Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "realism"
Why Starcraft is better than Command & Conquer
I was about seven or eight years old when I got the demo disc for Command & Conquer. Up until that point I'd only ever played games like Commander Keen and Super Mario Bros. and such, which were fun but not particularly noteworthy. I had no idea what to expect from the opening demo and that guy (my first FMV experience) talking to me... until the music kicked in, accentuated by the explosions, the cannons, the gunfire, and the screams of the dying, and promptly blew my mind.
I played that game as much as I was allowed for the next couple days, until the disc was taken away. I never figured out how to set up the construction yard and make buildings and new units, and instead charged with my mammoth tanks and others in a suicide mission against the NOD walls and the laser obelisk, over and over again, like banging my head to a wall. In retrospect it's probably a good thing that I never got over that: I later learned that the next demo mission involved a commando, and that guy probably would've blown my mind all over again in some unhealthy way, with his badass one-liners and awesome insta-kill sniper rifle.
Christmas 1999 I got Tiberian Sun, and I still remember it as one of my most beloved presents. Even today I think that game has the overall best soundtrack in the series - sure, it doesn't have any Hell March in it, but neither does it have a single C&C Thang - and a pretty great visual style that's influenced my scifi writing a fair bit.
In any game of the series, I always loved engineers. I preferred capturing all enemy buildings rather than destroying them, because it felt wasteful. But there's a thing there: what's up with the way reverse-engineering works in these games?
Okay, I've acquired the NOD stealth tank designs, can I use these in the next mission? No? Why the hell not? Why do I need to do this again every time? Shouldn't once be enough, and now everyone in GDI everywhere should be able to design these things? This makes no sense!
I didn't get to play Warcraft II or Starcraft until years after Tiberian Sun, but as soon as I did they resonated with me. They didn't have this reverse-engineering nonsense. Warcraft's armies were equal: obviously the orcs had long since stolen the sword designs from humans, for instance. And yeah, they still had dragons, but the Alliance has a bunch of gryphon riders that can shoot lightning, so it evens out.
(I used to experiment with their stats in level editors, giving humans better penetration and armor due to sharper weapons and better steel, while orcs got higher damage and hit points because they were stronger and tougher themselves. It never really went anywhere.)
And in Starcraft, of course, the three different factions are entirely different - but also of entirely different races. I can't imagine humans figuring out how to use Zerg tech. So that's also pretty great.
That's why I like them better than Command & Conquer. They're so realistic.
I played that game as much as I was allowed for the next couple days, until the disc was taken away. I never figured out how to set up the construction yard and make buildings and new units, and instead charged with my mammoth tanks and others in a suicide mission against the NOD walls and the laser obelisk, over and over again, like banging my head to a wall. In retrospect it's probably a good thing that I never got over that: I later learned that the next demo mission involved a commando, and that guy probably would've blown my mind all over again in some unhealthy way, with his badass one-liners and awesome insta-kill sniper rifle.
Christmas 1999 I got Tiberian Sun, and I still remember it as one of my most beloved presents. Even today I think that game has the overall best soundtrack in the series - sure, it doesn't have any Hell March in it, but neither does it have a single C&C Thang - and a pretty great visual style that's influenced my scifi writing a fair bit.
In any game of the series, I always loved engineers. I preferred capturing all enemy buildings rather than destroying them, because it felt wasteful. But there's a thing there: what's up with the way reverse-engineering works in these games?
Okay, I've acquired the NOD stealth tank designs, can I use these in the next mission? No? Why the hell not? Why do I need to do this again every time? Shouldn't once be enough, and now everyone in GDI everywhere should be able to design these things? This makes no sense!
I didn't get to play Warcraft II or Starcraft until years after Tiberian Sun, but as soon as I did they resonated with me. They didn't have this reverse-engineering nonsense. Warcraft's armies were equal: obviously the orcs had long since stolen the sword designs from humans, for instance. And yeah, they still had dragons, but the Alliance has a bunch of gryphon riders that can shoot lightning, so it evens out.
(I used to experiment with their stats in level editors, giving humans better penetration and armor due to sharper weapons and better steel, while orcs got higher damage and hit points because they were stronger and tougher themselves. It never really went anywhere.)
And in Starcraft, of course, the three different factions are entirely different - but also of entirely different races. I can't imagine humans figuring out how to use Zerg tech. So that's also pretty great.
