43 KiB
[D] The rationality of different LitRPG premises
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Author: u/Kuiper *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5ud46u/d_the_rationality_of_different_litrpg_premises/
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Score: 30
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Created: 2017-02-16T06:04:22
Post:
For those unfamiliar with the genre, LitRPG is about characters who spend a significant amount of time immersed in a game world. Sword Art Online, Log Horizon, and Ready Player One are prominent examples, some argue that cyberpunk stories like Snow Crash and Neuromancer fall into this as well.
Lately I've been thinking about LitRPG, and plausible reasons for why players might spend a lot of time in an game world with high stakes. Having spend some time reading in the genre, I've found that most premises fall into one of three categories:
- Entertainment turned life-threatening: Sword Art Online is probably one of the best-known examples of LitRPG; players get trapped in an immersion MMO by VR helmets that threaten to scramble their brains if they try to remove them, and death in the game means death in real life. Players' motivation for "beating" the game is usually to escape it.
- Gold-farming stories: people play the game to collect in-game resources which they can then exchange for real money on some kind of secondary market; the game becomes their "job." (Many of these stories amp up the urgency by saddling the character with crippling debt or medical bills or some other kind of financial emergency.)
- Portal fantasy: players are forced into a game world by some supernatural or otherworldly power. (Log Horizon is a prominent example of this.)
And some other less common categories:
- Battle Royale/Hunger Games: players are forced into a game, usually one with lethal stakes where they fight each other to the death. Sort of a variant on the first premise, but with players being forced/coerced into playing the game, rather than getting "tricked" into playing the game of their own volition.
- Escapism: Players "retreat" into the game to escape from reality. Sometimes, this is done through some kind of "brain upload" that actually allows them to leave their body behind while their consciousness is transferred to the game world, and stories of this sort often involve the character escaping from some kind of terminal illness, giving them extra motivation to leave their physical body behind.
- Pure game world: there is no "real world;" players just live in a world governed by game-like mechanics, and none ever question the nature of their existence.
There are some problems with the first example; Sword Art Online's premise is basically that the game and VR helmet were created by an essentially villainous designer with no regard for human life, and the idea that someone would have both the ability and desire to "trap" players in a game world that could kill them really strains credulity. (Stories with this premise are usually just about what happens in the game world, and the nature of the 'meta-game' is usually not explored too much, so readers usually aren't given much time to question the implausibility of the premise.)
I often take issue with the "portal fantasy" premise with game worlds that exist through supernatural means, partly for the reason that there is often no explicit reason for why the player must be sucked into a game world (as opposed to a generic fantasy world where there are no "levels" and your strength and stamina aren't governed by arbitrary integers). It feels like there is very little game inherent to this premise, and litRPG is a genre that is specifically about games. Arguably the same is true of "pure game worlds" where there is no transference and players just exist in a world that is governed by game mechanics.
To get a bigger point about why I'm holding certain litRPG premises up to a bit of scrutiny, rational fiction usually willingly accepts some contrivances. You get to have a small number of "this is just the way it is." We don't really need to explain why Superman has powers; he just does, and the consequences of his powers are the place where we expect things to hold up under rational scrutiny. It's okay to say "alchemists have figured out how to conjure gold;" it's not okay to have a world where people can conjure gold on a whim yet not have this affect the role of gold in the economy in any way.
One of the difficulties that litRPG can face is that most of the time, we're not just accepting a few contrivances. In a fantasy world, you can say "This is basically medieval Europe, but people have figured out how to conjure fireballs, and that has some implications on the way warfare and economies developed." Even in fantasy worlds where we have beasts like dragons or leviathans, we expect the world to reasonably adhere to first principals like evolution/natural selection, and try and come up with some explanation for why dragons exist, and you can be a little hand-wavy anyway since evolution is something that we only get to see the results of. You get a small number of contrivances "for free," and then from that point we expect the consequences of those to affect the world in a logical way.
