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Levi
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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 Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:18 am |
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| parker wrote: |
| t;]Since random battles in this game aren't necessary is there some gameshark cheat I can use to bypass them and still be able to get by the boss battles and rest of the game. If I could just play these games like adventure games I'd probably go back to them or try them out more often. |
you know Radical Dreamers is just the coherent, succinct parts of Chrono Cross (which nevertheless manages to deconstruct with spectacular violence) and it's basically a twine so
| M. John Harrison wrote: |
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid. |
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Levi
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:44 am |
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re: FFX
I think the problem there is not so much the prevalence of the church making Spira into a Pokemon world but rather the scripts complete failure to develop the oppositional relationships between the church, the player, and the principle characters in a way that wasn't maudlin
(funny aside -- a quarter of the way into Lightning Returns we're led to conclude that the hero just assumed that eventually she'll have to end up killing the god she's working for without actually informing us that she'd already come up with a plan which is at least a...mildy better way to handle this kind of thing. We should probably still take away that Anime Church is never going to be a goldmine unless we're Matsuno)
re: Metroid
What's interesting here is that as these games go on their added adherence to realist narrative casts the previously digestible expressionisms of prior games into weirder and weirder lights until we have to have a controlling ex-boyfriend to explain why Samus loses all her xp and we feel even more confused as to why precisely space station doors use handguns as doorknobs. |
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Levi
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 5:14 am |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say worldbuilding is bad - if you're trying to sell an audience on an imaginary world, it's certainly not a bad thing to envision it with as much richness and detail as possible without getting bogged down - but it certainly isn't a substitution for having a narrative that's actually about sonething. Unless the narrative is about things like history, politics or other subjects that can actually be thematically addressed through world-building (video game example: would Final Fantasy Tactics work as well as it does if not for the rich fictional history and political divisions of Ivalice?)
I mean, I think there's a place in the world for fiction-as-thought-experiment.
Video games are also uniquely well-suited to worldbuilding, because while a novel or TV show has to either take time out of the main story or rely on supplementary materials if it wants to explain the intricacies of its world to the audience, a video game has tons of options at its disposal for incorporating such information into itself in a way that doesn't put it in competition with the actual story being told.
I mean, rereading it I think I get what Harrison is saying though. I think he read Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 novels and discovered how much worse they are than the Kubrick movie, and is venting his frustrations accordingly. |
Actually though, I think Tactics works as a pretty striking example of un-world-building in its most positive sense. Most of what we know about Ivalace is transmitted through the illustration of interpersonal conflicts and the uncertainty of its framing device: It's like, at a certain point Ramza receives information from his enemies via an exploding frog telegram. Is...is this a thing in this world? The game doesn't care to address the question.
Conversely, the points at which Tactics tries to broach what we might see as more normative world-building are some of its weakest points -- stuff like characters saying "Faram" which, in my ear anyway, just doesn't play.
If nothing else the fluidity between representations of Ivalice suggests that world building is not precisely what was on the docket.
I feel like Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy X were both in production at the point where producer Sakaguchi got really into Hawaii |
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Levi
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 10:29 pm |
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| Tulpa wrote: |
You know I used to reach for that M John Harrison quote all the time (Used to sounds like I did this in my youth, I'm mostly thinking of myself 1-2 years ago, though), but I've started to avoid doing so. It's just awkward to take a quote out of its original context and use it to decry something completely different.
The way in which M. John Harrison uses 'worldbuilding' is discrete and distinct from the general use of the term. It has more to do with a response/rebellion against the late capitalist infatuation with escapism in all its forms. Worldbuilding is impossible because there is only the world we live in, and to create another one is a fantasy scenario outside of a Borges short story, not something that can be achieved. To try to escape from this world by building a new world is not only impossible but an act of cowardice, a refusal to deal with the problems of modern life. (spoilers: this is what every single one of his books is about yes even the lit fic he wrote about mountain climbing)
Whatever I'm pretty sure I'm like 1 of 3 people here that have actually read his books so this is me saying "that quote has fuck all to do with chrono cross, which is a game I would describe as a triumph of writing over worldbuilding in the harrisonian sense"
radical dreamers sucks because it doesn't have any of what made chrono cross so good (the art, the bizarre characters, the atmosphere, ok I guess there's some overlap between the two games as far as music goes so there's one thing)
Edit: just to specify how I know for certain that Harrison is talking about something completely different from this thread, he has said in comments that he was not talking about people making video games or playing DnD, but about the escapist dimension that can be present in both those activities. |
I understand that the point of this post is to suggest that I did not read a book that I read but I also think that it fails to point to a way that worldbuilding in a more common sense is meaningfully different in interpretation other than being less negative
http://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/im-not-against-worldbuilding/
etc
I would also describe Chrono Cross and really, most of the late-90's Square as writing-over-worldbuilding, which is what I was mainly trying to convey in talking about Final Fantasy Tactics above. I pulled the Harrison quote out of the drawer because I wanted to imply that world building, as such, is not the actual goal in any of these things and I couldn't find the article I actually wanted to link, which does a decent walk-over on these topics. Oh well.
Radical Dreamers is cool and also a lot shorter |
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