In Praise of logical conventions in naming

[micmc]

This is half a rant, half advice...

but with naming, esp. units or unit classes, going with a logical flow balanced with poetry makes it a lot easier to play. What I mean, if you are making a non-history mod, or a very specific civ history mod, where the names are accurate but don't translate to modern language very well, it might be best to comprimise in favor of reaching a wider audience....

how many times have we opened a mod...game...only to find the "bowman" unit being called "Zzzrralpheinie" ..now within the history of the mod I'm sure "Zzzrralpheinie" is the abosolute correct answer to what a bowman is, but coming from an outsiders standpoint, its giberish to players and no matter what you cool things you do with "Zzzrralphenie" it won't matter outside of your own enjoyment of playing it.

If you haven't read tolkien, you have no idea what an orc is...but there was always a widespread audience for tolkien stuff, so that was ok. the same could be said currently about the wheel of time books...the lesser known star trek stuff..even the star war trivia out there.

In the end if you enjoy making and playing with Zzzralphenie(i or s would be the plural?) then go for it, but only the really exceptional (and easy to digest) mods will get wide spread play so don't get your feelings hurt if there is never a market for the "I got shot in the butt by a Zzzralphenie" t-shirts.

I will now await Zulu's reprimand for being on the wrong forum, quietly in the corner explaining the reason for this rant/advice is, there is such a high benchmark for artists within the community, the same kind of expected standard for the writing of mods isn't too much to hope for....and on that prepistion, I'm out.

 

[zulu9812]

Seems like the right forum to me. Good advise too.

 

[TheBladeRoden]

I haven't read Tolkien and I know what an Orc is.

 

[micmc]

I haven't read Tolkien and I know what an Orc is.

It's amazing what movies they can do in movies these days....

and before you say it, someone in the food chain of your life had read Tolkien and the knowledge seeped to the strata where you became aware of it....and point of reference, bragging, or even aknowledging not reading isn't nearly as sexy in some circles as it is in others. Not a critism, I understand your point, now if you know what a grok is you can win the discussion

 

[Tabris]

It's amazing what movies they can do in movies these days....

and before you say it, someone in the food chain of your life had read Tolkien and the knowledge seeped to the strata where you became aware of it....and point of reference, bragging, or even aknowledging not reading isn't nearly as sexy in some circles as it is in others. Not a critism, I understand your point, now if you know what a grok is you can win the discussion

Not exactly, orcs have appeared in a number of fantasy books and games, my first contact with them was in Warcraft.
After the movies almost everybody knows what a orc is so at least for this generation they are common knowledge

 

[Wyz_sub10]

What does it matter what you name a unit? It'll be pretty clear what it does when it's in the game, and it should have proper unit info, a pedia entry and a strategy entry.

How many people knew what a Cho-Ko-Nu was, or a Keshik or a Quechua, before playing Civ?

 

[Zurai]

This is the age old question of flavor vs accessibility. By naming everything generic names, you drain a game of a lot of its flavor. What's more interesting - National Monument or Mt. Rushmore? Great Dam or The Three Gorges Dam? Ancient Cathedral or The Sistine Chapel? Ancient Spearman or Hoplite? etc etc.

 

[micmc]

This is the age old question of flavor vs accessibility. By naming everything generic names, you drain a game of a lot of its flavor. What's more interesting - National Monument or Mt. Rushmore? Great Dam or The Three Gorges Dam? Ancient Cathedral or The Sistine Chapel? Ancient Spearman or Hoplite? etc etc.

At the end of the day, despite how much everybody hates the word, it's a comprimise.

Then its a matter of finding great words,
ancient, elite, blessed, chop, dragoon.....which lets you put an (understandable) piece of pizazz or esprirt de corps (if you want a more butch sounding word) in what is otherwise a pretty dull sounding unit.

Civ4 mods lets you give units a unique name, for everythign not just great people, so rather than having 'old boring infantryman defeats even more old and boring spearman" you can end up with a fight with the "Draft Dodgers of Darby"(infantryman) vrs the "Babies on a stick"(spearman) [is how I think it would be returned in game text (I haven't tested this as much as I should before I use the example)].

but back to the words, you can put in "ancient calvary" which sounds a little cooler than "light horseman" and be easily understood but still have a little style to the thing.

but you are of course right, if you enjoy playing something one way or the other, then by all means go for it, the world is too small, life too short, cliches too hackneyed to try to create something to only make someone else happy. but the point is also, if you create something that needs the narrow esoteric viewpoint of 1 person...not a lot of other people will enjoy it too and you end up with a pretty short shelf life. A sad thing when you think about the hours that goes into making a decent mod. (I mean, "pete's mom" might be a great name for an absolutely scary bunch of amazons, buuuut, if you don't know pete, or his mom, you're going to miss most of why its cool. )

 

[Wyz_sub10]

At the end of the day, despite how much everybody hates the word, it's a comprimise.

Then its a matter of finding great words,
ancient, elite, blessed, chop, dragoon.....which lets you put an (understandable) piece of pizazz or esprirt de corps (if you want a more butch sounding word) in what is otherwise a pretty dull sounding unit.

