Adventure Gamers - Forums

Taught all petite crimes what adventures demands;distracting,sneaking,borrowing,collecting junk,forging signatures etc…

I learned some French history in Adventure at the Chateau d’Or and, in The Messenger, I learned quite a bit about the the changes in the architecture and uses of the Louvre over the centuries.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon - How to make chocolate.

Day of the Tentacle + Pepper’s Adventure = an insight into American history. The mentioned Gabriel Knight and Broken Sword games explored a lot of cool topics, although Jensen is a far better educator. I also liked how Christy Marx’s Conquest series revealed some of the history and legends of Great Britain and Heroine’s Quest - the Nordic mythology. Quest for Glory 4 referenced Slavic folklore. And I learned some survival techniques from Return to Mysterious Island, Voyage and other games by Kheops.

Gabriel Knight 1, 2 and 3 taught me a lot about New Orleans, voodoo and co., Ludwig II, Wagner, Rennes-les-Chateau and surroundings, including the mythos that goes with it. It also, on a more meta-level, showed me how to properly integrate fact and fiction.

Day of the Tentacle was a nice introduction to some of the key-players in US history. (Though it wasn’t until I listened to the musical Hamilton that I could take those key-players seriously).

And of course learned what a Shivah is (and that Rabbi’s always answer with a question ) from The Shivah.

On a more meta-level: King’s Quest 6 taught me about the concept of dead-ends and has thoroughly shaped my opinion on those, and Conquests of the Longbow showed me how much I love being able to die in a game when this is implemented well.

By the way, I am glad that no one mentioned learning about MRI-research from Gray Matter. There was so much wrong with that…

nomadsoul - 27 September 2016 05:06 AM

About graymatter, well she brought the graymatter reality into fiction in a nice way.

Not sure what you mean by the gray matter reality, but her representation is so far from real MRI, that it would have been better if she would have invented a new technique that better suited her story. Or changed the game a little bit to match the technique, I think it could have been done without too many changes to the original.

I am all for taking some artistic liberties if necessary, but it would still have to be rooted in reality somehow, and this was just too far off (and unneccesarily so).

@Luna: Nothing to do with MRI, but Jane Jensen mentioned 3 books that inspired her Gray Matter plot: Phantoms of the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by Ramachandran; The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks; and The Concious Universe: The Schientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena by Dean Radin.

Yup, I know. That bit of inspiration is not my pet peeve with Gray Matter (I loved Oliver Sacks’ book). My main issue is that for a game that is supposed to be very well researched, and for a game dev who tends to have her facts perfectly staright, about everything from the MRI-bit is blatantly wrong. There are some artistic liberties in the game that I am completely fine with (even some neuroscience ones), but the MRI-bit just barely resembled MRI. (You can’t have a bunch of them in your basement like that. They are extremely expensive. Each MRI has a very large magnetic field that would not only pull every bit of metal in the room towards it, including Sam’s piercings, it would also screw up the computer equipment in the same room. You would want them all in a Faraday cage for that reason. They all need liquid helium to stay on field, which requires a whole set of safety measures and makes it expensive, to name a few things).

nomadsoul - 27 September 2016 07:54 AM

Massa intermedia was good enough for a base to expkain ESP,magic or mind powers
With MRI machines ofcourse there is some suspension of disbelief

If there is something that could be, but isn’t proven, like the MI, sure. It is one of the artistic liberties I meant before that I am fine with (even though I highly doubt it). You can toy all you want with the supernatural/magical and tie it in with this world, because that is in the realm of not proven/uncertain/could be. Not being able to reliable measure from MI with MRI because resolution issues? Sure, you can take the liberty that now you can. It is only a small tweak, you can easily imagine that the technique has evolved just that tad more that now you can measure from MI.

But as soon as you change everything about a system, then you cross a line. And that is what happened with the depiction of MRI. It is too much. And that is where I draw the line. To each their own, but I do think that if you write a game which takes place in this world, and you list a lot of literature showing that you have done your research, you shouldn’t go about changing the basic physics of an entire measurement system

It’s a bit like saying you have a plate that heats your food in the same way a microwave does, but there is no casing around it whatsoever, it is completely safe to use without said casing, and you can even safely put metal cutlery on it. And then still call it a microwave. But it’s not. It is a different system, just like the MRI-scanners in Gray Matter are nothing like MRI-scanners in real life. And with a developer like Jane Jensen people may actually believe it to be true, because she is the type to usually be pretty accurate, while actually this was way off. And that’s why I said that I was glad that no one in this topic had said they learned about MRI from Gray Matter, because unless they did some fact checking themselves, they would have severely mislearned.

