Adventure Gamers - Forums

TimovieMan - 22 January 2013 01:18 PM

tsa - 22 January 2013 12:20 PM

It would be so cool to be able to walk around there as a tourist!

So you want to be Twoflower?

I have glasses already. Getting the IQ of a pigeon will be harder but if that’s what it takes I will do it! Everything for being a tourist there.

Dag - 22 January 2013 02:49 PM

xxax - 22 January 2013 01:44 PM

David Jason is seriously miscast as Rincewind

I agree, although, I think I’m being biased on that point. For me, only Eric Idle can be the perfect Rincewind.

Actually what bothered me the most was the fact he’s too old and short. But yeah Eric Idle’s voice really fits.

I just read that Sky is making a movie based on Unseen Academicals… No fun for me since it’s by far the worst Discworld novel out there (IMO).

Hoping they make The Watch series. And i’d kill for a new Discworld adventure game. There’s just soooo much material there…

TimovieMan - 22 January 2013 01:18 PM

Just as long as Rhianna Pratchett doesn’t soil her father’s legacy in the way Christopher Tolkien did…

How did Christopher Tolkien soil his father’s legacy? I mean, I’m not necessarily questioning you, just wondering what you mean

(And sorry for off-topic)

(Warning: huge off-topic post; feel free to move it elsewhere.)

TimovieMan, you’re tragically misinformed about Christopher Tolkien.

TimovieMan - 22 January 2013 06:02 PM

J.R.R. Tolkien never released The Silmarillion because he thought it wasn’t good enough. He kept revising it and rewriting it.
When he died, it didn’t take his son a lot of time to finish The Silmarillion as it was, and to release it.

That’s not really how it went. Like his aptly-named alter-ego Niggle, J.R.R. Tolkien “was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different.” He spent a huge part of his life torn between his desire to see his work brought to the world and his inability to stop tinkering with it.

When he died, he asked his son Christopher to publish the Silmarillion, but what he left behind was a disorganized mess of heavily-emended papers ranging from notebooks started during WW1 to radical re-inventions of the story of Galadriel and Celeborn outlined in the final year of his life. The Silmarillion itself was spread over three parallel versions (the original long tradition, the short tradition and the annals) left in a complicated state of progress since Tolkien would regularly re-work one bit of story on one version, then integrate it to another version making further changes in the process, etc. And then you had independent texts such as the beautiful Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, poems, reflections of his own work, and numerous phililogical texts blending linguistics, culture and story.

Even combining all of these sources, the Silmarillion was a mess: some parts of the story existed in three different but subtly-related versions (which one do you publish?); others, such as the Fall of Doriath or the story of Earendil, hadn’t been touched in 40 years and were now completely inconsistent in style and events with the rest of the work; as for the story of the beginnings of the world and the creation of the Sun and Moon, Tolkien had vehemently rejected it 15 years earlier, but had never put a replacement in narrative form (or, indeed, as a clear outline; probably deep down he had trouble letting go of the earlier story).

Faced with this, a lesser person than Christopher Tolkien would have hired a ghost-writer who would have taken some of the key story points, maybe a bit of writing here and there, and written something new, and then slapped J.R.R. Tolkien’s name on it. He, however, tried to remain true to what his father had left. The end result is not completely satisfactory (and couldn’t be, based on the state of the text when Tolkien died), and nobody was more aware of this than Christopher Tolkien. Which is why he devoted the next twenty years of his life to publishing all the messy-but-brilliant material that his father had written over the course of his life. The twelve volumes of The History of Middle-Earth are a gigantic piece of work that shows Tolkien’s genius better than any of his published books.

You cannot read those books and call them a money-grabbing scheme. You cannot go through half a dozen pages of Christopher Tolkien painstakingly trying to establish the date at which a given text was written based on the type of paper and the make of the typewriter, and then trying to figure out when the three successive layers of emendations were added (generally over the course of 15 years), and not recognize this gigantic amount of work as inspired by nothing but respect and admiration for his father’s work—certainly not by greed.

(part 2)

J.R.R. was a linguistics expert who created at least two entire languages out of nothing (and made them grammatically correct to the T). He wrote a lot of manuscripts on synthetic languages, but now his son won’t release those because he won’t be getting paid a lot for them.

Once again, your view of the truth is skewed. We would all wish that Tolkien had left behind a Sindarin-English dictionary, or a nice textbook of Quenya grammar. But he didn’t. He tinkered with his languages even more than with his stories. He kept changing things, such as the pronoun system in Quenya, for no clear reason (probably because he wanted to experiment with fresh stuff). You can’t judge Christopher Tolkien if you don’t understand who his father was. He was the kind of man who could spend pages figuring out what the element ros in the name of Elrond’s brother Elros meant and how he came by this name—and then reject it entirely when he realized that it contradicted a little thing he had published in the Lord of the Rings. He was the kind of man who could decide that the name that the Elves used for themselves, Quendi, meant “those who speak”, and then, decades later, decide to re-examine that question and devote over 20,000 words to establishing the etymologies of the various names used to talk about Elves in three distinct Elven languages (one of which, Telerin, was hardly developed at all), shaking up lots of established etymologies in the process.

