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IC and modern slang

IndecisionIndecision
edited December 2018 in The Commsphere
This is the future. What are we actually allowed to write?

EDIT: Okay drop the acronyms but what about words like "lit" and "woke" and "yeet"???

Thanks.
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Comments

  • AtalkezAtalkez
    Yeah, no, it doesn’t. Those are all acronyms from Earth time, and the history has largely been lost. So no, this isn’t right. 
  • MinionMinion
    It isn't earth lit though. Slang would have developed from the other cultures that the human prisoners were surrounded by. I think there is room for some fun slang/technobabble to be developed though.

    LMFO laughing my fins off...
    LMUWO laughing my useless wings off...
    LMOTTWNLO laughing my oddly truncated torso with no legs off
  • IndecisionIndecision
    Atalkez said:
    Yeah, no, it doesn’t. Those are all acronyms from Earth time, and the history has largely been lost. So no, this isn’t right. 
    History has been lost, but that doesn't mean language has been lost. We're still speaking modern English in-game. If this is supposed to be some language and it's just translated into English for our edification, then that still means there's slang.

    Are you just against the use of modern words?
  • AtalkezAtalkez
    Is it English? I haven’t gone into it too deep on that side of things. In Achaea, it’s Achaean, which is entirely different.

    No, I’m against seeing ‘lol’ or ‘lmao’ on FT because someone wants to be cute
  • ThePlaintiffReturnsThePlaintiffReturns
    Minion, not gonna lie, I came this close || to making exactly the same thread yesterday, about the razor-thin line between IC and OOC in Starmourn. Not 'rofl' so much but consider that "FT Died because of lag" would get you zapped in Achaea, but shouldn't here, because of course my character is talking about lag in his mindsim or BEAST suit.

    But let me bore you with an anecdote from my amateur fiction:

    I was writing a scene in which two of the Controllers are considering how to deal with a peasant uprising. As I was writing in my zone and the words are spilling effortlessly onto the page, the Controllers are thinking of ramping things up by sending in the Zone Security Force.

    Controller 1: "They leave us no choice, Marcus."
    Controller 2: "This hasn't been done in three hundred years."
    Controller 1: "They started this. I'm officially recommending that we use the Force."

    In character? One-hundred percent. Fourth-wall shattering? Immersion breaking? Two-hundred percent.

    TL;DR: Anything that jars unnecessarily shouldn't be in the game, whether or not it's technically IC. And in this regard, the reader is never wrong.
  • IndecisionIndecision
    Yes, but what about modern words like "lit" or "woke" or "yeet"???
  • EsheEshe
    edited December 2018
    Personally I would say that those modern terms would be in poor taste and already outmoded considering how far into the future the game is set. They would be archaic like folk phrases are today. 
  • AtalkezAtalkez
    Indecision said:
    Yes, but what about modern words like "lit" or "woke" or "yeet"???
    No because none of those words were mainstream 5 years ago, and won’t be in another 5 years. So it makes no sense for them to still be around thousands of years later.
  • ArcherArcher
    There's a line, and it's a bit blurry I think.  You could make these arguments against anything in the english language, and really we should all be playing in an alien language.  We'd take college courses for "Starmournian" before we could even play. :)

    When it comes down to it, think about sitting around playing Shadowrun and you're deep in to the RP, you just finished a hack and you're arguing over who's deck is better.  You wouldn't yell out TUCK FRUMP or YEET or saying your "Deck is Lit" (unless the lights are lit up on it!) without breaking up the RP.
  • SlanderSlander
    Think of it this way. Do you, in your daily life, use thousand year old slang? I'm gonna guess not (with the exception of a few words that transitioned from slang and have gone through numerous linguistic changes). We don't talk like we did a few hundred years ago even. Using modern slang in Starmourn makes no sense.
    I'm gone.
  • MinionMinion
    ThePlaintiffReturns said: No
    Minion, not gonna lie, I came this close || to making exactly the same thread yesterday, about the razor-thin line between IC and OOC in Starmourn. Not 'rofl' so much but consider that "FT Died because of lag" would get you zapped in Achaea, but shouldn't here, because of course my character is talking about lag in his mindsim or BEAST suit.

    But let me bore you with an anecdote from my amateur fiction:

    I was writing a scene in which two of the Controllers are considering how to deal with a peasant uprising. As I was writing in my zone and the words are spilling effortlessly onto the page, the Controllers are thinking of ramping things up by sending in the Zone Security Force.

    Controller 1: "They leave us no choice, Marcus."
    Controller 2: "This hasn't been done in three hundred years."
    Controller 1: "They started this. I'm officially recommending that we use the Force."

    In character? One-hundred percent. Fourth-wall shattering? Immersion breaking? Two-hundred percent.

