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| Re: Interesting Frankie Quote | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 6/14/11 2:01 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Interesting Frankie Quote (Cocopjojo) : So what does it mean in the game when I point my pistol at a marine's eyeball : and pull the trigger? Blood squirts out and the marine goes, "Hey, : mate, watch your fire!" but he's perfectly fine. That supercedes the : novels where it would be portrayed realistically and the marine would die? Forgive me, I'm sort of slack-jawed here. I think I sort of established, in two posts, that I understand the different demands of different mediums. I am saying they cannot be completely ignored-- not that they must be strictly adhered to. The situation you describe above is just one of many which can occur in gameplay but do not make sense within the continuity. Any significant friendly fire event falls into this category; the marines turn on the Chief, and then quickly forgive him (depending on difficulty). This is pretty hard to work into continuity. Invincible cinematic characters are also a pretty big challenge. That doesn't mean I think that these events have literal truth for the continuity. The fact that I can't kill Keyes or Johnson doesn't mean they are immortal (until the game kills them). That does not mean that these changes do not damage verisimilitude. They do. The proper response, however, to this reduction in the effectiveness of the work's verisimilitude is not to discard the events of one medium in favor of what the hypothetical result would be in the other. If that were the case, then Commander Keyes and Sergeant Johnson never live until the end of Halo 3-- because I would have already killed them. That does not mean that the way different combat scenarios play out in the different forms does not affect character development-- because it does. It just means that I don't discard one or the other in order to prevent it from happening. There is an absolutely unavoidable conflict between the design of the games, which include the Master Chief racking up a nearly impossible kill count, and the demands of a novel, in which a single combatant has to present enough of a credible threat to generate dramatic tension. The audience is being asked to believe two contradictory things at once. This unavoidably reduces verisimilitude for anyone not willing to dismiss one or the other with "it's just a game" or "it's just a tie-in novel" or "I'm just here to be entertained, and not to think about stuff like that". Which is fine-- but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.
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