However, in a "game world," you can't take things back to first principles, or if you do, it takes a lot of effort, because games are full of so many arbitrary rules. Now, this isn't a problem for rational litRPG that acknowledges the fact that the world is a game, because the answer to every one of these questions is always, "things are this way because the designers made them that way," and the parts of the game world that "work" are described as well-balanced by the designers, and flaws in the world can be explained as design oversights or exploits. However, if you want a game world that just exists absent any kind of human designer, you have to figure out why the world is governed by all of these arbitrary rules. (Probably the easiest way to do this is make it explicitly designed by non-humans: if it's not a virtual MMO designed by game developers in Montreal, then it can be a game-like world created by some supernatural deity who personally authored all of the content and rules of the world.) These are mostly issues with the "pure game world" and "portal fantasy" types of stories.
A work-around for the portal fantasy story would be to do something where you have a game world that is authored by humans on earth (designed like any other video game), and then the players get sucked into a game world that happens to perfectly (or reasonably) resemble that game world, which I guess only counts as a single arbitrary contrivance, which is more in the ballpark of what we'd allow for speculative fiction.
I feel like the economic incentive is probably the most rational or plausible, as gold farming is something that actually happened in popular games like World of Warcraft, and some games like EVE online even give you a legitimate venue for turning in-game resources into something that can be exchanged for cash. In this case, I think the test is less "can you make it rational," and more whether there's a way to put an interesting twist on it, or present it in a way other than "gather resources, sell resources." You could probably get some interesting stories ideas for this just by following real-world escapades surrounding the history of games like EVE Online or the "hat economy" of Valve games like TF2. (There are actually real-world instances of TF2's tradable cosmetics economy being used as a mechanism for money laundering.)
I also recently listened to an episode of Econtalk about Bitcoin and the economic crisis in Venezuela. Bitcoin mining has become a bit of a thing in Venezuela for a combination of several reasons: the socialist government provides citizens with electricity free of charge (meaning that it's possible to turn a profit farming Bitcoin there, unlike countries in the US where the cost of power to run mining equipment can greater than the return from farming), and Bitcoin is more widely accepted as a currency than the Venezuelan bolivar. (Venezuelans can use their Bitcoin to buy food from the US, and pretty much the only way to convert bolivars into other forms of currency like US dollars is on the black market, as bolivars are worth so little that nobody wants to buy them at the official fixed exchange rate.) You could map the same thing onto resources in an MMO, which are their own form of digital currency.
Comments:
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+15] fear of last pages (4 hours later)
(edit: re-positioned some examples)
I don’t care that much how the laws of a LITRPG universe are being explained away because, as you’ve said, when dealing with any fictional universe you have to accept some basic axioms as granted and proceed from there. It doesn’t matter if among those axioms are just superman’s powers and abilities or a “rulebook” that describes how all living creatures have stat points and experience bars.
Here are some things that I do care about:
1. Once the postulates have been introduced, any implications that would logically be derived from them should either also take effect on the world or have an explanation for why they are not present.
For instance, if [you kill a creature] → [you get EXP] → [you level up] → [you improve yourself], then:
- either countries have monster farms (if they can be bred in captivity) \ monster capturers so that certain people (royals, researchers, important non-combatant officials, etc) could level up their stats and skills without doing any extra work and risking their lives—
- or there is a specific reason why they are not doing that (high concentration of monsters breeds some other kinds of hazard, there’s a specific set of requirement for the experiences gaining to work, etc).
2. The rest of the presented world and phenomena within it must either be consistent with those postulates or have explanations for the existing inconsistencies.
The economic value of gold you mentioned is one example of this.
Another one is that if [creatures have levels], [levels give stat points], [stat points can be used for increasing P.Def], then the level-10 protag with 30 P.ATK can not kill a level-100 rock elemental with 500 P.DEF in a regular physical combat no matter what. Either the author gets clever and comes up with a really good strategy and explanation for how that victory was possible, or the story starts severely straining my suspension of disbelief.
