Ooh, I like that a lot, Owehn! That's great. =)

_________________

That's true, you got me there Owehn.

I love the idea of relegating OOC to some kind of Cavern induced dementia.

mrchapel wrote:

I love the idea of relegating OOC to some kind of Cavern induced dementia.

You can of course talk about it with people and then pretend ICly that it never happened

_________________

djlumberjack wrote:

yeah, I had no idea there was that much info revealed from journals, letters, and other sources in the game.

The original Myst, of course, had no dates attached to anything, and none of the novels actually mentions a single date.

Cyan really got the ball rolling for us back around 1996/97 as they were preparing for the release of Riven. They posted an explanation of the D'ni timekeeping system, a list of D'ni holidays, a timeline of some events in D'ni history, and some information about the D'ni language and numbering system. This material is all still available on riven.com.

That information plus the dates in journals found in Riven gave enough information that some very clever fans at the time (I still don't know who) were able to interpolate dates for many of the events in the novels, using clues in the novels such as statements that "Gehn was 4 years old" during a particular event. Our knowledge has been growing ever since, sometimes slower, sometimes faster (like with the appearances of the notebooks in the Hall of Kings).

(BTW, Owehn gives me too much credit. I was just a lurker around the edges of Myst fandom back in those days, and had nothing to do with the original figuring. I just reverse-engineered the thinking a couple of years ago, because the knowledge of how such things were done seemed to have been lost as many of those original fans moved on.)

djlumberjack wrote:

Is this just a clever adaptation of a Blair Witch type event (where they made a movie that looks real, create a history about the film and supposed actual findings, etc etc...)?

Blair Witch came along well after Cyan started doing this. Cyan had the basic meta-fiction in their minds back when they created Myst, and started revealing it to us during the development of Riven. But, yes, the idea is similar to Blair Witch: that there is a real D'ni Cavern being restored by a real DRC which passed historical information on to Cyan so they could make some games based on it. In Uru, of course, we get to experience the reality ourselves, instead of replaying events that were originally experienced by the Stranger.

_________________

*SLMW 1.0* No animals were harmed in the production of this message.

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

Very interesting! And I knew there was a phrase for that, so its called meta-fiction....

Yeah, and I don't think I meant to say adaptation becuase your right, myst came out long before that movie, but I just meant a similar usage of fiction-to-reality. Thanks for clearing all that up, I figured this was just being treated as meta-fiction, which is amazing becuase if I have to pause and actually question whether or not its real then I think Cyan has done its job .

Ian Atrus wrote:

And Cyan didn't invent meta-fiction either. The first example that comes to mind is Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" from 1940, but there are surely earlier ones.

Surely. Edgar Rice Burroughs used it a lot back in the early 20th century, often presenting his stories as information he personally received from the protagonist or others involved in the story. He wrote of himself as a distant relative of John Carter, passing along stories from Mars, and being in contact with an inventor who was in contact with Pellucidar through a new type of radio, and being in telepathic contact with an earthly astronaut who went to Venus and got stranded. Not to mention regular first and second-hand contact with a certain well-known Lord of the Jungle.

There are all kinds of authors (Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, H.L. Lovecraft) who have used meta-fictional wrappers for stories, and it wouldn't surprise me to find that the technique goes all the way back to Greece and Rome.

_________________

*SLMW 1.0* No animals were harmed in the production of this message.

The earliest I can think of is probably Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" which I believe is late 14th Century.

_________________

Proud member of The Meeting Place
"Somewhere, Something incredible is waiting to be known."
Visit My...Space

_________________
Grand Master
Guild of Archivists

Alahmnat wrote:

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Tolkien yet... he's usually first on the list of comparisons .

Well, while he created a huge and detailed universe (which lends itself nicely to D'niverse comparisons), and there are some layers to his fiction, I'm not sure it really fits the "metafiction" concept we're talking about here. Otherwise I probably would have mentioned him.

_________________

*SLMW 1.0* No animals were harmed in the production of this message.

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

In C.S. Lewis' Space trilogy, he refers the reader to Tolkien's works to read more about the "True West" (I think). That strikes me as meta-meta-fiction: you have to dig through two layers of pretending before you discover that it's fiction.

_________________
.reprad kenen nahr
.redoyhah pradteegahl kenen shin b'hahrten gah b'foles

KI# 45434

"Frame tales originated in ancient India sometime in the first millenium BC, when the Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, Syntipas' The Seven Wise Masters, and the fable collections Hitopadesha and Baital Pachisi were written."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_story

Wow. I'm pretty surprised (and pleased!) to see my "The Restoration So Far" posts getting linked... thanks for that one, Whil.

Anyway... just to clarify on those in particular... all of the stuff that happened on the surface (Such as Zandi's billboard, the metal spirals, and so on) happened on the surface. I'm positive, I watched the events unfold over several months. All the stuff that happened in the cavern, happened in the cavern. Again, I got to see these events unfold across the period that the cavern was public, and before the DRC lost funding.

As far as we're concerned, the Myst games were all based off of information that Cyan gleaned from the DRC over the years, primarily Catherine's apparently very detailed journals. Of course, that's just the Myst story. Other D'ni history has come from many different texts and studies over the years.

_________________
-vid (KI: 00201880)
The Age Linker's Guide
It is up to you to create your own adventures today!