Precepts and Guidelines: What are we doing here?

[bluewyvern]

There's still a whole lot about this enterprise that has to be made clear. I'm thinking largely in IC terms here, which of course have OOC consequences. This is long, bear with me.

The Guild of Writers as yet has no "mandate" from Cyan/the DRC, so we don't know how, for example, a bunch of explorers from the surface are supposed to be taught how to use this most cryptic and arcane art of D'ni Writing to summon new worlds from the void. (That's an exciting, awesome concept, and the idea that it's on the same level as greeters and map-makers is pretty funny.) I imagine that the DRC will come up with some newly-discovered explanatory texts on the Art, from which we (who must all naturally be more than proficient in the D'ni language, including the subset of jargon and formal language specific to the Art) will presumably be able to successfully teach ourselves how it's done. Having no Bookbinders or Inkmakers nor (surely) the technical knowledge to replicate these trades, we will naturally be using the materials happily discovered somewhere in a stockpile of Writing supplies (overlooked by Gehn and Atrus and everyone else who has been ransacking D'ni's last stores).

So then, as contemplated by Dr. Watson, it will be our task to write new Ages. Ages in which, perhaps, some resolution to the Bahro conflict can be found. As events have been shaping up, that will be the ostensible reason for our existence. How many playgrounds can we really make? I guess we will just be experimenting, since we have no idea what we're looking for, so we may as well create what we want, and we want to play.

Watson: Have you found anything yet that might help us in this Time of Peril?
Writer: No, nothing yet...hey, but there's a party on Waterslide Age tonight, wanna come?

(Incidentally, has anyone else begun to suspect that "Find a way, make a home", combined with the new suggestion of Writing new Ages, means that we might be asked to Write a new home for the Bahro?)

So what kind of Ages will we be Writing? I've seen a lot of talk of puzzles and whatnot, which is of course what we have come to expect in an Age, but if we were really creating worlds -- if someone gave you a kor'nee and a pen and said, "go on, Write anything" -- would the fantastic world that you create really have a lot of puzzles in it? Or would it just be a beautiful place to go?

I've also seen a lot of plans for D'ni worlds and backstory, but, if it hasn't been said somewhere explicitly (since again, we don't have that mandate), it can at least be inferred -- we aren't just people programming Ages, we're explorers who have learned the Art and are writing new Ages. Not rediscovering old lost D'ni ones. There shouldn't be a scrap of D'ni technology in sight, unless we bring it with us (setting up D'ni book pedestals and lamps around the link site, say).

Should the worlds be inhabited? Could be. There will be a little grist for the mill of the many writers and storytellers we have signed on...there can be indigenous cultures with their own histories and backstories, provided, I imagine, that they're all long gone and we never see them. There can be structures and things that they've built, remnants of their religion and language and industry. All that can be created, completely original, since no one from D'ni or anywhere else in the D'niverse will have ever been there before the Writer makes the first link. (In an IC context, we should note that during the process of Writing, the Writer would have no idea whether an Age is inhabited or not -- the Writer can only create conditions conducive to life, and then see what happens the first time she links to the Age. So no talking about the in-progress Age of the Fascinating Mountain People or anything.)

Now here's a question -- will we have to follow the rules of the Art as we've been told Atrus and the D'ni Masters before him followed it? Apart from things like no major revisions once the link is made, the one aspect that really concerns us is: should we Write man-made structures? Obviously, as Age-builders we can easily create man-made structures...they're much easier than natural features, in fact. But these should be for the most part structures purportedly built by previous inhabitants of the Age. Should we be able to actually Write in features like Atrus's Stoneship, that no human ever built, that was just there? Will we have access to all of Yeesha's paradigm-breaking secrets, or will we have to play by the old rules? (I'm saying "have" to because I'm assuming we'll want our Ages to be consistent in an IC context. Sure, we can slap a Stoneship down on an Age. But should we be able to?)

I'm hoping that out of this discussion we'll be able to form, as the topic suggests, a rough set of precepts and guidelines that will set out the sorts of things we will be trying to accomplish.