3. Especially in cases when the protagonist has been transported to this RPGMechVerse from our world, they should start actively trying to de-construct the seemingly contradictory and absurd laws of nature to see how these contradictions resolve themselves in experimental situations to make sense.
So far, the only stories I’ve found that tried having a protag like that and, consequently, to answer the questions that would emerge from such experiments, were The Games We Play and DK AMI (maybe also Terror Infinity to some extent). And even then the authors were shying away from some things. In almost all other stories, the main characters just “go with the flow”, never bothering to wonder, and so coming off as zombies to me-the-reader.
4. Protagonists (and their adversaries) must be clever and not make stupid mistakes.
Goodreads has been a severe disappointment for me in this regard. You try looking for a LITRPG series in the database to read, find something popular with an 80% rating or higher, and then
the protagonist KEEPS MAKING ONE STUPID MISTAKE AFTER ANOTHER A-A-A-A!!the story turns out to be of a very poor quality and you start wondering who were all these people that rated it as a 5/5.p.s. Regarding the premise of a LITRPG, it’s just a preference for me but I generally like when our world is not able to influence the RPG world too much. This, for instance, means that stories like SAO (where the characters are vulnerable to attacks on their bodies and on the game’s server) become less enjoyable for me.
u/Subrosian_Smithy [+6] Nudist Beach (6 hours later)
FWIW, TGWP wasn't really about a real protagonist in a game world, it was effectively about a game protagonist in a 'real' world. There was less room for experiments with game physics (although experiments still happened, to help gauge the protagonist's capabilities).
DK Ami is probably much better in that regard.
u/Draconomial [+1] Sunshine Regiment (5 days later)
Have you read The Gam3? In the setting, governments do provide access to special training and farming grounds to their militia and employees.
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+1] fear of last pages (5 days later)
I’ve put it for later reading because it seems to not be finished yet.
Unfinished stories are my bane in general, at the moment. Once I’ve accumulated 10+ stories that were WiPs with various update frequencies, I kinda had no choice but to start putting them in a time capsule for checking up on them some several years later.
Thanks for the recommendation though. Do you maybe know any RPGMech stories that are at least generally rational and contain 300k–500k+ words? So far the only long series that I haven’t tried yet is Guardians of the Flame, with almost all the rest ending up being a disappointment.
u/YetiMarauder [+2] (10 days later)
It's never going to finish the author has dropped it. A real shame too, as it was quite good
u/Salaris [+10] Dominion Sorcerer (12 hours later)
I actually tend to find it easier to suspend disbelief in portal fantasy style LitRPG, as opposed to "death game" style LitRPG like SAO, because the death game style LitRPG often tends to ignore the realities of how the video game development works.
SAO, for example, seems to imply that a single developer is responsible for both major game design decisions and technical features of the hardware. This is to the point where he could sneak in tech that can be used to kill people, as well as make major changes to the game itself (e.g. disabling certain UI functions, like logging out).
Not only is it extremely unlikely that a single person would be responsible for both lead game design responsibilities and designing the hardware, it's implausible to me that he could have gotten away with these changes without being caught at some point in the process of code review, Quality Assurance, etc.
Moreover, SAO itself doesn't play like a just-launched MMO, and certainly not like the first one on a new device. No game-breaking bugs? No server crashes? No client-side memory leaks? I don't believe it in the slightest.
Also, where are all the people from the company that decided to play their own product on launch day? That's a huge thing with MMO development. There would be QA testers and game devs that know the game backwards and forwards all over the place.
I'm ranting about SAO specifically here, but I run into problems like this with a lot of LitRPGs. There seems to be an idealized version of game development and releases that doesn't involve a lot of research. There also are often elements that don't make a lot of sense from a game design standpoint (unique skills for main characters that no one else can get, all sorts of deterministically generated content that would be nightmarish to test, etc.)
