
Umberto Eco and His Legacy in Open-World Games - Hooke
https://killscreen.com/articles/umberto-eco-and-his-legacy-in-open-world-games/
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skishore
I'm surprised someone wrote an article about Umberto Eco and his influence on
video games and neglected to mention Ultima Ratio Regum [0]. It's a roguelike
under development that attempts to simulate an entire world with multiple
civilizations and with some kind of conspiracy at play throughout the world's
history.

[0]
[http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/](http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/)

~~~
kbenson
That's an interesting looking game, but I'm a bit confused by the reliance on
the ASCII aesthetic. True, many people associate it with roguelike games, but
when you are using ASCII generate portraits[1] of the fidelity they are, I
can't help but feel a lot of time is being wasted on an aspect that matters
little to the end result. It will either be fun or it won't, and ASCII is
really just a highly constrained tile-set when used in this way.

1:
[http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2016/05/firstdr...](http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2016/05/firstdraft.png)

~~~
pvdebbe
It's not even ASCII. Blocks and "double pipes" fall out of the 127-character
range easily.

I also agree that a lot of the benefits and crude aesthetics is lost on using
extra codepages and fancy characters: I enjoy my NetHack on plain ASCII mode
as it doesn't depend on any particular font for instance.

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feintruled
A lot of talk about Eco, not much on the article! For my money, it's off the
mark. The 'freedom' in open world games is mostly an illusion, and we seem to
be getting away from it, as the technological demands increase. Generally the
only freedom is the order in which you undertake the pre-scripted missions.
Years ago in Morrowind, you could kill quest giving NPCs and wreck the story,
but in Fallout 4 all essential characters are weirdly immortal.

Your 'choices' are overblown. For example, in Far Cry 4 you have the option to
kill a character or not (on the orders of another). In your report, you refer
to them as having been "taken care of". You can't even change the dialogue.
Your reward is a different epilogue movie. It's all more choose your own
adventure than choose your own War and Peace. You can see the game designers
dilemma - why expend massive effort on branching paths when any given player
will only choose one? Far Cry 4 also had an amusing bug - you could also
choose to destroy a temple or not. However the bug meant the game would show
you the non-destroyed model when past a certain range, suddenly popping to the
correct model as you approached. The mask literally slipping!

Even non-open world games stuggle to provide meaningful agency. The much
acclaimed Walking Dead allowed many choices, from which all resulting
divergences were soon neatly resolved funneling the player to exactly one
ending.

Honorable mentions : Fallout New Vegas, which offered so many options it
almost collapsed under its own weight, and until Until Dawn, an interactive
horror movie in which every single character can live or die.

~~~
danielbarla
Your examples are all AAA titles, where the expectation is one of voice acting
and highly polished animations, etc. It's pretty difficult branch plot lines
when you carry such a high cost of production. Perhaps one day, computers will
be able to improvise voice acting, plot lines and art. Until then, if we want
any semblance of real openness, we have to stick to relatively low-cost of
production / algorithmic / generated content, like Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress,
No Man's Sky, etc. These games are all limited in many ways, but at least use
the player's imagination to fill in the gaps in creative ways.

~~~
feintruled
For sure, but I would class those more as "sandbox" games, which the article
specifically includes. But as always, indies are where the interesting
experiments are!

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mcphage
> In his 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco had three men feed an unwieldy
> amount of esoteric trivia—involving Templars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons,
> Illuminati, and a thousand other occult sects—into a computer that
> synthesizes them at random to generate a master “Plan” explaining the course
> of European history.

Either the author, or I, really misinterpreted this book. As I recall, it was
Bembo's word processor that took a few dozen phrases—some of which were about
occult sects, some of which were connectives "If this, then", and some of
which were garbage "Mickey Mouse is Minnie's husband". And it didn't
synthesize anything; it spat back a random selection of them, and the
characters then attempted to synthesize the results. Which seems like a minor
hair to split, but it really reflected one of the themes of the book, that
humans keep trying to find patterns and order in the natural world, and will
create it if it isn't there.

However, a similar remark is in the blurb on the back of the book, which has
always annoyed me. So maybe it's me that's misremembering (or maybe the author
of this article didn't really read much of Foucault's Pendulum.)

~~~
rukuu001
No, you're spot on. I just finished this book. The computer was used to
generate nonsense, which they used as a creative prompt when they were at a
dead end in the 'Plan'.

~~~
mcphage
Oh, good. I liked it quite a lot, and hoped that the misunderstanding wasn't
on my part! Thanks :-)

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simonebrunozzi
For the non-Italians: Umberto Eco is an extremely interesting figure for
Italians.

Everybody admires his extremely deep knowledge of the Italian language and its
nuisances, I would even dare to say "unrivaled" in our present day.

On the other hand, certain books he wrote are considered extremely complicated
to grok, or too academic.

~~~
Chathamization
> Everybody admires his extremely deep knowledge of the Italian language and
> its nuisances, I would even dare to say "unrivaled" in our present day.

I always found it strange that in the U.S., conversations about, say,
Foucault's Pendulum, don't really touch on the fact that people are reading a
translation and not the original work. The vast majority of the readers
probably wouldn't even be able to tell you the name of the translator.

I always wonder how different the translation is from the original, and how
different it would be from other possible translations. I remember looking at
different translations of Lysistrata and feeling like they were almost
completely different plays.

~~~
mathattack
For better or worse, anything sufficiently subtle or complicated can't be
translated 1-1 across languages. There are too many problems of context,
meaning, etc. For a strange example - the Intuit have 50 words for snow. How
much subtlety would be lost translating that into English? It just wouldn't
work.

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/there...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-
snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html)

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
I guess if you live in SV you might not have direct experience with this, but
English has a lot more than one word for "snow".

~~~
duaneb
Really? Like what? I can think of things _like_ snow (sleet, flurries,
blizzard, powder) but not any direct synonyms. We can't hold a candle to the
Inuit.

~~~
derefr
Why would you have multiple words for the same thing, that don't carry
different shades of meaning or uses? What do you imagine these 59 words are
used for? Cute little nicknames?

~~~
duaneb
I wouldn't say you should! I imagine the Inuit have a much more sophisticated
understanding of snow than someone from Massachusetts.

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gluelogic
I was looking at his Wikipedia page earlier just this morning and I didn't
realize he passed away in February. Synchronicity.

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hurbledr
Truly a sad day when Eco passed. While all his work is well worth reading, his
writing on lists should be of particular interest to people on this board. If
you are looking for a good art book, a good coffee table book, or a good
bathroom book, you could do a lot worse than History of Beauty, The Infinity
of Lists, or On Ugliness.

~~~
hurbledr
P.S. On Ugliness might be the most metal book ever published.