Some that I would propose based on my ideas so far:

1. We aren't Cyan programmers and we shouldn't pretend to be. We are not making the next Journey, D'ni area, pod age, bahro cave, Relto, or door garden. We are making experimental explorer Ages, both because we want a solution/answer/way forward and because it's cool, and that's something different. It's its own format, and we shouldn't try to replicate one of the others (designing it like, say, a new Prime Age), just because that's what we're familiar with.
2. Ages should be primarily in the form of natural worlds. Rock, water, sky, vegetation. As students of the Art, we should be experimenting to see what we can do with these basic forms.
3. Ages should not have man-made structures Written in.
4. Ages may be (previously) inhabited, and may contain structures built by the inhabitants and other remnants of their presence.
5. Ages may additionally have what limited D'ni and surface elements could have conceivably been "imported" by the Guild shortly after the link was made.
6. Puzzles, if there are any, should be organic to the world; either naturally-occurring obstacles/impediments to exploration, or contraptions created by inhabitants for a specific and plausible purpose.
7. Ages should be original. No D'ni anything, no connection to the rest of the known universe. These will be virgin Ages, and the first time the Writer puts his hand to the page will be the first time anyone from outside that Age has ever visited it -- with the POSSIBLE exception of the Bahro, who may actually have the ability to link anywhere.
8. Ages should be serious. I don't think that's a concern with the people here, but elsewhere I've heard concerns voiced about how giving Age-creation over to the users might result in the Shopping Mall Age and the Harry Potter Age and Phred42's Phat Phun Age and all kinds of abominations...but I'm sure the Guild won't undertake any such projects, and, for that matter, I'm sure the product of our labors will be subject to some sort of Cyan/DRC approval. Right?

One last thought -- I think that as members of the Guild of Writers, which, at least for those who are going to be doing the real meat-and-potatoes work of modeling and coding, has perhaps the most intensive duties of any of the guilds, we also have a greater responsibility to address the IC issues of our work and present ourselves and our projects in a plausible, realistic, consistent way. This is much less of a concern for, say, Cartographers, who, no matter how you cut it, will be A. visiting places, and B. drawing maps of them. There's not too much fudging or roleplaying going on there. We, in contrast, have a sort of double role to play, and I think we should be responsible stewards of the illusion.

[Lehm]

1. We aren't Cyan programmers and we shouldn't pretend to be. We are not making the next Journey, D'ni area, pod age, bahro cave, Relto, or door garden. We are making experimental explorer Ages, both because we want a solution/answer/way forward and because it's cool, and that's something different. It's its own format, and we shouldn't try to replicate one of the others (designing it like, say, a new Prime Age), just because that's what we're familiar with.
2. Ages should be primarily in the form of natural worlds. Rock, water, sky, vegetation. As students of the Art, we should be experimenting to see what we can do with these basic forms.
3. Ages should not have man-made structures Written in.
4. Ages may be (previously) inhabited, and may contain structures built by the inhabitants and other remnants of their presence.
5. Ages may additionally have what limited D'ni and surface elements could have conceivably been "imported" by the Guild shortly after the link was made.
6. Puzzles, if there are any, should be organic to the world; either naturally-occurring obstacles/impediments to exploration, or contraptions created by inhabitants for a specific and plausible purpose.
7. Ages should be original. No D'ni anything, no connection to the rest of the known universe. These will be virgin Ages, and the first time the Writer puts his hand to the page will be the first time anyone from outside that Age has ever visited it -- with the POSSIBLE exception of the Bahro, who may actually have the ability to link anywhere.
8. Ages should be serious. I don't think that's a concern with the people here, but elsewhere I've heard concerns voiced about how giving Age-creation over to the users might result in the Shopping Mall Age and the Harry Potter Age and Phred42's Phat Phun Age and all kinds of abominations...but I'm sure the Guild won't undertake any such projects, and, for that matter, I'm sure the product of our labors will be subject to some sort of Cyan/DRC approval. Right?

Disagree with pretty much everything here. You seem to be implying that ages you'd personally like to see be the only thing we do. I'm sure there will be ages like these, but that list seems rather limiting.

[Pryftan]

I *almost* entirely agree. I don't think we need to limit ourselves to never making an Age that we claim is a discovery rather than something we ourselves wrote. We just need to be very careful not to infringe on Cyan's copyrights while doing so.