I've seen some exceptions. Ascend Online has patches mid-book, for example, and some interesting discussion of user social dynamics and subscription fees, etc. The Proving Grounds actually has a QA department and game devs involved in the plot, which was refreshing to see.
u/GaBeRockKing [+5] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (18 hours later)
Moreover, SAO itself doesn't play like a just-launched MMO, and certainly not like the first one on a new device. No game-breaking bugs? No server crashes? No client-side memory leaks? I don't believe it in the slightest.
You know, that makes me want to read a story with the following premise:
In ancapdystopiastan, Megacorp X has developed AIs that can program games from scratch, almost entirely without human intervention. But that "almost" is important, and with the codebase being made by robots, it's too difficult to navigate by regular programmers to find issues, and of course all the robot error-checking that could be done, has been done. So instead, QA employees are sent into the game with an ultimatum-- if you die, you die in real life. You get out of the game if you beat it (thus producing useful data for balancing) or if it crashes for you. Thus, the story would be about trying to exploit the game as hard as possible in order to escape.
u/Salaris [+3] Dominion Sorcerer (20 hours later)
Working for Megacorp X sounds a lot like stories I've heard about QA for Electronic Arts.
Joking aside, though, I'd be pretty amused to read something like that. The death game premise is still a huge stretch, but I love the idea of QA protagonists. (I started co-writing a book with a QA protagonist a while back, but we haven't finished it.)
u/None [+2] (23 hours later)
That's...actually quite interesting.
Check back with me in a week for some back-of-the-napkin short story-ing.
u/redrach [+2] (a day later)
I think it's possible to have high stakes in the real world without necessarily having to resort to the protagonist facing the threat of death.
A good example of that is the anime series Kaiji, which is about an unemployed, dead-broke guy with a mountain of debt who gets roped into high-stakes gambling games hosted by the local yakuza. If he wins, all his debts are forgiven and he walks away with a tidy sum of cash. If he loses, he'll be forced into a 10-year contract with the gangsters and made to do manual labor underground until his time's up or he dies from the poor working conditions.
I could see something similar happening with an RPG instead of gambling games.
u/General_Urist [+1] (2 days later)
That actually sounds like a VERY cool premise! Also, allowing it to simply be just some random game rather than specifically a MMORPG makes the world-building and such easier.
u/Draconomial [+1] Sunshine Regiment (5 days later)
That reminds me of a similar story I started reading. The main character is a creative designer working from inside the game, alongside the God/AI/Server. It was so long ago, I can't remember anything else but that he had some really neat tools.
u/derefr [+1] (15 days later)
Oh, like The Magic Circle, sort of. (Though that's the player-character trying to exploit the game to get out.)
Or like Alphaland. (Though that's the game exploiting itself to extend itself.)
Or like the secret ending in Kaizo Trap.
u/GaBeRockKing [+1] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (15 days later)
Or like the secret ending in Kaizo Trap
Which one? There are a lot.
u/derefr [+1] (15 days later)
Ah, I think I was thinking of the second one. Treating the game runtime's crashed game state as its own game and using the original game mechanics to advance through it. A bit the Tron light-cycle escape, but with more intentionality.
u/Kuiper [+2] (13 hours later)
I think your post gets at a larger point, which is that readers are more willing to accept the impossible than the implausible. (Not to veer off topic too much, but I think this is why a lot of Star Wars viewers are fine with "The Force" as a mystical power, but find the idea of midichlorians to be incredibly stupid. Saying "this world was designed by a deity" or "it just exists" could you get away with things more easily than if you tried to come up with an explanation for how some Japanese designer was able to devise and execute it.