Luna Sevithiainen - 27 September 2016 08:34 AM

... And with a developer like Jane Jensen people may actually believe it to be true, because she is the type to usually be pretty accurate, while actually this was way off. And that’s why I said that I was glad that no one in this topic had said they learned about MRI from Gray Matter, because unless they did some fact checking themselves, they would have severely mislearned.

But isn’t this a general issue with trying to learn anything factual from fiction?
That there is a very high risk that you will instead end up mis-learning things.

I mean no matter how much research the writer/developer does, they are always going to take artistic liberties to use it for whatever fictional purpose they have, and unless you already know the subject very well, or do a lot of research yourself afterwards, then it will be impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Lets take another example also by JJ:
GK3 takes place in Rennes-le-Château which is a real village in France, and many of the settings in the game like the church is a more or less accurate depiction of the actual settings. At the same time there are also many myths concerning this village, the Knights Templar, a hidden treasure and lot of other related stuff. The game is very much based on these myths, but a lot of the story is also pure fiction by JJ, it is only based on these myths not a retelling of the myths.

My point is, how many are actually able to distinguish between what are actual facts, what are pure myth and what is pure fiction from JJ’s hand? - My guess is none!
That is unless they already know the whole story, or spend some time researching it themselves.

Iznogood - 27 September 2016 09:58 AM

But isn’t this a general issue with trying to learn anything factual from fiction?
That there is a very high risk that you will instead end up mis-learning things.

I mean no matter how much research the writer/developer does, they are always going to take artistic liberties to use it for whatever fictional purpose they have, and unless you already know the subject very well, or do a lot of research yourself afterwards, then it will be impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Lets take another example also by JJ:
GK3 takes place in Rennes-le-Château which is a real village in France, and many of the settings in the game like the church is a more or less accurate depiction of the actual settings. At the same time there are also many myths concerning this village, the Knights Templar, a hidden treasure and lot of other related stuff. The game is very much based on these myths, but a lot of the story is also pure fiction by JJ, it is only based on these myths not a retelling of the myths.

My point is, how many are actually able to distinguish between what are actual facts, what are pure myth and what is pure fiction from JJ’s hand? - My guess is none!
That is unless they already know the whole story, or spend some time researching it themselves.

Like said, I have no problems with artistic liberties. My problem lies purely in calling something an MRI-scanner while it does not behave as such (as I tried to articulate with the comparison with the not-quite-microwave, if you change things too much from the original, it at some point stops being that original).

Also, as I said, I am completely fine with any artistic liberties in the realm of unknown/unproven/myths/could be’s. Like the mythos on which GK3 is based. No problem there, there is a lot of wiggle room for speculation because it is a myth and nothing is set in stone. But, to get back to your Rennes-le-Chateau example, the city itself, which is an actual factual city, resembles the real-life city. It may not be a perfect copy, but it still clearly is Rennes-les-Chateau.

The key point here is that if you take something from the real world, be it a city, or a machine, or a person, or whatever else, it may be fair to say that it resembles the real life examplar (unless the game is really wacky, Discworld-style maybe, but don’t consider GM to be a game like that). People can recognize real RlC when wandering around the RlC of GK3. Washington in DoTT is still a founding father, complete with wooden teeth and the cherry tree. Then why is it odd that I expect an MRI-scanner to resemble a real one?

Now if an MRI-scanner were a thing of mythical origin then you would have a point, but I have seen them, and I know they are just boring factual things really.

My point here was not really to disagree with you or your MRI example, but a more general point regarding the whole topic: As soon as try to learn anything from a piece of fiction, there is a very high risk that what you think you have learned is actually wrong!

The best example I can think of to illustrate my point is really the witch processes. Most people actually have some serious misconceptions regarding these, and it is not because it is something clouded in myth or the truth is unknown, in fact they are very well documented as historical facts. Instead one of the main reasons is that they have learned about them from fiction, and the fiction is usually grossly inaccurate.

As for GK3 then I don’t really have a problem with it or with the artistic liberties, in fact I think it is a brilliant game, and the mix between facts, myth and fiction works very well imo. I however believe that it is a mistake to look at it as anything but fiction! I.e. beyond a recognition of some of the scenes, it is impossible to extract any facts from the game, simply because it is impossible to distinguish the facts from the myths and the fiction in this game. (Or for that matter to distinguish the myths from the fiction, if it is the myths you are interested in).

As for the MRI in GM, then yes, I agree, it would have been better if she had just called it some fictional name instead, or for that matter if she had depicted an actual MRI. But at least it is such an obvious inaccuracy that no one, or at least only very few, would be fooled into thinking that this is how an actual MRI works.