Annotated 12-19
I like how hard Carol goes here; the basics of her dialogue were Phil, but I shuffled and altered it a bit for an emotional crescendo.
I do some of my best work with characters who openly doubt an idea driving the story or series, because there’s a little part of me that thinks all my ideas are stupid, and giving that self-doubt a soapbox allows me to turn my internal conflict into courtroom drama.
We had to lay things out here that were complex enough to give you all an understanding of what we were doing with the story, yet they had to be simple enough to be comprehensible. That was a tough one, but if you got lost here, at least HR and Carol’s faces as they looked at each other made you feel you weren’t alone in that.
Does the idea of another world really sound that crazy to a person that knows “magic” is real?
I can see it. It’s one thing to see HR put on what amounts to a light show and do things to what sCarol thought was just a video game. A video game that other player interact with just fine using nothing but keyboard.
It’s another thing entirely to learn HR sculpted an entire other physical world with his magic!
That would be like learning your silly but generous uncle is actually so powerful and influential that he can shape politics around the world.
So, Rick & Morty, then?
Other worlds, no.
Other worlds that you can view and manipulate through the medium of a video game…that’s a bit off the wall.
To me, it seems a bit less nuts to say “I used magic to connect (or just travel) to another world” than “I this whole world. With magic. And C++.”
Than again, we’re talking about how believable something is with “magic” at the center…
I fungled the bolding. Please disregard my blundering.
I’m not sure where the thread of this conversation got lost. Either I’m not understanding what you’re saying here, or you’ve misunderstood the concept under discussion.
Are you saying it’s more reasonable to you to be able to alter a completely different universe with a computer program in your own than it is to make an MMO?
I think they’re saying that it’s more reasonable to say “I found this world and connected to it and altered it with magic” than.
“I created this whole world from scratch.”
Maybe the critical weakness of this plot juncture is that HR and Carol did Impossible Thing A, only to now be encountering evidence they instead did Impossible thing B, but the reader never gets a clear understanding of what Impossible Thing A was in the first place so they can’t appreciate the significance all this has to our characters.
As she’s saying in here, they have so much control over the world that she finds the idea impossible. We get enough glimpses over the course of the story to know that, for example, the tug-of-war for control of Arkerra can lead to the game actually unlocking entirely new content. Meaning that something that goes on in the game stops players from being able to leave the playing area.
Meaning that those players can’t BE real characters… right?
HR’s magic has not been shown to be that powerful in Sepia World. Not even CLOSE.
So Carol’s being asked to stop believing that Arkerra is a digital game being magically enhanced, and to instead believe that Arkerra is an entire world being controlled on an unimaginable level by someone whose magic is basically at current E-Merl levels.
There’s a critical detail to the story that this page kinda brushes up against, one I’m not sure ever gets a more thorough explanation.
It’s about the nature of the magical enhancements to Arkerra (the game). Is arcanometrics essentially being used to provide augmented functions? Ones where the program still provides input variables and gets other variables as output, only the output variables being provided (say, an NPC’s physical location in the world and the text strings of their dialogue) are coming from something far more advanced than a mundane computer simulation.
I think this conversation desperately needed Carol to name a specific, concrete example of HOW they control this environment (e.g. right now the World’s Rebellion is sacking Brookland because that’s what they TOLD it to do, the staff upstairs had to build the world event and update the servers to roll it out.) With that leading HR to point out some limitation (they can’t just directly alter such-and-such using a console command) and Carol to respond “Because you built them to run autonomously!”
Yeah it is never really explored how the world that behaves like a world in compatible to the game aspect. We don’t really know how it plays as a game for one. Like for instance what do other players do all day? Are there quests to fill the time that other people can repeat like in most mmos? Dungeons with respawn? That would make it behave in distinctly game like ways. On the other hand a world behaving like a world doesn’t have constant entertainment to offer, normal life tends to have boredom and downtime.
How much control the game company has over events is also an interesting question. In the end our world mostly served to give a big bad and a group that would go after him in parallel in another world. The world building never quite made sense to me, on the other hand it would be hard to come up with a convincing way for it to work so might have been the best choice to just sketch it.
2 + 2 = Phish
Fish = ghoti
Iunderstoodthatreference.jpg
That’s me, I guess.
Orange being conspicuously not one of the Five’s colors…