Verisimilitude (literally “the appearance of being real”) is an important aspect in any video game imitating a world. And it’s a really, really bad argument on a lot of levels, starting with the fact that it treats creative decisions as if they’re the same as normal choices of verisimilitude. This is, at its heart, what Olson dubbed the Thermian Argument after the eponymous aliens from the film Galaxy Quest, who treated all fiction as being absolutely real. Or, in other words, lore here is the justification for the decision, as if “the lore” were an impartial thing to be consulted and couldn’t be, you know… changed. The usual rejoinder when people ask about this – closely echoed by the official response – is that it’s the lore that doesn’t support any sort of cross-faction interaction and that it would violate the faction identity. Even beyond the obvious roleplaying rationale, a lot of people are calling for this to address some actual systematic differences in the game between faction-locked racial abilities and the overall population chasing progression content. Lore is the added explanation for that decision, which was a conscious creative choice driven entirely by time constraints.īy contrast, let’s look at the calls for cross-faction grouping in World of Warcraft. Let me highlight that specifically: Lore is not the justification for the decision. The game’s lore was written after the fact to justify this. Players were upset about this, and the explanation given was that the team had limited time for adding the new races and thus opted to add one more non-human race and one fan-favorite race in the most commonly seen genders. In Final Fantasy XIV’s most recent expansion, two new races with only one playable gender were added. Let’s start with an example not using this argument. But it seems to me that especially in wake of the most recent “ we can’t add women to our game because lore” incident, we should have a bit of a longer discussion about what this argument really is and why it’s… well, let’s say disingenuous.
Dan Olson has a great video about it as “ The Thermian Argument” that lays things out in a nutshell format, and it’s something I’ve mentioned in the comments more than once. I want to stress that this is not something that is a new thought. But there’s another aspect of how lore is used not just by players in a storytelling context but by developers, and that’s when you get into the territory of using the lore as a shield for things the development team just doesn’t want to do for whatever reason. I’ve talked about one side of this before, even. There are a lot of problems with how people tend to use lore when it comes to MMOs.
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