Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Frequently Asked Forum Questions | |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Re: Interesting Frankie Quote | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 6/15/11 3:03 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Interesting Frankie Quote (Cocopjojo) : I think you're still speaking much more broadly than I am. You mentioned not : wanting to be rude because of who you're talking to, but don't worry about : that at all. I'm not taking issue with you wanting to assert Bungie as the : authority on Halo. I personally disagree with the idea (I accept Man-Kzin : Wars as canon because Niven accepts them as canon), I would as well-- until a conflict needs resolution, in which case I'd put Niven-authored materials above non-Niven authored materials, just as I do for Bungie. but I honestly don't
I think we're more or less forced to do so just based on sheer volume. Throughout the series, the Master Chief encounters hundreds, if not thousands of Elites. If the game does not, within some reasonable boundaries, depict those conflicts with a reasonable degree of accuracy, then one has to accept that the single most important way that the player interacts with the Haloverse-- through combat-- is seriously distorting the perception of that world. If the typical Spartan-Elite encounter is more like what we see in the novel, rather than what we see in the game, then it means that most of what we're being told by the game about the game's universe when we're fighting Elites is wrong-- they don't fight the way we're being shown, they can't be killed as easily as we're shown, etc. This is true regardless of difficulty level, because those fight scenes aren't just different in terms of how difficult the encounter is, but by its very nature-- Halo not being a brawling game. That doesn't mean Elites can't or don't ever brawl or wrestle, but if I have to synthesize the games and the novels, I'd have to conclude that they rarely do. What place is there for brawling in a world where a single melee strike to the back means death because the Master Chief is so strong? : You said above that feature films are made with less budget than the Halo
I get the sense that you want me to discard the limitations of the game, as a medium, in order to gain the greater storytelling freedoms of other possible mediums, but I'm just not sold on it. Other mediums have limitations as well. I just don't find the limitations that limiting. I don't yearn to hear a story about Halo that includes different kinds of fighting than what the game is capable of showing me, because to me, Halo isn't about the fighting, although the fighting does reveal things about the universe. : So I wasn't talking about canon stuff, story stuff, exploration stuff or
Because the games are primary works by the author, not derivative ones. Because combat is how the reader interacts with the work. Because a single fight scene in a novel is, I think, a bigger distortion of the game's world because of its dramatic needs than the game's distortion is because of gameplay concerns, and because statistically speaking, even a handful of fight scenes in the novel are a rounding error when you consider all the Spartan-Elite encounters in the game. I'd advocate that rather than attempting to throw aside the gameplay-imposed limitations of the primary works, the novels should embrace them; doing otherwise just decreases verisimilitude for the group of works as a whole. I would do the same in favor of the novels if we were speaking of a series of games based on novels instead of the reverse; the derivative works should at least attempt to remain true to what it is that the primary works reveal about the universe, no matter how those things are presented, or what integral limitations of the medium they bear. TLDR version: In the games, Spartans and Elites mostly shoot at each other, not wrestle. This is because the game is a shooter. If there's a need, in the novel, for a tense fight scene, it should be a shooting scene, because putting in a single wrestling scene in the novel just because one is free to do so gives away more in verisimilitude than it gains in anything else.
| |
|
| Replies: |
The HBO Forum Archive is maintained with WebBBS 4.33. |