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Video game "folklore".

edited 2012-09-28 21:31:36 in IJAM
One foot in front of the other, every day.

I think it's kind of amazing when the community surrounding a game makes up something about it that, while plausible, isn't necessarily true. 


This thought hit me while thinking about Dark Souls, and its famous pendant. At character creation, you're allowed to select a "gift", which is a special kind of item you begin the game with. Some of these are rare consumables that you can find elsewhere in the game, others are items with very particular and narrow uses and one exists almost entirely for the sake of sequence breaking. But the pendant is the odd one out, because it doesn't appear to have a function. That would probably be the end of it if the game's director didn't say in interviews that he recommends the pendant as a starting gift for narrative reasons, implying that it holds a secret function. He also says that he intends to take the secret of the pendant to his grave. 


Given that so much of the narrative in Dark Souls is interpretive, this has had the game's community speculating about the item for months. It probably doesn't do anything; I think the director of Dark Souls was invoking "gamer folklore" to ensure that Dark Souls always feels a little incomplete, so there's always the sense that not all of its content has been experienced and that any player might be the first to witness something unique. Most of the in-game lore is built around vagueness, with just enough information to inflame the imagination but not nearly enough to draw clear conclusions. 


It reminds me very much of Pokemon Red, Blue and Green (if you played the Japanese versions) back in the day. I think all of us were under the impression that Down + B helped us catch Pokemon. And do you recall the endless rumours about catching Mew on Western release versions? That turned out to be impossible outside of promotional events. But the folklore about that game was fun, and reinforced by the many glitches the game had. Item multiplication, Missingno, all that good stuff. 


I think games in general could do more to invoke that kind of thing, because it means that any given game might have just a little more over the next horizon. And as much as I love the discovery aspect of video games, I feel that's taken away when I absolutely know I've experienced 100% of the content. But if I believe there's more, even if there isn't? A game can be endlessly engrossing on a psychological level, because its essential question of "what if?" never runs dry. 

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Comments

  • a little muffled

    I think all of us were under the impression that Down + B helped us catch Pokemon.
    It was always A around here, actually. I still do that just from force of habit.

  • edited 2012-09-28 21:51:43
    MORONS! I'VE GOT MORONS ON MY PAYROLL!

    I think the self-aware nature of gaming with easter eggs and shout outs limits that now. 


    I remember when I was like six thinking it was the coolest thing that you could find the Batmobile in Dracula's castle in King's Quest 2 but these days, something like this is par for the course.

  • One foot in front of the other, every day.

    It's less about easter eggs and more about potentially game-altering content, though, whether that alters how you play the game or how you understand it. Another example would be the speculation that the Triforce could be acquired in Ocarina of Time, which would have massive implications if it were true. 

  • No rainbow star
    Actually, Alex, there is a glitch that lets you catch Mew
  • One foot in front of the other, every day.

    I actually learned of that shortly after making this thread. 


    My mind is now shattered and I have much to reflect upon. 

  • a little muffled

    It wasn't actually discovered until years and years after the games came out though. So when your friend said he knew how to catch Mew, he was still lying.

  • Wheat Sword.

  • a little muffled

    I remember that!

  • We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced, For the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year


    you mean this

  • a little muffled

    Yes, that. It was originally a "guide" on GameFAQs.

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    FFVII Cheese Weapon

  • The funny thing is that the Mew glitch doesn't sound any more plausible than the rumors.


    Also, reviving you-know-who from Final Fantasy VII.

  • Seriously?  You found a way to revive Jessie?!  HOLY SHI oh wait it's just Aeris.

  • No rainbow star

    ^^ If anything, the actual Mew glitch sounds even MORE ridiculous


    And the Celebi Egg glitch is even worse!

  • a little muffled

    Interesting note: way back in my elementary school when I first heard about item duplication, the person explaining it referred to Missingno as "a guy who looks like a newspaper". And so Missingno was Newspaper Guy to me for years. (I never actually did the glitch in my own copy because I was worried it would mess up my game.)

  • this kind of stuff


    can't someone just like


    check the code of the game to see if it's real or not


    I mean gaming communities tend to be pretty big


    so finding a programmer or computer scientist or something in one shouldn't be that unlikely...right?