That's why I like them better than Command & Conquer. They're so realistic.
Impossible cities, impossible justification, realism and what it means
I've been looking at a lot of fantasy city artwork lately - purely because a friend posted something, I complimented it, and decided to look for more. It's gotten me thinking.
Look at this city! A magnificent view, yet from a practical real world standpoint, it should never have come to be. It's an engineering impossibility (at least for the medieval folk), requiring generations of work even if they did figure out how to do it. If those support pillars can handle all that weight, and any catapult stones thrown by particularly persistent hosts of assholes, they'd have better served the walls of a fortress. And there's little tangible benefit in reaching out into the valley like that, other than making its inhabitants constantly feel like they're standing on top of nothing maybe. And what's up with that tiny bit at the very end?
But it does look really nice. You really would want to have it in your setting, or your D&D game, anyway. So how could this thing have come to be?
"It's magic!" is the usual justification, and it's almost always a cheap and unsatisfying one. Not because there's anything wrong with magic in itself, just that it's only the beginning of the explanation - pretending to be enough on its own, and as a consequence, being worse than no explanation at all. It raises many followup questions: who did the magic, and why, and how? Maybe the wizard was a bit crazy and vain, and wanted to show off his colleagues by conjuring his demons and elementals and djinni to build something other than a yet another boring tall tower.
Or maybe it was all divinely-inspired? You've got a goddess of art and architecture, her devotees starting up this sort of a mad project to impress her, and she's now blessed it and won't let anyone mess with it without provoking divine retribution.
Or it could have been built in the ancient past, when man had the means to mold steel and minds and traverse the stars in great shining ships, and when they could afford to let loose a little and build something because they just liked how it turned up.
Or you could have a closer look and realize that there is already a rational explanation to it: look at the pillars, their colouration, the architecture, and it starts to look like they'd once been underwater. This valley was a river in the distant past, perhaps even a lake or a sea. This is the beginning of a great bridge - but the construction work was abandoned for some reason, the sea level receded much lower... and then at some point, probably led by local economics and politics, people found it a fine place to settle down on - entirely unrelated to why it was originally built. Rich history and worldbuilding without needing to bring in magic at all!
You see? It's so easy to dismiss these things right at first hand, because you want to write about something more realistic. But realism is about far more than what can exist in our world. It's about how well grounded it is within its setting and surroundings, how well it seems to fit there. Not about how real something is, but rather how real it feels.
It's not about cities, either - that's just the thing I was thinking about and the justification for this long rambling. This line of thinking applies to everything. My whole setting is probably the sort that should, by laws of physics as we understand them, be incapable of sustaining any kind of life. So I often end up asking this stuff of myself, and coming up with reasons how it could all have come to be in the first place - and ways for the local folk to have survived as they have, their own way of living and things they've come up to adapt.
Such thought exercises bring colour and excitement and depth to your worlds, and help you improve your craft and imagination as well. Never hesitate to think them through.
Look at this city! A magnificent view, yet from a practical real world standpoint, it should never have come to be. It's an engineering impossibility (at least for the medieval folk), requiring generations of work even if they did figure out how to do it. If those support pillars can handle all that weight, and any catapult stones thrown by particularly persistent hosts of assholes, they'd have better served the walls of a fortress. And there's little tangible benefit in reaching out into the valley like that, other than making its inhabitants constantly feel like they're standing on top of nothing maybe. And what's up with that tiny bit at the very end?
But it does look really nice. You really would want to have it in your setting, or your D&D game, anyway. So how could this thing have come to be?
"It's magic!" is the usual justification, and it's almost always a cheap and unsatisfying one. Not because there's anything wrong with magic in itself, just that it's only the beginning of the explanation - pretending to be enough on its own, and as a consequence, being worse than no explanation at all. It raises many followup questions: who did the magic, and why, and how? Maybe the wizard was a bit crazy and vain, and wanted to show off his colleagues by conjuring his demons and elementals and djinni to build something other than a yet another boring tall tower.
Or maybe it was all divinely-inspired? You've got a goddess of art and architecture, her devotees starting up this sort of a mad project to impress her, and she's now blessed it and won't let anyone mess with it without provoking divine retribution.
Or it could have been built in the ancient past, when man had the means to mold steel and minds and traverse the stars in great shining ships, and when they could afford to let loose a little and build something because they just liked how it turned up.
