I had been meaning to write a more cohesive and well-structured effortpost1 but that has been stuck in the gulf between my head and the page since forever and I would feel bad if I didn't answer the only2 ask I got on here before the site went read-only so here’s a bare-bones sketch:
By "mythopoetic interface theory"3, I mean interpreting the interface of Caves of Qud—what you experience of the game—through the lens of mythology, exaggeration, the "hyperreal".
I think it is fairly common and pretty easy to assume that whatever "window" the game gives into itself is "true", "real", "objective". Some games complicate this but I would say it's not unusual to understand what you're seeing as some kind of fundamental reality (however abstracted) of the story that's being told.
But what if somewhere between the "story" and what you "see," things were exaggerated?
- Do you really kill a million snapjaws in your quest, or is that an exaggeration?
- Are the white-titled books literally reams of Markov text? Are they literally written in English?4
- Are you actually tossing in the various wacky ingredients when you throw together a meal?
There are things that incorporate with the rest of the story (particularly sultan hagiographies histories) but I am increasingly worried I am running up on the deadline so that will need to be elaborated on in a later thing I do.
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alas, it did not become a Roguelike Celebration talk for this year either
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true until I woke up today
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it being "my" theory is overstated, I just like it a lot
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arguably the latest (last until 1.0
) Feature Friday, which makes most white-titled books excerpts of the only readable text you can see, makes this point stronger
I went looking for some of the roots of this idea and came across these tweets by Cae which I feel does a pretty good job of saying something similar to what I mean
I'm not speaking on behalf of @ptychomancer here so don't consider this 'canon', but when I write for Qud I write for a storybook world told by an unreliable narrator: broadly accurate but edited, studded with embellishments, and filling in forgotten spaces.
The hero probably did not kill a thousand snapjaws or solve the mystery of Bey Lah in half a day. But their account is the only one we have, and it's more fun this way.
Themes of historical inaccuracy and pliable reality are all over the lore if you look for them.
— Cae