Whilyam wrote:

While I don't quite understand the concept of "normal" users (people who put add-ons are abnormal?) . . .

I mean someone totally new to Uru, who hasn't actively made the choice to install add-ons. I am primarily concerned with what their user experience is like.

Whilyam wrote:

I pretty much agree with this. My understanding was that fan Ages would be put in a "Fan Nexus" (simple to make, small, infinitely scalable) so no book to the Age of Brown Cubes need ever be seen in the City. While I'd love to see fan Ages in the City, I think it's far more pragmatic to have them in their own area.

OK, yes. I agree. Except I think that it should be possible, in the case of the absolute best fan Ages (as judged by... I don't know who) -- those that are "real" Ages, absolutely respect canon, largely complete, thoroughly tested, and respected in the community -- should be "blessed" as official Ages. These would appear in the city, and once linked to, appear in a fixed place on the Relto shelf. I reckon we could get one of these per month or so, and get back to the original schedule for MOUL. By the look of it, the GoW already has some Ages which are almost ready.

Whilyam wrote:

I don't necessarily agree that they should be added out of game, though. Why not have the full list in the nexus? You would go in, checkmark a few ages and select "Retrieve Books" (or some other IC mechanism). Progress bars start up showing how far you are on downloading and you can go about your business while the Ages are downloaded in the background. You come back and you see the Ages you've downloaded (as a different color to identify them as available to you) and can link through.

True. I don't see much difference between in-game and out-of-game UIs. The important thing is that this "fan nexus" (or "fan ages" panel of the main Nexus) is clearly marked "unofficial". The Ages you browse there have passed minimal screening, so they could "break" continuity (and possibly your game). Explore at your own risk.

I just want to ensure that there is a clear distinction between "official canon" (Cyan and official fan ages) and unofficial content which is accessible from within the game.

Eat_My_Shortz wrote:

Whilyam wrote:

I pretty much agree with this. My understanding was that fan Ages would be put in a "Fan Nexus" (simple to make, small, infinitely scalable) so no book to the Age of Brown Cubes need ever be seen in the City. While I'd love to see fan Ages in the City, I think it's far more pragmatic to have them in their own area.

OK, yes. I agree. Except I think that it should be possible, in the case of the absolute best fan Ages (as judged by... I don't know who) -- those that are "real" Ages, absolutely respect canon, largely complete, thoroughly tested, and respected in the community -- should be "blessed" as official Ages. These would appear in the city, and once linked to, appear in a fixed place on the Relto shelf. I reckon we could get one of these per month or so, and get back to the original schedule for MOUL. By the look of it, the GoW already has some Ages which are almost ready.

Whilyam wrote:

I don't necessarily agree that they should be added out of game, though. Why not have the full list in the nexus? You would go in, checkmark a few ages and select "Retrieve Books" (or some other IC mechanism). Progress bars start up showing how far you are on downloading and you can go about your business while the Ages are downloaded in the background. You come back and you see the Ages you've downloaded (as a different color to identify them as available to you) and can link through.

True. I don't see much difference between in-game and out-of-game UIs. The important thing is that this "fan nexus" (or "fan ages" panel of the main Nexus) is clearly marked "unofficial". The Ages you browse there have passed minimal screening, so they could "break" continuity (and possibly your game). Explore at your own risk.

I just want to ensure that there is a clear distinction between "official canon" (Cyan and official fan ages) and unofficial content which is accessible from within the game.

I really like these ideas! I think the old Maintainer's Nexus would be the most logical place for the Fan Ages until they were "blessed" as it were. Perhaps along with acceptance and recieving their own spot in the city they could get their own Maintainer's Mark in the Age... Just throwing out ideas at this point.

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member of the Guild of Calamitous Intent

"I invented the term the Bevin Generation do I get a spot in Mystlore?"

Eat_My_Shortz wrote:

I think that it should be possible, in the case of the absolute best fan Ages (as judged by... I don't know who) -- those that are "real" Ages, absolutely respect canon, largely complete, thoroughly tested, and respected in the community -- should be "blessed" as official Ages.

I don't really have a position on this since I make Ages for other fans, not Cyan. People have enjoyed my Ages for a while now without Cyan's blessing. Cyan elevating Ages isn't too bad (though it will create charges of elitism, etc.) but I don't want Cyan (or certainly the paranoids) rejecting Ages based on criteria like "do we 'need' this?" or "is this what Uru 'means?'"

Edit: Added a necessary parenthesis. -Whilyam

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-Whilyam

Last edited by Whilyam on Tue Apr 20, 2010 1:12 am; edited 1 time in total

And I'm of the stance that my Ages don't /require/ official "blessing".

They will be used, if people see fit to use them. I make ages for the community to enjoy, while I do not break canon, nor do I wish to, or intend to.

I do, however, find it offensive that others believe they have the right to judge canon. RAWA, and by extension, others in Cyan, /alone/ have the right to judge canon. We, as fans, only have a flawed perception of what "canon" truly is. We may never know all the different threads of Cyan's story. Cyan may or may not have the manpower to judge it, or may or may not have the resources to judge it, but it is /not/ our place to make those decisions.

If the situation is: "Well, Cyan can't possibly judge canon, for every age..." then the ONLY solution that will not corrupt what little canon we have, forever, is to simply /not/ judge canon. It is not our place to judge canon.

I stopped trying to figure out what canon was along time ago. I just got by what info I can find in game and if its not in the game then its not canon.

Much simpler

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openning up new doors and doing new things,
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Keep moving forward

Canon has always been for me, at any given moment in time, whatever Cyan says is the official story. But it is more than that. Canon is also the emotion, that feeling of being In the Cavern, the atmosphere that such official storyline has created.

