Re: Names (was Re: Hello again)

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

Erik Sigra wrote:
> 
> You seem to focus on the funny aspect of names. Sure, it may be nice if names
> are funny. I was not thinking nearly as much about that as you, but rather
> about the reality aspect; a synthetic name should be likely to be the real
> name of something in that language, and a name in a city list should have
> been under control of the specified state during the specified time period.
> 
> I think that not every name has to be funny. I won't get mystified by names
> just because I don't consider them funny.

The fundamental purpose of all this is to build games, right?
So for every element you need to say "Is this entertaining?  Is this
fun for the player?"  One way to entertain is to immerse, thus Civ's
use of evocative names - the use of "Rome" immediately brings up
memories and context, even for players who've only seen movies like
"Spartacus" or "Gladiator".  By contrast, "Sturni" is not at all
evocative, even though there was believed to be such a town in Italy
in ancient times.  (The name is not made up, good luck finding out
exactly where it was, heh-heh.)

Another way to entertain is with humor.  Players are simply
delighted to discover a city that is named after the place that
they used to laugh at when they were kids - in a couple instances,
I've met people who've asked me "How did you know about Ronkonkoma?
(or whatever)  It was so cool to see it in the game!"

By contrast, real but forgettable names don't do anything at all for
the player.  I spent a bunch of time putting in names for all the
Latin American countries, and had a hard time finding anything other
than a dreary succession of "Santa Maria" and "San Vicente" and so on,
quite often the same names, just in different countries.  The one I got
are still pretty dull.

> There is some point. It's at least more point having a precise categorization
> than not having it. It won't hurt. In fact it would help. Think about the
> Freeciv situation you mentioned (nationalistic name-calling). Suppose that a
> lot of Danes want the Swedish city Lund to be included in the Danish city
> list, because it has been an important Danish city for a significant length
> of time (i think Lund was once the archbishopseat for whole Denmark). Then
> suppose some Swedes would feel hurt about that, claiming that the city is
> Swedish now. With the current Freeciv, no matter what the maintainer chooses
> to do, one of the groups will be pissed of. With precise categorization, the
> maintainer can just add Lund in the correct city lists and the issue is
> settled. Europe is full of cities like Lund.

This is definitely a cultural thing we Americans simply don't understand,
perhaps because there aren't really any ex-American regions.  I can't
even get annoyed about having Los Angeles and San Diego being included in
a Mexican city name list, which is valid since they were Mexican for about
25 years.  (In fact, seems like there's a bit of comic value in that.)

Probably there are also some self-identification issues that are stronger
for a Civ-type game than an Xconq-type game.  Civ is almost like an RPG of
strategy games - you develop your civilization for a long period of time,
and grow attached to it, while Xconq games tend to be more of a sharp and
short fight.  Something to think about for game module design...

> But why should Xconq have this precise categorization? Xconq doesn't have
> such nationalistic name-calling.
> 1. To be compatible with Freeciv. One day someone will make Freeciv and Xconq
> use the same installed namers on the users system, because he thinks
> duplication is ugly and difficult to maintain and he wants to save space.

It's only a few kilobytes though, hardly noticeable compared to the megabytes
of image data and program.

> 2. When Xconq becomes as popular as Freeciv is now, the issues will also come
> to Xconq.

Yeah, probably.  I personally don't want to deal with it a whole lot
right now, Xconq has already has too much detritus from things added
in anticipation of demand that never materialized.  Sometimes the code
reminds me of a shopping mall with empty storefronts all over...

Stan