However, I feel like litRPG has more problems with this than a "traditional" portal fantasy would (where people just get sucked into a magical world, a la Narnia). The magical world of Narnia is, in many ways, modeled after nature. Things like talking lions and talking mice are inventions of the human imagination, but in an intangible way, they feel more like nature than artifice. LitRPG worlds, on the other hand, are modeled after video games, and therefore they feel inherently more artificial (and less natural in the literal sense of being "less like nature"). When I see a griffin, I think "Oh, this is like a lion and an eagle, both of which are part of nature," and even if I know that griffins are a human invention, that's not where my mind goes instantly; accidents of evolution have already given us plenty of strange creatures. But when I see an HP bar floating over someone's head, or see an axe fail to damage a wooden shield due to arbitrary numbers and levels attached to those items, my mind immediately jumps to the idea that "someone made this." It feels like a designed world, which leads to the obvious question of who the designer is. (This is why I kind of feel like the idea of the world being constructed by a deity works better than the idea that the world "just is.")
u/Salaris [+1] Dominion Sorcerer (20 hours later)
Yep, I agree with your general point and the comparison to Star Wars, etc.
I absolutely agree that worlds with UIs and other RPG mechanics feel "designed" rather than natural. To me, at least, that just means the protagonists should at least think about that fact - even if it's never answered within the story. Giving a satisfactory answer would be great, but that's a lot tougher.
u/SpeculativeFiction [+2] (7 days later)
SAO, for example, seems to imply that a single developer is responsible for both major game design decisions and technical features of the hardware
More critical to me, is that AFAIK, they don't seem to take food, water, or waste disposal into concern at all. Everyone there should have died of thirst within three (ish) days, and been lying covered in their own excretions.
It was all I could think about while watching it. I watched a few episodes, and they never even handwaved the problem away.
u/Salaris [+1] Dominion Sorcerer (7 days later)
I believe they mentioned later that everyone who was hooked into the machines was moved into hospitals for care. You can see spoilers for end of season 1
That said, this still would require a method of locating everyone who is hooked into the game and moving them to a hospital. Moreover, it would presumably require maintaining both power and internet connectivity to the game servers the entire time. That makes the hospital solution implausible and compounds the whole "always online" issue even further.
u/derefr [+1] (15 days later)
It would have been an interesting—but far more "hard speculative fiction"—angle, if they indeed had just ripped everyone's headsets off, and left them semi-brain-damaged—with the "better half" of each person's mind left uploaded into the game.
The people in the game could then have had a moment where someone from the real world managed to reach them, and told them that "they" were all awake and walking around in the real world, but weren't quite themselves any more—that they had all mostly fallen off the life-paths they were on. The goal would be to merge the parts of them existing in the game back into the parts in physical reality.
It might not even work fully, in the end: their physical selves' minds might be restored, but their digital selves might persist, stuck in the game. Each individual would have their own personal denouement for whether they kept in touch with their digital self afterward. Some might even play games "alongside" their digitally-trapped self. (Which can be a positive thing, if you don't question it much.)
u/Salaris [+1] Dominion Sorcerer (15 days later)
A twist like that (or some variation thereof) would be great. I'm not sure I'd go about it from a "splitting" standpoint; treating the characters in the game world as being uploaded "copies" of the person would be more believable to me, although that still would probably be beyond the tech level of SAO. (Maybe not, though, if Yui - heh, "Yui" - is an emergent AI.)
u/derefr [+1] (15 days later)
This is to the point where he could sneak in tech that can be used to kill people, as well as make major changes to the game itself (e.g. disabling certain UI functions, like logging out).
Miyamoto got to dictate hardware features of the SNES in order to enable mechanics in SMW. SAO served pretty much the same "flagship launch title" role for the NervGear that SMW did for the SNES, so I could see the game-designer character saying "we need to be able to manipulate people's neurotransmitter levels in order to enable [game experience X]" and the hardware team just giving the software control over that, without stopping to consider that the software could e.g. jack the cortisol signal up to be equivalent to VX nerve gas exposure.
Moreover, SAO itself doesn't play like a just-launched MMO, and certainly not like the first one on a new device.