So looking through your list...

1. True. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to Write what we dream about. We're not making the next Journey, but we can make A journey of sorts. We can, and I think we should, make all sorts of cool puzzles because it's the Myst way. I know in real life if I could make these Ages yes, I'd just want to make somewhere beautiful to go. But as a Myst Age it has a precedent to uphold and people to entertain.
2. We should be doing this, but I don't feel like we should limit ourselves to only doing so. That blurs into the third so I'm just going to move on.
3. What about writing an Age where wind and water erosion have worn a massive cliff into a naturally occuring "house"? Isn't that experimenting with rock, water, sky, etc. but using man-made structures?
4. I was going to type about this exception too, but you already included it. Yeah, there definitely needs to be allowance for civilizations on our worlds, in the same way as in the past where we never, or hardly, set eyes on the people themselves, merely what they left behind.
5. Yes.
6. Mostly, yes. I don't know why we can't occasionally make a storyline about someone designing a puzzle Age, though. Like Kadish Tolesa. Puzzles to protect riches.
7. This I don't see. I think it makes perfect sense to release some Ages we've taken possession of and used as "reference".. little Prison Ages of the D'ni and such. No D'ni cultural stuff (so we don't cause copyright issues), but built by the D'ni and tying into their history.
8. Most definitely.

And yeah, we need to be careful about the IC side of what we do. In some sense we should be working that side out in the idea stage of Age building, and we definitely shouldn't wait until it's built to find an explaination IC for it's existance.

But I think we can build little D'ni Ages as long as we're careful.

[bluewyvern]

Disagree with pretty much everything here. You seem to be implying that ages you'd personally like to see be the only thing we do. I'm sure there will be ages like these, but that list seems rather limiting.

Actually, I'd like to see all kinds of Ages. I'd love to see a space-station Age, a D'ni vacation Age, a physics-defying Age, all kinds of things. I'm just concerned about some of the limitations inherent in the world, if we make a commitment to staying in-character and playing by its established rules. Otherwise, we're just churning out any old world like we were making our own game.

If we're not going to approach this as if we were actually explorers who had gotten access to the Art, then we might as well throw out the in-game aspect of it altogether; get rid of Guilds and Pubs, don't talk about what we do in the Cavern, instead become an online forum for the Uru Fan Corps of Age-Builders, who act as a volunteer adjunct to Cyan and program D'ni Ages, Yeesha creations, areas of the City, puzzles and everything else, without being bound by the needs of the storyline.

I agree, those limitations are perhaps...limiting. Then again, within those guidelines there is still an immense space for imagination and challenge. I mean, #7 is "be original" -- how limiting can that be? I don't know, though, this is just meant to spark discussion so we can arrive at some kind of consensus. How would you like it to be done?

[bluewyvern]

I *almost* entirely agree. I don't think we need to limit ourselves to never making an Age that we claim is a discovery rather than something we ourselves wrote. We just need to be very careful not to infringe on Cyan's copyrights while doing so.

If we could release "discoveries", it would certainly open up what we can do. A lot of that will depend on Cyan, though...we still have to wait and see how they're going to treat us as an entity, and whether they would agree to making "discovery" Ages canon.

3. What about writing an Age where wind and water erosion have worn a massive cliff into a naturally occuring "house"? Isn't that experimenting with rock, water, sky, etc. but using man-made structures?

Well, except that it's not man-made -- it has a "natural" explanation. I would completely support Writing an Age like that.

What wouldn't fly, at least according to Atrus and his warnings, is just Writing in a house, with boards and nails and shingles on the roof and all. Yeesha could Write it, all right. We could maybe try...we might up with something like Stoneship, a house with one half melted into the ground or trees growing out of the side of it or something else strange gone awry.

It might even make for a great little storyline -- an Age where the Writer tried to experiment with the rules of the Art, and ended up with a funky melted house.

Maybe we make an experimental melted-house Age, then announce that we've discovered how to reliably Write man-made objects...then from that point we do whatever we want. But we make a story out of the process.

That's playing within the rules of the world. If we just Write an Age, and put a man-made house in it -- then that's flouting.

