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Guard Responce To Being Trapped.


Irenices

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Fine, here are three:

 

Language like that is boring. I think pretty much everyone would rather hear, "Have at you!" than "Die, fucker!".

 

THe inclusion of one doesn't automatically mean the exclusion of the other. They are all perfectly legitimate and useful English phrases.

Thief builds its fictional universe by combining iconic elements of various historical time periods.

Exactly, and so the language should be taken form the same variety of time periods, and that would include the swearwords.

One of the most important of those iconic elements is the language. Conventional epithets like fuck and shit are perceived as contemporary language.

Not by me, certainly. It's an incorrect assumption, and one that could and should be changed by marrying thee and thou wth fuck and cunt in the same sentence.

Fuck and cunt would be particularly useful and appropriate in conversations such as the LotP guard argument. They were insulting each other to the point of murder, and weren't even using any serious swearing. Ridiculous.

Thief is played primarily by geeks. Geeks love made-up swear words. So taff the frack off, ya frelling smeg-head.a

'Come back here you fucking taffer' in a gruff Benny voice sounds perfect to me.

Again, not mutually exclusive.

 

I'd like to hear the word 'cunt' more thna 'fuck'. Cunt is certiany not overused in games, and has more specific usage then 'fuck' which can be stuck almost anywhere in any sentence.

 

THe question is whether you want to make this a tough, gritty, realistc kind of place, where you can smell the sewage in the streets, where most poeple die before adulthood, where extreme proverty and disease are rife, where the guards are uncouth, uneducated oafs who use the most profane and explit language, or if you want it to be a cartoonly, idealistic fantasy type of universe where nothig really bad happens, and the guards are all nice guys deep down, and dont' go home an beat their wives bloody because they don't like their dinner or they;ve had a bad day.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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Well I wouldn't mind fuck and cunt seeing as they are old words. However Oddity I think you are being really aggressive in your argument, so I'm not encouraged to a agree with you.

 

I would prefer to see no made up swear words. I think they are just silly.

 

Maybe though a compromise would be to have the milder swear words. I don't really mind. The strong ones would have a shock factor, but they may be unimmersive. I'd have to play it with various words and see what I think really. Maybe that's what the team should do.

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THe question is whether you want to make this a tough, gritty, realistc kind of place, where you can smell the sewage in the streets, where most poeple die before adulthood, where extreme proverty and disease are rife, where the guards are uncouth, uneducated oafs who use the most profane and explit language, or if you want it to be a cartoonly, idealistic fantasy type of universe where nothig really bad happens, and the guards are all nice guys deep down, and dont' go home an beat their wives bloody because they don't like their dinner or they;ve had a bad day.
I don't see why it has to be either. That is, to adopt a specific worldview (e.g., "cynical horrorscape" or "earth-tone happyland") and shoehorn the entire game universe within it is unnecessarily limiting and, in my view, makes for a mediocre game experience. Far from making the game seem more "real" by fleshing out one interpretation in unyielding detail, such heavy-handedness makes it seem unrealistically simplistic (like the absurd noir of Max Payne). In Thief 1/2 I never felt that everyone in the City was a nasty piece of work nor a paragon of virtue (even the guards), but rather I felt that the populace was largely an open canvas onto which I could project a psychological landscape of my own imagining. Of course, the story/art/level design provided a framework within which my notions about the game universe and its inhabitants were confined, but there was still enough space for me to imagine a diverse range of attitudes and ideas in a city that somehow managed to remain intriguingly mysterious.

 

Now, perhaps you're right about a certain puritanical sensibility at play here, in that I too would not want all the guards to throw around words like "fuck" and "cunt." But for me, anyway, it largely has to do with not wanting every guard to be the same world-weary, brutish asshole. Nor would I want them all to be decent, well spoken young lads who are driven by strong ideas about justice and nobility. Instead, I would again appeal to Thief 1/2 (not as an unquestionable authority, but rather as an example of something done right): you have the crude, oafish Benny-types and then you have the more intelligent, well reared types. Moreover, my preference is that they tend toward the middle rather than the extremes of personality.

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I don't remember mentioning that I wanted every guard to call you a fucking cunt every time they speak.

Obviously they would only appear in some barks that would be randomly heard, and probably not often. It's just the idea of completely banning them like they don't exist, when you are dealing with the sort of charcaters who would obviously use them.

I also don't want them for the shock factor, since they aren't shocking to me. I use them every day, talking to my mother even, and they are commonly used words where I come from.