Maybe it's "a new game" in the sense that it's a reused game engine, with its rendering backend newly ported over to VR (like is being done to FFXV presently), and populated with new but not mechanically-novel content (ala Megaman 2-through-5.)
code review
Code review only works for code checked into version control. If the "logout lock" logic was embedded in, say, an SQL stored procedure on the production database, where its matching migration was untouched, you'd never find it in code review/QA. Or, more insidiously (yet sadly, more common), if a large part of the game was built in the form of a business rules engine, the rules loaded into it would be rendered pretty much opaque to the developers—production business-rules engines are basically "write-only."
Also, where are all the people from the company that decided to play their own product on launch day?
I agree this part seems off. The only way I can make sense of it is to imagine that nobody even knew they were making an MMO, other than the designer. There was some Manhattan Project level shit going on. Like in [Cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)).
u/Salaris [+1] Dominion Sorcerer (15 days later)
Miyamoto got to dictate hardware features of the SNES in order to enable mechanics in SMW. SAO served pretty much the same "flagship launch title" role for the NervGear that SMW did for the SNES, so I could see the game-designer character saying "we need to be able to manipulate people's neurotransmitter levels in order to enable [game experience X]" and the hardware team just giving the software control over that, without stopping to consider that the software could e.g. jack the cortisol signal up to be equivalent to VX nerve gas exposure.
Good point about old school Japanese systems having more input from people like Miyamoto. That's not something I was thinking about; there could be more of a cultural distinction there. That being said, anything that interfaces directly with the brain is going to come under a lot of scrutiny. I have a hard time believing that would have gotten though to the point of SAO's launch with literally no one noticing and calling it out, especially since SAO isn't supposed to be the first item on the device (it's just the first MMO).
Even if somehow it got through devs and QA, which I doubt, I still expect that users would have cracked open the hardware and figured out the potential applications fast. There are videos with people Opening up an Occulus Rift and analyzing the content, for example.
Maybe it's "a new game" in the sense that it's a reused game engine, with its rendering backend newly ported over to VR (like is being done to FFXV presently), and populated with new but not mechanically-novel content (ala Megaman 2-through-5.)
Ports to other platforms still are going to have bugs, though. And even companies that have existing hardware capable of handling MMO servers often have terrible launch stability; see the launch of Diablo 3, for example. Blizzard has some of the most stable servers and the best teams for "always online" games in the business, but even they have problems. Even the first few expansions for WoW had serious problems at launch.
Code review only works for code checked into version control. If the "logout lock" logic was embedded in, say, an SQL stored procedure on the production database, where its matching migration was untouched, you'd never find it in code review/QA. Or, more insidiously (yet sadly, more common), if a large part of the game was built in the form of a business rules engine, the rules loaded into it would be rendered pretty much opaque to the developers—production business-rules engines are basically "write-only."
I admit that I'm a game designer, not an engineer; your degree of familiarity with this may be greater than mine. Even if somehow he managed to get malicious code into the game without going through source control, though, some other programmer could probably still hotfix that stuff back out. Obviously some things are trickier to hotfix than others, but they had literally years to solve that problem - and "no logout" seems like a pretty simple flag to flip.
I agree this part seems off. The only way I can make sense of it is to imagine that nobody even knew they were making an MMO, other than the designer. There was some Manhattan Project level shit going on. Like in Cube.
Hah! I'm amused by the cube comparison. But seriously, this game had a beta phase that was publicly known, even if somehow they pulled that kind of deal you'd expect the developers to find out at that point.