6. Mostly, yes. I don't know why we can't occasionally make a storyline about someone designing a puzzle Age, though. Like Kadish Tolesa. Puzzles to protect riches.

Absolutely. That's what I was thinking of when I said that it should have a specific and plausible purpose. But puzzles just for the sake of puzzles are a pitfall of badly designed adventure games of all kinds, and we should try to avoid them. It would also be nice if we could avoid making any puzzles look like we Wrote them in, as puzzles. If we attribute them to either the old inhabitants' security devices/malfunctioning machines/etc. or to accidents of geography, that way we both avoid the kind of strange act of building puzzles into Ages on purpose, while still fulfilling the obligation to give other explorers something fun to do and to solve when they visit our Ages.

[Dovahn]

In fact, the rules say that we cannot make man-made objects at all (or at least, that the D'ni had trouble with it). We apparently have to add them on afterwards with our bare hands. Oh, right I forgot. Explorers don't have working hands...

The GoW is at an interesting point between OOC and IC. Everything that we do is essentially OOC (what with modeling, scripting, and the like) and yet we're still a Guild, IC as much as Cyan wants us to be. So it can be a tricky balance.

I happen to agree with you in terms of what ages I would like to make, but that's just a personal preference. I'd probably also like to see another Kadish, but that would be a completely different sort of age.

I wonder whether there's some sort of balance between the two; in other words, if the GoW is allowed to "find" books. "Oh, yeah, we found this one. It was made by a guildmaster a long time ago as his secret hideout. It's pretty tricky to get in; see if you can try". Anything like that would actually be okay. Maybe there would be some other IC group to distribute these "found" books.

In terms of ostensibly GoW made books, I think you have a point, to some extent. However, we shouldn't limit ourselves this early on.

Dovahn

EDIT: ^ Yeah, I agree with what you said there.

[JulyForToday]

I too disagree with the first post.

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me say that people need to be VERY cautious of the OOC and IC distinctions of each Guild. Especially here at the GoW. Some Guilds make the translation from OOC to IC very easily, like the GoC. We are the most complex Guild when considering the OOC and IC perspectives of the game. IC, we would be using paper and ink to write using D'ni in an way that is almost reminiscent of programming and coding (I think of CSS). But out of character we use Blender and a lot of programs and graphics jargon. Now of course people have explored how the 'science' of the books work (ie, Linking Theory). I've previously already thought maybe we should institute an In Character Department of the GoW, but I honestly haven't ever liked the idea myself because it would be too confusing. Great maybe for a bunch of IC stories about experimenting with Ages, but it can also serve to confuse people. At the end of the day, Age Building is pretty much exclusively OOC. And 'Age Writing' (the process of writing like Atrus did) is entirely IC.

And as for the restrictions, just like in reality, if these books really existed, anyone who knew enough about them could experiment all they wanted without anyone knowing, as long as they didn't talk about it. It's whether these ages will ever become widely available to the public. That's where any restrictions will come into play. And most of that I would wager has more to do with stories and how they fit together than the quality of the physical content (which can always be improved).

[Pryftan]

July, I'm not sure how that makes you disagree with bluewyvern's restrictions. Age Building and Age Writing are different, yes. That's exactly why the only way we can ever hope to bridge the gap and make sense on both levels is to explain everything we build as if we wrote it, so why not build within similar boundaries as we would have if we were writing?

[Jennifer_P]

Hey, we can always build the buildings ourselves. Money's no object, IC; maybe someone won the lottery. Or alternativey, over at SR we needed to finance the building of a boat, but ICly we didn't have enough money. So we solved the problem by creating an anonymous donor who showered us with the money we needed. I'm sure the Cavern's just full of rich, eccentric people, right...? I mean, in the last looting event in the SR storyline there was one person who bid 4 million dollars to buy the Age of Mandil from looters! (The Age of Mandil, by the way, is one of the Ages of Ilathid--having it be sold in the auction was sort of a publicity stunt for both SR and Ages of Ilathid.)

[theclam]

Perhaps some initial ages could be designed to be material sources. Writing ages that supply wood, gravel, firemarbles, and steel would come in handy, in an IC sense.