Why are people so unconcerned with the violence and brutalty of games (and boy have I argued till I'm blue in the face for making the game non-violent, and not even carrying weapons, and no one wants that, you all want to be able to kill anything as and when you feel like it) but as soon as the mention of a charcater saying a swearword is mentioned, you all turn into little old easily offended prudes.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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I don't think that's it. I'm perfectly happy with hearing 'fuck' all over the place when I play GTA3, as I think it fits the style well. It's just that I (admittedly erroneously) don't associate it at all with the midieval time period any more than words like 'blingbling' or 'ho', and worry that it would be immersion-breaking to hear 'fuck' often used as an expletive. I wouldn't mind it hearing used in more archaic-sounding ways, much like how 'faggot' is modern-sounding when used to refer to homosexuals but sounds archaic when used to refer to firewood and kindling.

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I don't remember mentioning that I wanted every guard to call you a fucking cunt every time they speak.

Well, I got that impression from your all-or-nothing argument for grittiness. At any rate, even if swearing were confined to only a few instances I don't see the point. It just seems as though it would draw attention to itself rather than be an immersive detail.

 

Why are people so unconcerned with the violence and brutalty of games (and boy have I argued till I'm blue in the face for making the game non-violent, and not even carrying weapons, and no one wants that, you all want to be able to kill anything as and when you feel like it) but as soon as the mention of a charcater saying a swearword is mentioned, you all turn into little old easily offended prudes.

I swear all the time as well, but that's a big reason why I don't want people in the game to swear frequently. As others have said, using "fuck" and "cunt" seems too familiar and modern and so erodes the steampunk atmosphere (and you can fairly disagree with this view). But your argument that if killing is an acceptable part of the game world then swearing should be as well is only effective if the objection to swearing is based solely on prudeness, which is not the case for me, at least.

 

As for the lack of concern about violence and death, at least in the case of Thief/TDM I think there is a good explanation. In medieval times death was a much more banal part of life. People died younger, from injuries and diseases that are today no longer life-threatening, from social problems that today would usually be resolved by law rather than violence (or draconian laws), and so I think people were generally far more desensitized to death than today. Reality forced them to inure themselves to death and violence, which perhaps explains why the spiritual metaphysics of religion was so popular (the fundamental distinction between flesh and spirit). To totally remove violence would significantly alter my concept of a Thiefish universe.

 

Look at it this way: perhaps many of us are attracted to the medieval/Victorian setting of steampunk precisely because it differs from our world in certain key respects. Two of those respects are fewer inhibitions regarding violence and a (at least perceived) increase in linguistic formality. You might argue on a historical basis against this perception of more formal language, but in the end I think that what most of us want is a blend of reality and fantasy, and I suppose that there are no hard rules to determine how to arrive at such a blend.

Edited by Mark
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I don't think violence is any less prevailent now that in the past, sure wars were more common, but it's still within living memeory for some people that 100 million people died in WW2, and as for social violence, that has risen if anything.

Death from natural causes obviously is vastly reduced in the Western world, but it's hard to quantify a mother's grief if her baby dies, so to say women today feel more grief because it's a rarer event than in the past, doesn't have any real meaning.

 

 

I swear all the time as well, but that's a big reason why I don't want people in the game to swear frequently. As others have said, using "fuck" and "cunt" seems too familiar and modern and so erodes the steampunk atmosphere

That makes zero sense.

Every word in the dictionary is used in modern games and movies, so how can you single out one or two specific words and accuse them of being 'modern sounding', just because they are also used in games and movies.

'Nerd' is modern sounding, 'internet' certainly is, but 'fuck' or 'cunt'? Don't be ridiculous. You openly admit that the words aren't actually modern, just, in your opinion, 'modern sounding'.

So your opinion should prevail over the actual facts, should it?

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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I don't think violence is any less prevailent now that in the past, sure wars were more common, but it's still within living memeory for some people that 100 million people died in WW2, and as for social violence, that has risen if anything.

Death from natural causes obviously is vastly reduced in the Western world, but it's hard to quantify a mother's grief if her baby dies, so to say women today feel more grief because it's a rarer event than in the past, doesn't have any real meaning.

If you want a good indicator of general societal attitudes toward violence and death then look at the laws. Hell, as recently as nineteenth-century England thieves were routinely hanged. People gathered in the streets and cheered public executions. Today such events are unthinkable in America/Europe. Even if modern (first-world) societies are no less violent than medieval ones, I think it's pretty clear that medieval sensibilities about violence and death were much coarser. Maybe we today are hypocritical in shrinking from violence in some ways while engaging in it it others, but at any rate this differs significantly from older societies that were much more open in all ways about violence and death.

 

That makes zero sense.

Every word in the dictionary is used in modern games and movies, so how can you single out one or two specific words and accuse them of being 'modern sounding', just because they are also used in games and movies.

'Nerd' is modern sounding, 'internet' certainly is, but 'fuck' or 'cunt'? Don't be ridiculous. You openly admit that the words aren't actually modern, just, in your opinion, 'modern sounding'.

