave up, not me) but I liked the overland map and finding stuff on it.

"What do you call the guy who graduated last in his class from medical school?" "Doctor" (ie, whether you're a writer or not doesn't hinge on being good or bad at it).

If writers wrote for themselves no one would read them. Writers always bear in mind the audience/readers when writing a story. What is a point of a story which only you would understand. It's pretty simplistic to view it in that way. As for your last statement, I don't really know where you got that from, and I must say that is a pretty arrogant and snobbish statement to make. Hmmm, I expect that I didn't make my joke very well then. I was making a joke on the old line when getting students interested in writing they should please themselves - this is writing as recreation (not on selling to the market in which case, as Tale mentions above you need to understand the market and what it wants) and the idea that if you're writing something for yourself and you're expecting the audience to be dumb, you're expecting you to be dumb. It was a joke that apparently fell flat on its face and I apologize. I really don't know how to parse "ripping good tale that everyone enjoys" in a way that has meaning to me, I'm sorry. Unless we're talking about going for LCD and making a tale full of explosions. Because everyone loves explosions. That's like a call to Michael Bay. Which is fine, but it doesn't balance wider appreciation against something meaningful or interesting. My point is that a good tale is a good tale, having good science or good history or good political theory isn't going to make a bad tale good and have bad science or bad history or bad political theory isn't going to make a good story bad (unless you get stuck on the bad science or bad history or bad political theory in which case your problem isn't with the story). That Shakespeare takes liberty with some of his history in his plays doesn't diminish the power of the play itself. A good story will overcome such "factual shortcomings".

Yes? I feel like that's a trick question, but I'm not seeing it. Plenty of books have been written for what you may consider stupid people. And while there's a moral objection to writing that way to take advantage, there's a long and proud tradition of writing that way under the label of philosophy, self-help, spirituality, or metaphysics. Even conspiracy theories. I was just asking because we were always told to write for ourselves and not worry about writing for an audience. And if you start out writing for stupid people you're not really saying much about yourself. In their own subjects? Probably. That's why you focus on some other thing that you might know more than they about. You teach the historian a bit about astronomy or the astronomer about history. Or perhaps tell a ripping good tale that everyone enjoys and let the science and history sort itself out? I think that's why fantasy worlds are the real world with some unreal constructs (that still act like concepts we understand). You can't really move outside of yourself so totally as to create the truly foreign (and arguably if you could it'd be so foreign to the reader they would be put off by it). That said, I'm not sure the slavish recreation of reality in fantasy is desirable, either.

Looking at some of the full twitter conversations, some (definitely not all) of the stuff he posted were reposts from other twitter users.

Don't know about over there, but here asking if you're a Female D-subminiature or Male D-subminiature is a big no-no.

I took it as a take on Ambrose Bierce's DEVIL'S DICTIONARY - ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught. HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the lawyers. IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about. MIRACLE, n. An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king. PHYSICIAN, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well. ROAD, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go. SELFISH, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others. TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments. etc. - but with connotations more used in RPG/gaming forums.

But if your only problem with a game - story is great, combat is great, character generation is great, NPCs are great - is the rivers flow in the wrong direction on the map...is that really enough to make the game "bad"? I'd argue it'd only be the case if the game was "river flow simulator 2.0" not the average fantasy RPG. Its nice that they corrected it, makes sure to remove that complaint from the internet "pile of complaints" division. And I'm not saying they shouldn't - they're trying to create a world and they want to make it a "living and breathing" thing I'm sure. But it's importance is probably more in pushing the "reality" of the setting than what the player experiences directly in the gameplay.

More than your target audience does. So its okay to write things wrong if you're writing for stupid people? Also its now nearly impossible to target a Doctor Who story that could be appreciated by astronomers, physicists and historians. Isn't this the same Star Wars where the duly elected leader of Naboo was called..."Queen"? Can't tell if sarcasm or not. Realism isn't the opposite of fun, its a tool in a toolbox of storytelling. I think the issue is, ultimately, not whether realism is "fun" or not but whether from a storytelling perspective limiting yourself to only that tool is worth the limitations to storytelling applied (even if its just the primarily tool used). If you create a game element that accurately reflect Hindu philosophy and cosmology and the player only sees a bare minimum of it - lets say 10 minutes worth in a 50 hour game - does the adherence to the "truth" actually matter from the perspective of the game player? There was a big flap when the first PE map was released about the rivers not flowing geographically correctly. Okay, I can understand wanting to do it geographically like reality world...but in a fantasy world were things don't work the way the real world does, is it really something the average player is going to notice? Would the threads after release for PE be about how the rivers flowing the wrong way broke the gamers' "immersion" and ruined the game for them? Without regard to the other gameplay elements?