Civ4 mods lets you give units a unique name, for everythign not just great people, so rather than having 'old boring infantryman defeats even more old and boring spearman" you can end up with a fight with the "Draft Dodgers of Darby"(infantryman) vrs the "Babies on a stick"(spearman) [is how I think it would be returned in game text (I haven't tested this as much as I should before I use the example)].

but back to the words, you can put in "ancient calvary" which sounds a little cooler than "light horseman" and be easily understood but still have a little style to the thing.

but you are of course right, if you enjoy playing something one way or the other, then by all means go for it, the world is too small, life too short, cliches too hackneyed to try to create something to only make someone else happy. but the point is also, if you create something that needs the narrow esoteric viewpoint of 1 person...not a lot of other people will enjoy it too and you end up with a pretty short shelf life. A sad thing when you think about the hours that goes into making a decent mod. (I mean, "pete's mom" might be a great name for an absolutely scary bunch of amazons, buuuut, if you don't know pete, or his mom, you're going to miss most of why its cool. )

I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I fail to see your point. If I create a new cavalry unit and call it "Zaporozhian", how will this cause you to enjoy the mod any less? You can see by the graphic that it's a cavalry unit, and you can look at the stats to see what it does. Would you not be interested in looking at the pedia to see what it is, specifically?

And I don't see this as particularly esoteric - certainly no more so than any other part of civ. Sure, it's a bit pedantic to say, "see, I know something about history, nyah!" But that's pretty much Civ, head to toe (unless you assume people were familiar with the Kashi Wishwanath before playing CivIV).

 

[Gerikes]

I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I fail to see your point. If I create a new cavalry unit and call it "Zaporozhian", how will this cause you to enjoy the mod any less? You can see by the graphic that it's a cavalry unit, and you can look at the stats to see what it does. Would you not be interested in looking at the pedia to see what it is, specifically?

And I don't see this as particularly esoteric - certainly no more so than any other part of civ.

I'll start by saying that for a Civ player, I constantly find that I view myself, rightfully, as NOT a history buff. It seems that Civ's historical aspect draws the historically-knowledgable types of people to it. I, however, was not drawn in for that reason.

So, when I read up in the top-left of the screen that during the AI's turn, an AI Zabumafu attacked my Swordsman, but retreated, I like to try to know what I was just attacked by. If I'm right outside a city, trying to seige it, and it was a Seige unit that wasn't there the turn before (it moved their by road, and finished it's turn attacking me), now I know I should probably step away, because after all my stack wasn't that large, and I only have one catapult over there trying to take down that 40% culture against evenly matched defenses. If it was a Cavalry unit, I could care less, I had two Spearman in that stack. Let'em come at me.

Of course, I could obviously go to that plot when it's my turn and look and see what's remaining of the unit and find out what it is. But it's annoying when I don't have that information right in front of me. Sure, I'll eventually learn, but truthfully I don't play enough games to remember a bunch of UU's, especially since I normally like games of no more than 6 Civ's, and play about one full game a month!

Another thing is when I'm looking at the military advisor and see a foreign civ with 18 Zabumafu's. I guess I should start building some anti-Zabumafu units. It would be helpful to know what one is before having to go into the Civilopedia.

Of course, on the flip side, going back to my original argument, some people stress historical accuracy, and coincidentally, some people are Civ4 players. So, it makes sense that someone looking for a historically acurate game will be thrilled to see that Zabumafu rather than "Fakeliand Catapult" for a unit name.

I had the same problem playing some RTS games like Age3, where I knew I had to build Spearman rather than infantry, but because all the different units are named differently I couldn't just search for "Spearman". Thank god for hotkeys.

 

[Zurai]

but the point is also, if you create something that needs the narrow esoteric viewpoint of 1 person...not a lot of other people will enjoy it too and you end up with a pretty short shelf life. A sad thing when you think about the hours that goes into making a decent mod. (I mean, "pete's mom" might be a great name for an absolutely scary bunch of amazons, buuuut, if you don't know pete, or his mom, you're going to miss most of why its cool. )

I think you're getting just a little too far into hyperbole there. There are great mods with huge followings out there that use non-generic naming. FFH, for an example. It was originally created from the viewpoint of a single person, and is currently one of, if not the, most popular Civ4 mods.

 

[micmc]

I have to agree with you that Fall From Heaven mod is in a leauge of its own both in style and execution. which is one of the things that prompted my orginal rant, because FFH is so good and so much depth of design was put into it, there are going to be knockoffs which won't have the scope or ability of the team that put FFH together, and I hoping to offer a little free advice in design for people headed in that direction.

and like most free advice it was worth what it was paid for and as welcome as an incontent cat, during the 60's Tolkien gave a lecture to a crowd of what would have been D&D players had the game been around then, all of whom had thier own dreams of making their own middle earth, with thier agenda already in hand (remember the times here, it will be on the test) rather than sticking to the nuts and bones of the world and letting the story flow on its own....

anyway long boring story later, it always struck me when real genius is found, like the group who did FFH, it is like running the 4 minute mile, everybody figures they can do it too, and you can, if you are willing to do the training, however aiming at the goal rather than the journey is a pretty common mistake that game designers make; the "zzzralphie" thing is the first mistake made because they confuse esoteric with being cool. and I was hoping before we waded through a bunch of mods that don't quite work that designers balance out between "cool" and "approchable".

To put it another way, when you see 3 ten year olds with firecrackers, ya take the time to show them how to light and throw, so at the end of the day there are still 30 fingers attached to the proper hands, rather than searching around in the bushes

 

[Zurai]

designers balance out between "cool" and "approchable".

This is definitely the key, and I wholeheartedly agree with you there.