It's disingenuous to characterize "fuck" and "cunt" as merely "one or two specific words," as though they're no different than, say, "table" and "shirt." Perhaps these words don't stand out to you, but to most people they do, which is why we recognize them as "swear words." Having said that, it is not the swear words themselves that strike me as modern but rather the various locutions we employ. Today I think we generally swear very frequently, which means we swear in all sorts of ways, which means that pretty much any construction involving the words "fuck" and "cunt", among others, is a phrase that we use in everyday language and that we regard as contemporary. That is why including swear words in the game seems to me to be too modern. "Fuck you," "get that fucker," "what a fucking cunt," etc., are all artifacts of twenty-first century society, whether they originated in the twentieth/twenty-first centuries or not.

 

In other words, I think we have appropriated most swear words to such an extent that they cannot be used in ways that strike us as archaic, or that strike us as anything other than modern. In this vein, unlike most other words, swear words are inherently stylized. That's why we're always coming up with new and creative ways to tell someone to go fuck himself. Bearing all of this in mind, I think using recognizable swear words in TDM would seem anachronistic whereas using other common words that we use today would not. Of course, you can legitimately disagree.

 

So your opinion should prevail over the actual facts, should it?

Well, no. After all, I am just Anonymous Internet Guy #28023895 so who cares what I, in particular, think. Beyond that, however, I don't think historical fact is the sole determinant in whether something qualifies as appropriate for a Thiefish/steampunk game. If it were then you'd never be able to get over the fusion of Victorian and medieval elements, or the inclusion of modernish technology. In the end I suppose it does just come down to opinion, and maybe my opinion derives mostly from the fact that most pre-twentieth-century English texts that I've read have been scrupulously devoid of swear words.

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Is it possible to make cursing something that a mapper could toggle on/off? I would like to include cursing but I sympathize with those who think the F-bomb is too modern sounding, although its not really modern. Im in the "made up" curse word camp, I liked the T-bomb in T1/2.

 

Its interesting to consider who would curse too, and when and where. Guards would'nt curse in front of most officers or nobles, street thugs wont curse to cops unless they want a beating, nobles may tend to refrain from cursing (except in moments of duress) as a sign of "breeding."

 

I wonder if its possible to have specific sets of responses for interactions between different classes of AI. I dont mean like a scripted set up with speeches, I mean like when a street tough sees a cop he nods and mumbles "evenin, Gov" but when he comes across a lady he whistles and calls after her. I'm describing random encounters between AIs.

Edited by Maximius
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Then he should be able to ommit all the weapons as well. I consider it slightly more vulgar than swearing to stab someone, put an arrow through them, blow them up, knock them unconscious, or set fire to them.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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Well it's not a new word, hence the solution to modern phrases is not to use them!

 

Don't have guards say "Fuck you!" because that is a phrase new to the 20th century. Research old ways of saying it.

 

If you're gunna use it then use it in the old style, whatever that is. Research required. On wiki all I found was this:

 

"William Dunbar's 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" includes the lines: "Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit:/ Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane.""

 

But I don't really understand it, "Yet it is his feiris (???) he would have fucked" is all I can translate it to, so I have no idea how fuck used to be used.

 

Certainly any modern insults with it would not be appropriate.

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It's so much more cute that you're the sort of drooling, dribbling nerd who's memorised every Thief FM. You can no doubt name at least 80% of them - your membership of the Pedant Society would be rescinded if you didn't have of such a wealth of mindnumbing trivia to call upon in the event of someone making an error concerning it.

The point being that while you want a blanket ban on swearing, in case someone might be offended at hearng a naughty word (which you dress up in some sort of gawdy 'it doens't fit the setting' costume) . You're quite happy for all weapons to be included as default. Obviously no one is offended by violence and murder.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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The point being that while you want a blanket ban on swearing, in case someone might be offended at hearng a naughty word (which you dress up in some sort of gawdy 'it doens't fit the setting' costume).

Oh, now this is rich. You challenge people to come up with arguments that aren't based in morality, we do, and you not only reject those arguments, you reject the existence of those arguments. Oddity has truly achieved a new high in... ummm.... Oddityness.

 

You're quite happy for all weapons to be included as default.

No, I'm quite happy for the weapons selected by the mapper to be available by default. But we've all already had that rather lengthy discussion, so of course you already knew that, so I can only presume this comment was an attempt at raving froth-mouthed misdirection.

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Yeah, that's right, just ignore the entire point of the argument, and stick you your usual mindless comments (which don't work on anyone but the noobs you bully at TTLG).

You want a ban on mappers even having a choice of swear-inclusive barks. Don't make any, period, that's your point.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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Calm down people. No one has given the official team response either way!

 

And it's not comparable to the (passé) weapon argument.

 

Other people are sympathetic to both positions. No need for extreme agro.

 

Plus people can record their own voice sets. (which is how the official team response will deal with the problem I bet :P).

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