    TL;DR: Anything that jars unnecessarily shouldn't be in the game, whether or not it's technically IC. And in this regard, the reader is never wrong.
    I don't agree. There arr so many semi-hidden references to RL modern scifi tropes to not look at it in a tongue in cheek sort of way. I find RL slang a bit over the top but dont mind it being twisted to fit the setting.
  • CrorrCrorr
    edited December 2018
    Sidebar, your honor. The Tuck is "yeet"?

    ETA: By which I'm both asking a sincere question and pointing out one of the issues with modern OOC slang being taken IC.
    Come one, come all W'hoorn, to the Cultural Exchange where we can talk about being catbird klingons!
  • CragCrag
    Personally seeing someone say My new Corvette is lit in-game doesnt phase me but for example seeing long time IRE players using the same player name across games jars me right away.
    Besides isnt there tons of pop culture references in-game. Like there was an npc overlooking Scrapton with a cloak saying "I am the night." And similar stuff. You ever read some old stuff like Shakespeare or something, everything we say today would be jibberish to them. You have to suspend your disbelief no matter what and to me modern slang falls into A okay.
  • MinionMinion
    edited December 2018
    Like I said, we have a lot of freedom to create our own slang. If they happen to be based on RL, that isn't terrible in my opinion. Unless they release Tolkienesque appendices, we only have a few contextual cues from denizens.

    The big thing is, just like in real life, slang is crowd-sourced. So, if you don't want something to be slang replace it with something you do like.

    EDIT TO ADD: I would prefer to have SOME slang rather than be so paralyzed by fear of "getting it wrong" that the language we use is boraing af.
  • YalauYalau
    Just make it all up from scratch.  It's not hard, why wouldn't you?
  • MarunaMaruna
    Why would you use old slang in Starmourn? It's already been stated that by the admin that, yeah Earth existed at some point, but everything from Earth has been wiped clean to the point of nobody knowing about it. Using '1000 year old slang' from a planet that, for all your characters know, didn't actually exist... Is silly. It's not even similar to referencing Shakespeare 100 years from now.
  • KaxKax
    Whether any particular word or phrase survived into Starmourn doesn't matter. I'm 98% certain we're not speaking anything descended from English, or anything originating from Earth for that matter. 

    You can use cutting-edge slang in an IC way to convey a particular sort of personality, but the problem is that it's not easy to distinguish deliberate IC use from a kid talking OOC like they would on Fortnite or whatever. By contrast, if you see "howdy", "cannae", or "thou", chances are overwhelmingly good that those are deliberate IC usages.

    So yes, "yeet" is going to cause trouble, because people are going to have some uncertainty about whether you're IC or not, and that's going to be jarring/immersion-breaking/whatever.
    "You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I go get and beat you with ’til you understand who’s in ruttin’ command here."
  • VielarVielar
    edited December 2018
    One of the many strengths of the introductory quests is that, between the NPCs and your options in the dialogue trees, you have a lot of examples after which to model your character's diction and speech patterns. There's a lot of Starmourn-specific lingo peppered in there, as well as more familiar, time-tested colloquial phrases that would have been likely to stick around well into the future and be translated into Galactic Standard. Taking cues from that and other NPC interactions is a good way to develop an authentic voice for your character in the Starmourn universe.
  • MinionMinion
    So, as a solution maybe we should turn this thread into suggestions for Starmourn slang. First step is to do a denizen study and see what they are using.

    By the by, this is almost identical to swearing. If we are going to eliminate RL slang we should eliminate RL cussing and come up with setting appropriate swearses.
  • CragCrag
    It's exhausting to have everyone agree with what the replacement words and phrases to existing words and phrases would even be.

    Yo, I get it. 1000 years in the future on a multi species space world english wouldn't be the same. But I prefer to suspend my disbelief in this regard to easily convey personality.

    Having said that, slang much like cursing, can be obnoxious when overused and acceptance is going to vary by personal taste.


  • YalauYalau
    Make it up and see if it sticks!
  • HalcyonHalcyon
    In Dungeons and Dragons, players often substitute in-game accents for real life ones. Irish/Scottish/Welsh for the Moonshae Isles, Arabic for Zakhara, German for the Zemni Fields. I don't think it takes a huge suspension of disbelief to see someone using a lot of old country slang, even if the words might seem silly in context, as using the equivalent of that kind of language. Like if a character strolls up to a takeout shop going, "Howdy y'all, was hoping you could rustle up some <insert glorious elgan foodstuff>" you can safely assume they're speaking in  the Starmourn equivalent of a folky accent. On the same principle, I don't mind people using words like 'yeet' or 'woke', because I can suspend disbelief enough to accommodate for faster than light travel, but there is no way you can convince me that an entire sector of teenagers interconnected with VR haven't invented some dumb as hell slang. 