Or you could have a closer look and realize that there is already a rational explanation to it: look at the pillars, their colouration, the architecture, and it starts to look like they'd once been underwater. This valley was a river in the distant past, perhaps even a lake or a sea. This is the beginning of a great bridge - but the construction work was abandoned for some reason, the sea level receded much lower... and then at some point, probably led by local economics and politics, people found it a fine place to settle down on - entirely unrelated to why it was originally built. Rich history and worldbuilding without needing to bring in magic at all!
You see? It's so easy to dismiss these things right at first hand, because you want to write about something more realistic. But realism is about far more than what can exist in our world. It's about how well grounded it is within its setting and surroundings, how well it seems to fit there. Not about how real something is, but rather how real it feels.
It's not about cities, either - that's just the thing I was thinking about and the justification for this long rambling. This line of thinking applies to everything. My whole setting is probably the sort that should, by laws of physics as we understand them, be incapable of sustaining any kind of life. So I often end up asking this stuff of myself, and coming up with reasons how it could all have come to be in the first place - and ways for the local folk to have survived as they have, their own way of living and things they've come up to adapt.
Such thought exercises bring colour and excitement and depth to your worlds, and help you improve your craft and imagination as well. Never hesitate to think them through.
Westeros versus Mordor
Picture a gritty low-fantasy kingdom, the likes that have come back in vogue these past couple decades. Everything's dirty, all the lords are bastards, war everywhere, women get violated, heroes die quickly. Everyone is miserable. Game of Thrones, am I right?
Nope! It's the Dark Lord's Shadow-Realm, where he ever plots the demise and downfall of the good peaceful folk that thrive beyond his borders!
We're being told that it's "realistic". That it's how things actually are, outside of lurid fantasies and escapism. That true change is impossible, that you have no power to do anything, and that if you try, you'll die miserable. Being good sucks, villains always win.
And that's precisely what the Dark Lord would want you to think. I bet he'd style himself as the High King or some shit, too, and all his minions and lackeys are Knights and Dukes and other such shiny respectable titles, to further legitimize himself and to mock the truly good people, drive home the point that they're no better than he is. What if they complain? Why, they're the Dark Lords actually! So everything's muddled up and twisted and nothing makes sense anymore.
When he's inevitably defeated and the actual heroes march in to save the day and bring freedom and justice and true equality, the Dark Lord's downtrodden subjects will be leery and suspicious and wonder just what the catch is. So beaten and broken they are, they can't even recognize the true goodness when it comes their way. It will be a long and rocky road to bring them around. Some will never be convinced.
These are some of the things I've been thinking of for this year's NaNoWriMo, which I'm still writing. I feel like it could make for an effective twist: the readership of today has been conditioned to expect their grit and grime and low-fantasy, and what with how close the two concepts come, it'd be quite easy to pull the rug on them. Turns out it's all pretty bad and that we shouldn't tolerate it.
And perhaps we don't need to. Perhaps we can fight it for real.
Nope! It's the Dark Lord's Shadow-Realm, where he ever plots the demise and downfall of the good peaceful folk that thrive beyond his borders!
We're being told that it's "realistic". That it's how things actually are, outside of lurid fantasies and escapism. That true change is impossible, that you have no power to do anything, and that if you try, you'll die miserable. Being good sucks, villains always win.
And that's precisely what the Dark Lord would want you to think. I bet he'd style himself as the High King or some shit, too, and all his minions and lackeys are Knights and Dukes and other such shiny respectable titles, to further legitimize himself and to mock the truly good people, drive home the point that they're no better than he is. What if they complain? Why, they're the Dark Lords actually! So everything's muddled up and twisted and nothing makes sense anymore.
When he's inevitably defeated and the actual heroes march in to save the day and bring freedom and justice and true equality, the Dark Lord's downtrodden subjects will be leery and suspicious and wonder just what the catch is. So beaten and broken they are, they can't even recognize the true goodness when it comes their way. It will be a long and rocky road to bring them around. Some will never be convinced.
These are some of the things I've been thinking of for this year's NaNoWriMo, which I'm still writing. I feel like it could make for an effective twist: the readership of today has been conditioned to expect their grit and grime and low-fantasy, and what with how close the two concepts come, it'd be quite easy to pull the rug on them. Turns out it's all pretty bad and that we shouldn't tolerate it.
And perhaps we don't need to. Perhaps we can fight it for real.
Pankarp
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