I am rereading old topics tonight for ideas.
Anyway, I bet this has been a long post. And I bet you are wondering what the hell conjured this up out of me. It's actually this...
For a long time people have been thinking. Video games are becoming more than just games. We need a new word to describe this nascent phenomenon that will soon begin consuming all of the arts and if we are not careful, reality as we know it.
I've always thought we should just ditch the goggles concept of 90s "virtual reality" and call it all VR. Because that's what it is. Even Tetris is a reality, goggles or no goggles, or piped directly into your brainpan. Its a reality. But it occurred to me this afternoon that we have a better word, if only for its brevity, in "irreality"...
And an abbreviation does not a word make. So I vote, as the art of video games matures, and as we begin to see all forms of storytelling media being developed with the same tools used to develop video games, because make no bones about it, it will just be a thousand times more economical to do so, and there will be a thousands times more people who will therefore be able to afford to do so...
We slowly begin to refer to this stuff as "irreality". The word itself is already strictly limited to the subject of fantasy, fantasy fiction almost exclusively. So there is no ambiguity in terms of terms like hallucination or surreality to be had
These are things I've grappled with for a while. I think I have an answer now, and its a lot more pedestrian I think, but good. It comes out of an essay I wrote for a Patreon account/whatever for myself and this work, that is now linked to on the Support page of this website.
Basically my concept now, and I think this is final, for the "graphic novel" equivalent of video games is "action adventure". Not action-adventure game, just plain action adventure. Like video->action game->adventure.
I think this is a new medium that permanently take the game out of games. If a game has game-like elements then it's not a pure action-adventure (it's an action-adventure game)
This works because anything that embeds you in a story is an Adventure by definition. And because its real-time and fully 3D (these are the base requirements for this medium) it will always entail Action.
If you want to shorten it, it just becomes Adventure. We'll know what people mean because no one in their right mind goes on adventures anymore!
Also, as for my stance on how to enmesh Sword of Moonlight as deep into literature as possible. My feelings are that the base world of King's Field must be literary. So it must be generated from literature. I think there are two main strains of modern literature and modern culture that are undeniable, the obvious winners.
I think that's religion pretty much, but especially the Abrahamic kinds. Full disclosure, I'm not religious, but I know when to admit defeat. And I think vampires. There has to be vampires. In fact I saw Shadow of the Vampire for the first time last night, and I watched Nosferatu again afterwards on Netflix to see if it was really anything like SOTV, because that's not how I remembered it at all...
And of course, if you have vampires you necessarily have the religions, because their weaknesses are crosses and stuff, and there is just no other way to explain that kind of thing. But the reason I focus down on these is not because I am a huge fan, but because I think the King's Field universe must be virtual, so my concept of it is is nothing in it is real. It's like if you took a library and put in in a blender and fed that smoothie to a super computer and asked it to turn it into the coolest thing it can!
That's pretty much it for me. My working concept, and I think final concept, is the super computer crunches all of the literature and decides to create the King's Field verse, which is like our world, since our world/literature is the input, but it isn't. All of the dragons and really everything in the universe is really just the dragon in revelations who falls down to earth, and actually is the earth. And the dragon is kicked down by the other dragons in heaven, which is something you can never see since its outside the creation. The dragons are angels, and there is really no distinction, the words are interchangeable. Their true forms are dragons. If they appear as men/women I believe they should not have wings, they don't need them, and that looks silly.
The red dragon that is all of creation / Sylval is kicked out of heaven by archangel Michael whose weapons are the Moonlight and Dark Slayer. Both of those weapons are pulled into creation by the dragon. And when the universe ends, everything happens in reverse, the dragons all coalesce back into Sylval, and try again to enter heaven, only to be kicked out again, so that a feedback loop is formed and every repeat of the cycle feeds back into the next.
After so many cycles the super computer has pretty much lost track of that the Moonlight and Dark Slayer were originally the Holy Spear and Grail from legends of Christianity that it read about in a lot of the literature that it used to initialize the universe. And the "true cross" is when the Moonlight and Dark Slayer are combined...
And this explains why crosses freakout vampires. Because after the initial formation of the universe everything eventually settles down, but the vampires still remain from the old world (they have ground up shards of the Dark Slayer that runs through their bloodstream, and that's what makes them immortal/magical like the old world)
My other rationale is I want to create a universe that is as compatible as possible with Hideyuki Kikuchi's novels, since I think they are perfect fits for King's Field. They have Fire, Earth, Wind, and Water when it comes to magic like King's Field. And I think his stuff is about a century ahead of its time, and so perfectly fit for the 21st century. He's basically obsessed with vampires since he was a kid, but does write other things.
PS: Vampires are not supposed to have shadows! But since that's really hard to do on a movie set most vampires in film have shadows. But games / digital media shouldn't have that problem at all.