    On the other hand of this, though, we have some in-lore allowances made for language that I don't want to see in game, even if it has IC founding. The other day I was seeing some absolutely charming alt-right allegory referring to a worthless caste of people who should be worked without mercy and have their rights taken away, children castrated, etc, all hidden behind the pretty, shiny veneer of 'the filthy crinkers'. Yes, it's an IC slur, but an oh-so-subtle attempt at reskinning Nazism into space doesn't make me want to play with you. 

    I think, overall, it's a matter of how you use the words instead of the words themselves. Someone going 'lol yeet let's go bash some mobs' is different than someone playing hacker-kid extraordinaire who drops dumb slang into their sentences as character flair. 
  • DevinaDevina
    Most Cyberpunk/Science Fiction games I've played have involved a plethora of slang terms from a variety of decades. Granted, Earth was lost, but as was mentioned before, language usually isn't. I like to throw in shortened versions of words (Hab Zeta for Habitat Deck Zeta, for instance), and use things I personally wouldn't use IRL (bae, for instance).

    Honestly, I'm not jarred by unusual language like yeet or woke. I'm more bothered by people referencing individuals like Karl Marx, Hitler, or even contemporary actors like Adam Sandler, because those individuals /would/ be lost.
  • ZiazapojiraZiazapojira
    saturnine said:
    Think of it this way. Do you, in your daily life, use thousand year old slang? I'm gonna guess not (with the exception of a few words that transitioned from slang and have gone through numerous linguistic changes). We don't talk like we did a few hundred years ago even. Using modern slang in Starmourn makes no sense.
    We don't for the most part use words from 1.5k years ago, the pronunciations and meanings have shifted quite a bit.

    There is little to be gained by people having to trip all over themselves trying to figure out if something they are saying is slang. There is no way to know which words would drift into standard usage.

    Woke arguably isn't even slang.

    I wish the designers would have considered how interesting it could be to have selected known records from the past and people using those as their cultural Bibles.

    Imagine if we had been told we only have complete copies of:
    Terminator 2
    Lionheart
    Battlefield Earth
    Plan 9 From Outer Space
    Casablanca
    Dr. Strangelove
    The A-Team, Third Season
    Moby Dick
    Plato's Republic
    Orwell's 1984
    Shakespere's The Tempest

    etc.

  • CrorrCrorr
    Switch Tempest out for Midsummer and you got a deal, schweethaht.
    Come one, come all W'hoorn, to the Cultural Exchange where we can talk about being catbird klingons!
  • ZiazapojiraZiazapojira
    edited December 2018
    Crorr said:
    Switch Tempest out for Midsummer and you got a deal, schweethaht.
    Puck you.  >:)
  • KestrelKestrel
    Maybe I'm just really lacking in empathy but I think this entire hullabaloo boils down to common sense and the choice some people make to be an arsehole.

    I really, legitimately, don't think anyone is actually 'confused' about the 'blurry line' between IC and OOC. I don't think anyone referencing dank memes IG or using the latest/trendiest late-10s slang is just 'not thinking' or having a little slip of the proverbial tongue. This topic presents the premise as if there were two sides of a debate, two perspectives that need to be consolidated; I disagree. The other perspective in this situation is one which is fully aware that it's being — to put it mildly — a bit cheeky, and just doesn't care.

    So I'm not going to address this topic as if there's an invisible line in the sand that needs to be helpfully defined to provide constructive guidance for people who are struggling to figure out the best way to stay IC. It's common sense. You know where that line is drawn. You know that when your character says yeet or lols or references Drake you're not being IC, you're just being an arsehole because you think it's cute or funny. Only you're disrespecting the setting and other people's desire to stay immersed within it. That's why that handy helpfile says that while you don't have to RP, you do have to, as a minimum, for the sake of other players around you, stay IC.

    Stay IC. It is not complicated. You don't have to really give it any thought to know when you're being an arsehole. 

    "They are elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty."
    — Oscar Wilde

    "I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before."
    — Margaret Atwood
  • CragCrag
    Kestrel said:
    So I'm not going to address this topic as if there's an invisible line in the sand..
    It's common sense. You know where that line is drawn. 

    Quoting a little out of a context but..

    As soon as I read the gist of this I had a Peter Griffin style flashback of terrible things that  went wrong because someone made the "common sense" assumption before implementing something upon the general public.

    I agree many are blatantly obnoxious about being OOC, but equally many are blatantly obnoxious about trying to be OOC hall monitors for trivial stuff. 

    I think ultimately the games energy for IC will be there, but it’s not there yet and talking about it early on helps.


  • AureliusAurelius
    https://wiki.starmourn.com/Slang
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