On top of that, you have to take into account how hard it is to establish the order in which Tolkien’s linguistic ideas evolved. If you read a LOTR draft talking about one Bingo Bolger-Baggins, and then the same bit of story now starring Frodo Baggins, you can figure out that Tolkien decided to change the character’s name (and thank God he did!). But if you have an isolated, undated piece of paper with a couple of random Quenya sentences on it, how are you supposed to figure out where it fits?

I think Christopher Tolkien did what he could with what he had, lacking the technical skills and the passion necessary to completely do justice to his father’s linguistic creation. He published some of the essential texts, such as The Etymologies and Quendi and Eldar, as well as the less-technical, more philological pieces—such asThe Shibboleth of Feanor, probably the best insight into Tolkien’s mind ever published, or the Dangweth Pengoloð. And then, admitting defeat but not wanting his father’s linguistic work to be lost, he sent more linguistic texts to Tolkien-language experts who published scholarly editions of them in the journals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon.

Sure, things are only trickling out slowly and it is frustrating that more linguistic material does not get released. But look at this sample issue of Vinyar Tengwar and see the amount of work it takes to analyse just a few lines of Quenya (and we’re talking here about texts that are very clear and whose meaning is known with certainty). It will take decades to get through all of it and understand the work Tolkien did on his languages. But that’s mostly because it’s such a difficult task, not because Christopher Tolkien is sitting on some secret ultimate decoder ring like Smaug on his pile of gold.

Christopher Tolkien has been nothing but an obstacle for people trying to make movies out of his father’s books. Heck, he even disowned his own son because he had helped with the production of the LotR-movies. And then he tried to get several fan sites to close down. Etcetera.

He’s certainly afraid that the movies will replace his father’s words in people’s minds. I believe he’s wrong. I believe Jackson’s vision, imperfect as it is, shows respect for Tolkien’s works (although all the merchandising that comes with it definitely doesn’t) and will bring more people to the books. But he can’t do anything against the movies anyway. And I’ll forgive an old man for not completely getting on with the times.

In Niggle’s story, the painting is never completed. A piece of it, a leaf, is left, and admired for a while, but eventually the museum in which it was burns down and all is forgotten. That’s what could have happened to Tolkien’s works: a little part saved (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), and the rest lost forever until Tolkien was eventually forgotten. Christopher Tolkien’s tireless work ensured that this would not happen. The History of Middle-Earth is more than a collection of texts: it’s a biography of his father, of his flights of imagination, of his doubts, of his beliefs, of his giddiness at coming up with new ideas, and of his despair at his utter lack of discipline, as seen through his writings. It is an incomparable insight into the mind of one of the 20th century’s greatest literary geniuses. I’ll forever be grateful to Christopher Tolkien for giving us that.

Now, if you want to rant about sons pissing on their father’s legacy, we can talk about Brian Herbert! 

(OK, and we need to establish a new rule for these forums: never mention Tolkien again, or Kurufinwe will talk everyone’s ear off!)

Jesus never published the Bible himself. I also don’t think there is any greed involved in the publishing of the Bible.

But on topic again, I don’t think we adventure gamers are the target audience for Ms Pratchett’s talk. I guess everyone here must have thought about how he/she could make an adventure game themselves, or has done that already. Squinky has written a few insightful pieces about how she wrote Chicalry Is Not Dead: http://www.deirdrakiai.com/my-games/. Nothing Ms Pratchett said was new to me, but the more I think about making an adventure game the more I am awed at the immense amount of work that goes into making even a small AG, and the more respect I have for the people who make them.

TimovieMan - 23 January 2013 11:36 AM

tsa -

But on topic again, I don’t think we adventure gamers are the target audience for Ms Pratchett’s talk.

With the whirlwind year that 2012 was for adventure gamers, speculation about the future of adventure games has been all the rage. Whether it’s about future Kickstarter projects (and veterans returning), or about the future of the LucasArts catalogue when Disney bought it out, or the effects of the success of The Walking Dead, or whichever other adventure game topic, speculating about it is fun.
The future for adventure games hasn’t looked this bright in well over a decade, so hearing this talk that Terry Pratchett’s daughter is a game developer, and knowing that the Discworld universe spawned three great adventure games in the past, that’s enough for some of us to start dreaming…

Even if it’s not an adventure game, anything Discworld that makes it onto other media is a reason to be happy, no?

That is all true but I was just arguing that adventure game developers should know all about writing stories for computer games, and therefore are not Ms Pratchett’s target audience.

Anyway, who knows what the possibilities are if a Discworld TV series gets made (and turns out to be both good and successful)...

That would be very cool. I must say, I liked the TV films mentioned in this thread. I would be very happy to see more of that.