Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games
request to other developers: please NEVER refer in-game to anything in your game as "lore"
The primary function of the word Lore is to imply disposability; "that stuff I don't have to read or pay attention to"
if you're putting things that you encourage players to ignore in your game maybe consider having more interesting things in your game instead
Why?
That's not a rhetorical question, I personally find the word "lore" distasteful, but I'm curious why not to use it.
Because that was the original implication of the term. It used to refer to in-game mythology and in-game legends or stories that werent necessary to the plot or characters but just added extra bonus flavor to make the world feel more lived in.
Over the past 5 years it's evolved into meaning any setting, backstory, or biological information. The term has been so clouded that its pretty much meaningless and really only serves to confuse someone about if the information is relevant or not
Interesting. That make sense. If I think of the word Lore outside of the internet (while I am committed to the idea that a word meaning is in its use, I just despise what internet communities do to... everything), it means like an old story, something not immediately relevant to present concern. Thank you for your reply!
lore is an ancient word and has always meant the knowledge of a culture or mythology and has been re-used for that meaning in games
where did people say that it was supposed to be immaterial??
yeah, I've never heard it used as "useless info I don't need to know to play" except by the types of players who don't care for story and want all games to just focus on gameplay. lore can 100% be an intrinsic part of a game and exist in the game, its just that whether or not people think it's important to gameplay is up to interpretation.
if you open up a book in a library in-game and it has a little history bit in it, that's referred to as a lore-drop. the primary function of the word lore is "details of the background of a game's setting to help with story immersion".
Worth noting that Aura's addressing developers in particular here; the issue of what players choose to call it of their own volition is moot in this context, as is the question of the word's definition and usage outside the cultural context of gaming.
I think the main argument she's making is that if you've decided to refer to something in your game as "lore," you've immediately lost your lowest common denominator players, and that if you've decided to use this word for a feature of your game, your development resources might be better spent elsewhere. Some people who have solidly bought in to your game's world may still find it interesting, but electing to avoid using that word in the text of your game may well improve your chances of successfully conveying the relevant information to those players who might otherwise ignore it.
I do also think there's something to be said for the notion that explicitly delineating "this is where the lore goes" (even if you don't use that word) can have the effect of sectioning off that information into a place where even well-meaning players might decide they don't have to pay too much attention to it. At this point it's not so much an issue of terminology, but I think it's a worthwhile pursuit to incorporate information one might describe as "lore" or "backstory" in a way that's more artful and less reminiscent of an encyclopedia, or at least to accept that you are allocating precious development resources to something that you cannot expect players to treat as anything but entirely optional.
so this is some variant form of the term used primarily in corporate video game mills?
that is very disappointing, yet not surprising that they would treat world building as filler
in ttrpgs the term might be "fluff", for comparison, which is important to the world building but may be completely disconnected from the way the game is actually played, it too can be divisive
V:TM and its siblings and children were heavy on "fluff", with a large portion of the source books being dedicated to short fiction and even poetry, aside from the basic setting information for each of the clans and affiliations
I'd say it's less something that's been imposed by corporate efforts and more a connotation that's been ascribed to the word over time by contemporary multimedia audiences. I'd define its modern colloquial usage as something akin to "Extra contextual information about a subject that is not immediately apparent at a glance."
Its classical definition is still very much in use, but as it pertains to modern media it's taken on a tinge of denoting extraneous information to the "here and now" of story plot.
i am an exploration and world building junkie so the concept seems bizarre to me i think
