The last time I said "lore is not narrative" I had to turn my social media off for a week afterwards because I got so many weirdos rocking up to tell me I didn't know what I was talking about. One insisted I read a short story with no people in it, as an example of how good a description of a place could be.
@joningold Is it fair to say that in the way you use these words, lore refers to the rules of the world's evolution (i.e. the rules that allow you do predict what will happen if you know ~everything about the current state of the world) and narrative is the description of the particular evolution that's happening during the time period (and spatial area) the piece of fiction describes? (Where we understand "state of the world" at the level of detail/precision that the reader is expected to.)
I'm curious what you'd think about the boundary between lore and backstory in fiction that goes way deeper than usual on the "precision of the world's description" axis (for example, Clockwork Rocket that has the characters discover their world's physics): is it shifted towards putting things that would ordinarily be in lore into backstory or not.
@robryk interesting question! So like, if a Star Trek episodes plot hinges on a detail of how warp drives work, does that detail get “elevated” from lore into backstory/narrative? Or if it relies on a detail about something Sisko’s mother did?
I’m not sure, off hand: but it’s certainly true that a core feature of backstory over lore if it’s discovery usually alters the core story; it’s active relevant past information, as opposed to ambient information.
@robryk So I think that’s the test for this way of looking at things: is the detail moving? How turbolifts work might affect the plot of an episode directly but that information still didn’t move (it’s lore); the secret level hidden between decks 8&9 that no one knew about is discovered (it’s back story).
Does that hit your question?
I'm not sure I see the difference: in both cases (how turbolifts work vs. existence of secret level) the statement of fact remained true, only the knowledge of characters and reader changed. In both examples the knowledge of the reader _does_ change. Do you mean to have the piece of information in the turbolift example the information is ~generally known to the characters? If not, I don't get the concept of the detail moving/not moving.
If yes, then would having the story be partially about characters discovering that detail change things?
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@joningold Actually, a more concrete and obviously known to you example: what about meaning of the word that is translated as vault in Heaven't Vault?
Well, one might think that meanings of ancient words is not lore, because the game is about discovering them (both from the POV of the player as well as the character). Let's for a moment assume otherwise.
If we think that those meanings _in general_ are lore, then _that one in particular_ might still be backstory by virtue of being basically equivalent to one of the central pieces of mystery in the game: what the Heaven't Vault is.
Is this in any way similar to how you think about the lore/backstory distinction?
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@robryk that one at least I think is fairly easy: it's lore. The reader might care / enjoy it, but Aliya doesn't even notice it. So it has no "life" within the story.
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@joningold This leaves me confused. I thought that this was a major revelation for Aliya, who wanted to find Heaven's Vault (presumably because she expected it to be a vault of ancient writings? at least this is what I assumed was a significant part of her motivation) and then realizes that it's not the kind of thing she was looking for after all. I thought that the only reason this was not an explicit part of gameplay was that the game has no way of knowing when the player has realized that, so it's impossible to do that without running both the risk of spoiling the player _and_ of belaboring the (already) obvious.
Was the intention different?
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@joningold Ah, that depends on when you think she's realized that. It's possible for the player to realize it quite early on, and so (in a world where she really speaks English) she would also have that opportunity. Alas, in a world where the language's different it's moot as you say.
Re mountain vs murder on Aliya's surprise when reaching the Valut. (First, if one has noticed that than the surprise feels somewhat weird, which might be why I don't remember her being surprised at Vault's function.) It doesn't seem similar to a mountain to me (it's explicitly not driving anything: the search for the vault is, while this is a piece of knowledge you don't know you lack until you have it), but I think you mean that it's dissimilar enough from the murder to belong to the kitchen sink category, which I can see (and probably agree with).
I realize that I was very thoughlessly thinking of your ~classification scheme as scheme that puts _pieces of information_ into buckets. I wonder if you think of things that go into backstory, lore, "mountain", ... buckets as pieces of information or something else?
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@robryk I think these are tools of analysis rather than construction. I might say, "this world could use more lore - it feels thin" or "the backstory lacks emotional heft"... but I don't say "this is a lore piece, it goes here. This is a backstory piece, it goes there."
I find it useful to see what's missing: and by that lens, I see a lot of lore-based games as lopsided, often badly missing a narrative.
Hm... that starts to sound like it would be easier to describe everything in terms of "lorefulness" (how well the world is fleshed out) or "backstoryfulness" (not sure how to phrase this) instead of "lore" and "backstory": it's not something you want to divide the story into, or even put things into buckets with such labels, but rather want to talk about total amount of backstory and lore. Every piece of the story contributes somehow to those, but those contributions are very much not independent, and we don't want to try to model these interdependencies, but just talk about stories as wholes.
Does this sound roughly like what you have in mind? If so, do you have maybe a succinct phrasing of the question that defines "backstoryfulness"?
PS. I also really enjoy trying to understand how you think about these things (as you can see I find it hard not to be very reductionist). Thanks, and please do tell me if it starts to be tedious for you.
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@robryk I felt the double-meaning on the word was too goofy for a big plot point; presumably our characters aren't actually speaking English, but I loved that it works for the reader. But you could make the same argument for, say, the Heaven's Vault being what it is, and Aliya is definitely surprised by that. But I'm not sure that the discovery inflects her journey; it changes the plot but the narrative is already nearing its end. So it's more like a mountain than a murder