Angels in February games
stefoid:
I didnt get the Angels thing at all -- just didnt occur to me, I looked at wings and thought "wtf? Obviously every 2nd entry is going to be about whisper and murder - secretive conspiracies, etc..." and yet angles dominated. I wonder why?
edited to change the title for the split - RE
Baxil:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 09, 2011, 05:25:32 PM
The games are diverse in all sorts of ways, yet there is some kind of shadowy, aerial, ethereal, gore-spattered unity to them which no single title fully encompasses ...
What I find most interesting is the unanimity with which people agreed that "wings" meant "angels", for good or for ill. Even those who didn't leap to actual angels in their game design still riffed off of it. Both of us who flew "wings" out to "blackbirds" (Michael's guardian-angelic Crows and my destructive-demonic Deathbird*) basically reduced it to animal angels. And even Paolo's Wings of Blood, with its vengeance-driven reptiles, seems to me to have that quale. The closest thing to dissent was the two entries with aerial soldiers/police, and even that isn't a huge stretch from divine authority and judgment.
Ron, I think you hit a deep vein of shared culture there, and "murder" was the icing on the cake.
Which leads me to an observation: Back in the November 2005 Ronnies, you used "dragon" as a term (with a similarly loaded supplemental violence term, "gun"). There was a similar lead for "dragon" use in those results (13/24) as for "wing" here (9/14), though not quite as lopsided. And you remarked back in that thread on the thematic similarities of the games. There's something to those big winged things that commands the tone. (Hell, we've known that since Gygax/Arneson ...)
... And I want to argue that dragons and angels, and other similarly large shared myths, are somehow shorthand in our gamer brains for that thing that matters. It seems obvious to me** in a deeply intuitive way, but looking back, it's a big jump, and I don't know how to bridge the two in words.
--
* Technically, I took "wings" mechanically out to "flying dice", but my approach into that (which left its thematic footprints all over the game) was the Deathbird itself.
** A self-identified dragon, but that's only relevant in that I've spent a lot of time thinking about just what the hell "dragon" means.
Nathan P.:
Both of my ideas for a Wings + X entry were totally about angels, as well. Wierd, huh.
stefoid:
Now that you mention it, dragons could have been used for wings+murder as well, but they didnt get a look in.
May I ask how many of the Angel game authors are Christian or come from a Christian upbringing?
Quote from: baxil on February 09, 2011, 07:33:42 PM
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 09, 2011, 05:25:32 PM
The games are diverse in all sorts of ways, yet there is some kind of shadowy, aerial, ethereal, gore-spattered unity to them which no single title fully encompasses ...
What I find most interesting is the unanimity with which people agreed that "wings" meant "angels", for good or for ill. Even those who didn't leap to actual angels in their game design still riffed off of it. Both of us who flew "wings" out to "blackbirds" (Michael's guardian-angelic Crows and my destructive-demonic Deathbird*) basically reduced it to animal angels. And even Paolo's Wings of Blood, with its vengeance-driven reptiles, seems to me to have that quale. The closest thing to dissent was the two entries with aerial soldiers/police, and even that isn't a huge stretch from divine authority and judgment.
Ron, I think you hit a deep vein of shared culture there, and "murder" was the icing on the cake.
Which leads me to an observation: Back in the November 2005 Ronnies, you used "dragon" as a term (with a similarly loaded supplemental violence term, "gun"). There was a similar lead for "dragon" use in those results (13/24) as for "wing" here (9/14), though not quite as lopsided. And you remarked back in that thread on the thematic similarities of the games. There's something to those big winged things that commands the tone. (Hell, we've known that since Gygax/Arneson ...)
... And I want to argue that dragons and angels, and other similarly large shared myths, are somehow shorthand in our gamer brains for that thing that matters. It seems obvious to me** in a deeply intuitive way, but looking back, it's a big jump, and I don't know how to bridge the two in words.
--
* Technically, I took "wings" mechanically out to "flying dice", but my approach into that (which left its thematic footprints all over the game) was the Deathbird itself.
** A self-identified dragon, but that's only relevant in that I've spent a lot of time thinking about just what the hell "dragon" means.
Kensan_Oni:
I admit, that after I had finished and submitted, and was reflecting on the entries, I was going "I should have chosen Fairies." At one point in the design space, I was really tempted to switch the Owl motif with a Moth motif, but I figured that would have looked weird against the Raven faction. The next day, as I was about ready to sleep, I was going "Butterflies!".
I might change Wing Types from birds to insects when I go and do a re-write.
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