  • If you must eat a phoenix, boil it, do not roast it. This only encourages their mischievous habits.

    Only if the stuff is intentional. Things like the Mew Glitch require you to do more than just look at the code to understand why it happens or if it can even happen alone, as the actual process to do it requires manipulating the game's data in a way that was not intentional or supported by the game's coding.

  • edited 2012-09-29 00:56:23
    Loser

    Alex,


    If you like the Mew myths, I think you might find this breakdown of fan theories about the "Pokegods" pretty interesting too. It makes an effort to elaborate on how and why those myths came to be by talking about the structure of early internet communities helping to encourage the rumors and other stuff like that.


    On the topic of mysterious things in games, I also feel like Stop 'n' Swop deserves a mention, especially since Banjo-Kazooie alludes to it in the ending credits without really giving you any idea how it works.

  • edited 2012-09-29 00:55:45
    Tableflipper

    ^^oh right


    sorry, I was focusing more on things like that pendant in the first post


    though I guess that the programmer of the game to start with could have used misleading code for that too to try to keep people away from thinking it's actually useless or something

  • If you must eat a phoenix, boil it, do not roast it. This only encourages their mischievous habits.

    More than that, the effect could be buried under lines of miscellaneous code, requiring people cracking the game to go through it with a fine tooth comb. And even then, they may not actually know what they are looking for.

  • One foot in front of the other, every day.

    Thanks for the link, Louie. That was a very interesting and nostalgic read. I remember a lot of that mythology from my own playgrounds, but much of it was new to me as well. 

  • Poot dispenser here

    Does Half-Life 2 count? There's maybe at least a couple things that are leftover from the beta in the final game.

  • You can change. You can.

    Man, I remember when San Andreas came out and pretty much every kid in high school spent their time exploring the San Andreas island trying to find cool shit. 


    As much as I love GTAIV and RDR, I think no other game in Rockstar's history has managed to create that feeling of looking for shit up and exploring. Mostly because GTAIV's city doesn't feel like a sandbox to explore but like a city to live in. RDR's story is too compelling to go exploring, imo. But that may be just me.

  • a little muffled
    Oh man, I just remembered the endless attempts in geade 4 to get a cursed necklace in Golden Sun (so we could get Feizhi as a party member).
  • BeeBee
    edited 2012-09-29 02:52:19

    The difference between the Mew/Celebi urban legends and how you exploit glitches to do them is typically pretty easy to recognize if you have a few months' experience as a programmer, because by then you'd be familiar with what happens with pointer errors and half-saved data.


    Like, the Cinnabar thing makes total sense when you realize it's a strip of land with no encounter table coded in.

  • I always always under the impression that if you shut your eyes and begged to God that you'd catch Pokemon.

  • Seriously: I am a HUGE fan of Fable, and the first Fable game is filled with stuff like this: The signing sword, the Sandgoose and there's others.

  • if u do convins fashist akwaint hiz faec w pavment neway jus 2 b sur


    Man, I remember when San Andreas came out and pretty much every kid in high school spent their time exploring the San Andreas island trying to find cool shit. 


    As much as I love GTAIV and RDR, I think no other game in Rockstar's history has managed to create that feeling of looking for shit up and exploring. Mostly because GTAIV's city doesn't feel like a sandbox to explore but like a city to live in. RDR's story is too compelling to go exploring, imo. But that may be just me.



    Oh, man.


    Back in third grade, every single kid from my school played Vice City. At one point, we made some sort of a competition, where the first one to finds all 100 of those green Aztec statues wins. I didn't have internet or know about the existence of sites like GameFAQs, so I spent an entire month looking for the statues, only to get stuck at 99. I don't think anybody even managed to do it.


    And yes, we played GTA when we were nine years old. We're as collectively messed up as you expect us to be.


  • One foot in front of the other, every day.

    For what it's worth, various social pressures ensured that many children at my school were playing similarly violent games at a similar age. Then again, once you've played Mortal Kombat... 

  • I thought that this thread was about the game Folklore.

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