Xenophobic egomaniacs being occupied by an invading force?

Sorry S. Carolinians :hehe:

I think if I asked my aunt that lives in Charlette, she might tell me it fits.

I was thinking more on the line of "mysterious easterners". Yeah, I should travel more.

I actually didn't read the OP until now. And I believe that the OP has mistakenly equated 'deep' with 'exhaustive' and 'banol.'

Now that Todd's instance of foot-in-mouth has been cleared up and made more credible, that familiarity and player identification of the game world are required, time to move on to part #1 of the discussion, but part #2 still needs to be referenced.

Though it is the familiarity described by Todd that brings players to the game, and piques their buying interest, it is the unique spins the game puts on the familiar that keeps them there and turns them into fan-boys... as evidenced by Morrowind. Most of the "Morrowind is entirely unique" comes from the way the familiar/generic stuff is implemented in the game. Though it is there, it takes its rightful place in the game's background as the lore and uniqueness of the game manifests, to the point that the fans are so amazed by the unique elements that they start denying that the generic is there.

For example, the Imperials. Facially, they are Romans. However, the lore about them, while still based on the Roman Empire, diverges away from it at about a 30^o angle, and that offset makes them memorable as a culture. Same thing with the Dunmer and Chinese, but the angle is more like 40-45^o, with a bit of Mexican/spanish thrown in,and all those other cultures referenced by others in this thread. The divergence and mix-and-match creates an entirely unique creation. Video game design is an art. And like all arts, it is made of already-familiar components. Music is nothing more than a unique arrangement of generic notes, each one slightly shaped and toned. All pictures are created from the unique arrangement and gradients of the four generic colors CMYK (or 3: RGB). Likewise, video games and cultural lore are created by unique arrangements of similar generic qualities. If you try to introduce completely alien concepts, you end up with something taken from the Necronomicon. Unless the target audience are the Lolcats. Then it is taken from the Necron-om-nom-nom-nom-nom-icron

Last I checked, nothing about Morrowind's Imperials was especially original. Their main features were just whatever connection they had to the occupied province. Disregarding whatever you might find in books, that is, because I think shoehorning is limited to visual representations.

As for the Dunmer and the Chinese, are you really at it again? Go ask Yiasemi and see what she thinks, then come back.

If the new material is more plentiful than borrowed material, comparisons beyond a certain point are just stupid. You're ignoring the fiction for the sake of getting to the bare meat at its center. And it's fantasy, which means that that concise morsel you've reduced it to is an uninteresting falsehood with a few trappings of the genre thrown in. You've gone through an awful lot of effort to say, "Morrowind is actually a fake place with fake people that doesn't exist." So beyond tongue-wanking on the internet, this sort of overanolysis misses the point of the whole venture. It's not literature, so looking under the hood is a disservice.

Unless, that is, you're trying to bring it back down to earth (what does that act signify in a fantasy world?) so it can be better compared with the uninspiring elements of other video games.

"Ah, I see a suspension of disbelief is required. Right-o. Let me just put on my Sceptic Glasses with the Military History bifocal lenses and we'll get down to business."

As Talyn would say, "Que aburrido."

HAHAHA!, Didn?t see that one coming! What gave me away, the signature or the bad spelling?

I actually agree with most of your argument, Paws. It just seemed a little aggressive...

I don?t see the point of digging into how the devs came up with their ideas by making parallels beetwen what we know of TES and what we experience in the Real World. But I do tend to make similar comparisons because it helps my learning process, making it easier for me to understand the material

Ah but that's in North Carolina, and every North Carolinian makes fun of South Carolina.

I believe that we've more or less come to the conclusion that Todd's statement about familiarity attracts purchasing is more or less apt, if slightly over-stated a little.

The question is, how much should things be familiar and then ultimately, the question then becomes, how can the unfamiliar be used to create the familiar? How is it that we have these conventions like Star Wars and Star Trek and LOTR that are so familiar and are so much a part of our creative culture in the first place? How did they come about?

We spend a large part of our lives with BS streaming past us - the news about this, the row about that, the state of the economy ... and even before we start taking conscious note of that stuff there is still mummy holding that delicious spoon of gruel just out of reach while she does something else that is clearly terribly important. So we build up a yearning for commonsense and fulfillment in a place that is fundamentally unreachable. How else can we have or do what we can never otherwise get at or do?

We read about ancient civilisations and their wonders and we wanted to be there, then we read about their religions and we saw that they are now called mythologies, and now we can live those fantasies and mythologies, reaching out beyond the simple stuff that our world has been rendered down into.

To make is interesting and exciting requires some kind of intellectual, emotional, spiritual, visual, auditory stimulation ... so we (creators, devs, writers poets, composers, whatever, good or bad) use the multitude techniques that have been developed over the millennia to enhance the structure. It's our own desire for it that is the real clincher though. And as a roleplayer even if we do not see ourselves as otherwise creative we can add our own personal creativity to form a social dimension when discussing it - along with our dreams.

The sig, which I haven't managed to correctly read yet.

I doubt I actually believe my whole argument. Mostly I just find the subject unnecessary and the motives suspect, so I'm being combative.

Pardon.