Besides that, ALO appears to have been in production at around the same time (and on the same engine), so I doubt there was any real conspiracy to keep the devs from knowing it's a MMO. =)
Frankly, I think most of this is just a manifestation of the author not having experience working in the industry. Many LitRPGs have similar issues.
u/eternal-potato [+7] he who vegetates (13 hours later)
There is a fairly good (and hilarious) Russian LitRPG novel Реабилитация (en: Rehabilitation) which has a premise that does not seem fall into the categories you describe. It is somewhat like gold farming but I believe it is sufficiently different to be mentioned here: present-day MC signed up for cryonics then some years later got shot in some unexplained circumstances and subsequently frozen. About three hundred years later laws are passed that make indefinite life extension a right of every citizen. Any person who's body is unable to continue living for any reason other than destroyed brain and who has not explicitly opted out of this, are uploaded and put into virtual reality of their choice. Specific wording happened to apply to cryonically preserved at any point in the past. So MC gets thawed out, his consciousness digitized and his body disposed of. He is promptly informed of the situation. Getting a new meatspace body is possible but hellishly expensive unless one has a sufficiently high social significance rating IRL, which is similar to what China is currently trying to do with their social credit system. Ways this rating can be raised to required levels are limited in VR, and are further limited to those that will not cause extreme future shock. Virtually the only way immediately available to MC is "attaining goodhood" within the stock-fantasy VR game of the setting.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (19 hours later)
Do you know if there is an English translation available anywhere? That story sounds like it has a good premise to start with.
u/AugSphere [+2] Dark Lord of Corruption (a day later)
I wouldn't bother. It starts off well enough, but very quickly descends into unabashed crack. There is no sense of consistency to the world.
u/General_Urist [+1] (2 days later)
Just how bad does it get? Worse than SAO?
u/AugSphere [+1] Dark Lord of Corruption (3 days later)
Much worse, but I didn't get far enough into it. Maybe the insanity settles down to manageable levels later on, but I wouldn't count on it.
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+2] fear of last pages (21 hours later)
– Жестокий ты.
– Говорить жестокий — не политкорректно!
– А как надо?
– Альтернативно гуманный!
The book was last edited in 2015 but this bit reads like something written after that Conway drivel.
Regarding the recommendation in general: thanks for story, but it was a crack!fic, not a rat!fic.
u/General_Urist [+1] (2 days later)
very rough translation:
You brute
Talk brutally. Not politically correctly
And how is that?/what do you want?
How about humanely/human?
This sounds like a bunch of crazy people, but not necessarily like a crack fic.
u/derefr [+1] (15 days later)
Sounds like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom crossed with DataPacRat's S.I..
u/InfernoVulpix [+4] (6 hours later)
One thing I'd like to draw attention to is how games, and by extension game worlds, have a ton of mechanics. MMOs most notably, but true for other forms as well, the author simply can't start out the story with a large tutorial that explains every rule of the game. From the simple nature of the mediums, authors have to hoard exposition-minutes like gold, and that means with game worlds they have to cheat.
Even if the game world is properly and fully developed, and every rule is internally consistent and coherent, the readers won't know this because they only got exposition for immediately relevant ones. This makes traps for the author, where they can want to use their entirely coherent and pre-defined mechanic to advance the plot of the game, but since they couldn't afford to mention it in the info dump it's out of left field to the reader. The simplest way of avoiding this trap, of course, is to just not use the mechanic, which eventually creates game worlds with no 'game' to them beyond what's immediately relevant to the player.
There are creative solutions to this, such as making a real-life game (if not as immersive) and using it to teach the more in-depth mechanics of the game, by which point your story is a fanfic and understanding of 'canon' is to be expected, or you could have an encyclopedia full of the game rules to refer to at the start of the book. By far the easiest, though, is to discard game elements whenever convenient and substitute them for more intuitive shounen elements under the guise of "game elements", or something else similar.
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+6] fear of last pages (8 hours later)
games, and by extension game worlds, have a ton of mechanics.
Even though that’s true, consider that when you want to play a videogame you do not first go and read its manual book from cover to cover. You just start playing the game, and along your gameplay progression its mechanics gets gradually unfolded before you.
So I think for LitRPG stories that’d generally be a good strategy to adopt as well — the reader would explore the world along with the protagonist, and gradually each new unlocked area, item, or important setting rule would introduce its small bit of extra exposition.