I liked what Cyan did so far, even with all the retcons and shortcomings of some of their storytelling (most of them due to RL reasons). This is why I'm still here. This is also why I'm wary of handing everything over to the fans - because none of us, as far as I know, has spent the last fifteen years of his/her own life in the professional design of fantastic worlds and adventure games, with this kind of quality results.

Now:

- if people come up with stories about how they found other D'ni linking books;

- if some new fan-made drama between groups with different views on the future of D'ni arises (maybe some IC anti-Guild protest?);

- if someone says: "Look! I've written a Descriptive book to this wonderful Age with glowing seas and rocky islands";

...I'm all up for it. If these new stories and Ages are of poor quality (according to my own judgement - because after all, I play Uru because I like it, and not because it's awesome in some objective way), I'll be unhappy; but the only solution would be either to make my own, or to become rich and fund Cyan. ;-)

But I like Uru for what it is. If it becomes something so different that I lose what makes my game experience valuable, I will not see any reason to stick around anymore.

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Please avoid drinking the lake water.

goofy wrote:

I stopped trying to figure out what canon was along time ago. I just got by what info I can find in game and if its not in the game then its not canon.

Much simpler

I love this! That's my take on it -- but I'm the sort who thinks that if you didn't put it in the game, why should it matter?

The live events are a grey area for me. I realize they exist, but since they are long gone, and I never saw any of them (like most players), I don't know why they are important. The "grey area" part is that I realize that many players think they are important. I got burned out on the live events after the last one, where they actually had Yeesha being played by someone at Cyan, I presume a live actor, and only a small number of people got to see it.

I the world of the game, if we get some changes, new ages, the KI being redone (please, yes), it seems to me that one could come up with an "in game" way to explain almost everything. I think that having explorers learn to do the art of book writing -- that goes a long way. And someone enhancing old technology, works for me.

On things like flying -- I'd love to fly in Uru. It seems to me that you could explaing it -- some sort of anti gravity device thing. Right now, the city is a dead world -- but it's not closed off, new explorers, and new things get in. And the ages are wide open too. You really could explain anything.

If it's not "official canon", OK. If and when Cyan elects to great some new content, in game, then we'll have an "official" addition to the story.

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Ian A. Pertwee in Cavern - KI# 374362
Ahnotahm - Il quartiere
Not talking as a mod unless I say so

My Canon definition is pretty simple for Uru:

Everything you can see and do in the Cyan-run MOULa game/data is canon, except where a limitation in the game's technology introduces a compromise or inaccuracy. Anything not shown or mentioned in the Cyan-run MOULa game/data is not canon.

That's it. That's the whole definition, and I think it covers everything exactly.

Notice this leaves out all the other Myst games, all the books, and all the user-created content. I am not hating on these things! Add them in some tangible way to the Cyan-run MOULa data, and they become canon! Most of Riven automatically becomes canon just because of the debris in the Cleft, for instance... it's not that hard to do. Myst Island (and by implication, the Myst game) becomes canon because you can go there in MOULa (though it'll be awfully nice when they dump in the Myst V ages and we get the whole island to walk around).

User-created content becomes canon when it's reachable from the Cyan-standard MOULa world. Simple.

I waver a bit on what the DRC says, and whether the DRC forums are canon or not. I lean towards "yes" but there's always the possibility that a DRC member doesn't know what's going on; you can't put it past Cyan to role-play the DRC characters to have bad misconceptions.

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Last edited by Drakmyth on Fri Apr 23, 2010 9:26 am; edited 1 time in total

My view is that canon so far is what cyan worlds has decided. It is unclear where the story will fit into the open source agreement.
Either way I would suggest an open source project "URU storyline". If The story line of present URU (but not the older parts of MYST . Riven and books) is released for modification then great. We can have a project of continuing a beautiful storyline that writers and programmers of new material can adhere to, (at least on the major server), if we can agree on the above project for guidelines.
If all official storyline, past present and future, is frozen for possible use and direction, selling by Cyan Worlds, then an open source storyline project may still have important work. Not to create the grand d'ni continuing story, but to make the reference work and suggestions that will prevent new additions from to clash wildly.

This should also reveal my view of canon. Canon today is based largely on the very biased material left to us by the surviving family of Aitrus. I do not believe that much there is the objective and informed truth about what happened. They are historic fragments. Aitrus was hardly that key figure in the downfall that his guilt constructs him to be. Veovis role not that important. Aitrus describes it as he understands it for various reasons.

Once when one producer controlled the game there was no need to canonize, and contradictory elements are part of any real world history description, or any truly emersive worldbuilding, cf Tolkien's Middle Earth.
To canonize in order to keep the band of contributors that will now take over tied up to order is the wrong attitude. It will invariably lead to rifts, dual and triple schools.
Keep an open source attitude all the way is my sincere view.

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--- in our hearts our dreams are still the same ---

I was trying hard to uderstand why people do not feel the importance of canon in Uru. At the same time, I was wondering how to explain that having "canon" is the same thing as having a "story", and that Uru is nothing without a story. And then I remembered the words that Aristoteles wrote more than 2,000 years ago, and that explain why canon is Uru for me:

Canon is "a deception such that the deceiver is more just than the non‐deceiver, and the deceived wiser than the undeceived".

The deceiver being the storyteller (Cyan and/or fans), and the deceived being the explorer. The deception is the world of Uru, with all its retcons and stuff.

Those who do not care about having a canon story, do not wish to maintain the beautiful deception that is storytelling. Because you cannot be immersed in a story made of 100 simultaneous plots and worlds that contradict each other.


P.S. For those who might want to know, Aristoteles was actually referring to tragedy in theater. ;-)

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