by bluewyvern » Wed Oct 10, 2007 7:15 am
That's a really nice thought. I have an even simpler idea for implementing it: write all of the Age's notebooks and accompanying texts multilingually.
When you think about it, all the texts you read in our Ages are going to have been written or translated by the Writers, Maintainers, scholars, and whoever else first visits the Age. They will either be our field notes, observations and discoveries about the new Age, or translations of the texts left behind by the inhabitants, because whoever was there and left their diaries and notes and messages didn't know English, that's for sure. They will either be originally in D'ni, if we do do D'ni Ages, or in a never-before seen language that will have to be deciphered and translated super fast by our resident crack team of genius exolinguists, if they're from an entirely new civilization that's never had any contact with Earth or D'ni.
We were lucky enough in all the Myst games to be following in the footsteps of Atrus and his family, who obligingly spoke English (or French, or German, etc., depending on your version of the game, but it came from the surface in any event), but that's not going to be the case any more.
I'm thinking, a journal, the diary of an Age inhabitant, filled with strange and unfamiliar symbols, and next to it a DRC-style ruled notebook with a linguist's translation of the text for the explorers to read. If we want to make this appeal to an international audience, we can just do that in multiple languages, provided we can find people to do the translations.
In the case of Maintainers' and Writers' notes about the Age, same thing -- the original journal in English, with a companion volume of translations done by helpful volunteers. (Technologically) easy to implement, makes perfect sense IC, and everything.
Last edited by
bluewyvern on Wed Oct 10, 2007 5:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Concept, design, storytelling, editorial
KI# 05697413