Here’s the wikia for Reincarnator, for example. It has articles about Dimensions and Zones, Powers, Abilities, Item types, and so on. But the story itself doesn’t start by explaining all these things that are surely important parts of the setting. Instead, in the introduction the reader is given a glimpse of what the protagonist has to try preventing, and then the story begins where the protagonist has to face one problem after another — with each new problem arc also coming a new bit of explanation regarding the world’s lore and mechanics.
So I think a good approach would be to first keep re-designing if not the entire mechanics system then at least its backbone, until no inconsistencies popped up when you tried simulating the world through time. After that, some of these elements would get shown in the actual story as the tip of the iceberg, while the rest of the sketches would stay under the hood. Those could either be revealed in a complementing blog or side project for those who’re interested enough to read your world-building notes (something that MoL’s author seems to be doing, for example) or just be left alone, for maybe possible future fanfic writers to explore upon on their own.
This, however, leaves unanswered another problem adjacent to the one you mentioned: how to determine which plot devices, introduced down the line, will the readers perceive as congruent with the previously established setting elements, and which ones will feel like Deus ex machina cop outs to them.
u/derefr [+1] (15 days later)
by which point your story is a fanfic and understanding of 'canon' is to be expected
You could go further and make the story into the scenario of the single-player campaign of the actual game.
u/generalamitt [+3] (5 days later)
A question: In a game world where raising intelligence actually make you smarter, why would anyone bother with strength or any other physical stats?
Intelligence gives you more mana and magic power, so it's not like you would be weaker then someone who invest in str.
u/Endovior [+2] (13 hours later)
some games like EVE online even give you a legitimate venue for turning in-game resources into something that can be exchanged for cash.
A minor quibble, but EVE has never been one of the games that permit Real Money Trading (RMT); they've always banned people for that.
You might be thinking of Entropia, which is basically the only game-type game (as opposed to gambling-type games) that people make serious money from.
u/Draconomial [+2] Sunshine Regiment (5 days later)
A ton of cash trading still goes on in EVE anyways. Just check ebay.
u/Endovior [+2] (5 days later)
Sure, but OP was talking about legitimate income sources. Illegal out-of-game exchanges aren't ever going to be the kind of moneymaker that Entropia's virtual real estate deals are.
u/LazarusRises [+2] (6 days later)
Stephenson's Reamde is a great example of the economic incentive. I think most of the book takes place in the real world, but big chunks of it are in T'Rain because a) T'Rain currency can be mined like Bitcoins and exchanged for dollars, and b) a group of hackers are encrypting players' files and offering the key in exchange for T'Rain currency.
This kind of lampshades your discussion because a lot of the book is actively concerned with the development and functionality of the game world--the creator intentionally built the world to be as rational as possible, and that serves as the fulcrum for much of the plot. Good book, if kind of off-the-wall.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+1] (a day later)
How about a post-singularity LitRPG where there used to be a real world but it's all been converted into game world now? I haven't read Friendship Is Optimal but I get the impression that that's approximately its premise.
u/PeridexisErrant [-4] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (44 minutes later)
Readers: please note that posts should be about existing works of rational fiction - rather than abstract discussion.
u/ToaKraka [+13] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (3 hours later)
What about my zillions of links to Critical Hits, of which many have been "abstract discussion"? And this post does explicitly reference several existing works.
You (plural) could at least add these spur-of-the-moment "rules" to the sidebar as soon as you decide to institute them.
u/veruchai [+13] (7 hours later)
Could you clarify this? I agree posts shouldn't primarily be about non rational subjects but we literally have a [meta] tag for general discussion right? These kinds of posts are the main reason I'm on the sub in the first place.
I believe short thoughts should be in the weekly threads but sufficiently elaborate essays deserve a shot at being a post an sich.
u/Zephyr1011 [+13] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (9 hours later)
Is there a specific thing you wish to prevent/encourage with that ruling? Given that this thread seems entirely fitting for this sub, something to provoke discussion and of interest to at least some of the members, it seems natural that the rules of the subreddit should allow it