Lore gaming

I've been reading one of those Halo tie-in novels recently, Ghosts of Onyx to be specific. It's hardly Shakespeare but it offers some interesting perspectives on the Halo universe, as did the rest of the series.

I've always had a healthy appetite for fictional trivia and books like this are always welcome, helping to expand the existing universe of games, films, TV shows, anything, by adding new characters and new backgrounds, explaining the current characters and their backgrounds. I'm always particularly fond of more information on games and the worlds they're set in. It's possible this is simply due to the fact that I'm more interested in video games than films, a fact certainly supported by my fascination with the worlds of Doctor Who and a few other TV shows.

Maybe it's the fact that games often present an entirely new and different world to explore and exploit. In the best games, worlds are designed from the ground up, with cities of adventure, legends and myths (which, by rights, have to be 100% true and the characters of which must be encountered by the player at some later time) to truly engage the player.

Or maybe not. There are some games where there are no plots and for very good reasons. Anyone played Tetris Worlds? As part of my hitherto unmentioned quest to play every version of Tetris ever made, I bought it for the PC. Turns out that Tetris isn't just about making blocks fall in the right way. Oh no, you have to make enough blocks fall the right way to activate transporter gates and evacuate your people to some ancient world. Or take tourists from some ancient world. Or Sea World. I wasn't really paying attention. Crummy version of Tetris anyway.

Then there are games which try, they really do. My weak and battered optimistic side likes to think that maybe, just maybe, they didn't have such god-awful catchphrases in the original language. Maybe that isn't supposed to be trendy slang but an alien language. My personal favourite example of this is Star Fox Command, a game with decent gameplay and nine different endings, complete with their own dialogue and clichés.

That said, I still played through all of Command, even though the gameplay got to be horribly repetitive and dull towards the end. Why? Because I was interested in how the different stories played out and what each would reveal about the universe of Star Fox and the astronomically illogical Lylat System. Seriously, some of the references to Lylat's astronomy are useless. Is it a solar system or a galaxy? Why are there those three nebulae all over the place? Is Solar a planet or a sun? Make up your freaking minds!

Where was I? Ah, yes. My fascination with fictional universes. I'm not sure if there's any kind of term to describe gamers who play games for their plots as much as for the challenge and who speculate about useless trivia. So I'm suggesting one.

Lore gamers.

I'm sure Skippy will be able to summarise it in a New Word Thursday at some point, or maybe I'll expound upon it some more at a later date. I hope I've at least given the gist of it here. Now, I must sleep.