Manifesto

Sakr

The backstory is that I want to use Lusternia as an educational tool, by putting texts of various forms and styles as a way to educate the player base. This is the primary goal of the Library that I have set for Magnagora. For example, we are working on texts to teach mathematics of its various forms, simplified Lusternian history, Geomancer basic science, Poetry and prose writing, cooking, etc. The books are all in character, but can be applied out of character as well. Currently I'm working on a book about Advant Garde prose poetry for Magnagorans - and will move to writing about Madness and Surrealism.

But!!! The problem I am facing is that when I am going be comparing two texts to each other to show the prose and cons of each style, is that the styles are pre-dominantly non existent. If I want to write a book about Philosophy, it would be rather out of character, and I do not want to write a text expecting the reader to have read Plato. Instead, I want to write the text with an in-game reference already available so that the person can look at something like Plato but isn't Plato unless the admin can help create a set of philosophical books that can be used as a reference for more advanced streams of thought.

So the goals are:

1. I want to bring in different kinds of Manifestos into Lusternia. For example, Dada'ism, Advant Garde, Pau-Brasil Poetry, Surrealism, Modernism..
2. Teach mathematics, and reinforce it so that a person who can't afford to have a college education can be educated by the game he or she plays.
3. Teach the applied sciences with in-game application, so that again, you can use your skills outside in the real world.
4. Teach philosophical ideas.
5. Teach about geography. In game application would be a guide to exploring a new location, how to see if the natives are aggressive or not, how to create a map

Has anyone tried to use Lusternia as a teaching medium? Would there be anything inherently wrong about trying to do this?

Laxinova

I doubt anyone who plays Lusternia would not be educated to at least a decent degree. Text games are designed around those who are intellectual, getting past the journey shows if someone is intelligent enough or not to be interested in the game.

It is a decent idea, though I think most fps players are 1000x more stupid than someone who would play a heavily grammar, spelling and word based text role playing game such as IRE's.

Lavinya

Why not write some philosophical writings yourself? Then in future, perhaps people will reference the great Philosopher Sakr!

Also, a noble aim, but the purpose of Magnagora's library (or any IG library) isn't so much to educate people in real life things as it is to enrich our character's minds and give us culture and teach us about things within the game and fulfill our characters that have the urge to write. I try hard not to consider the people behind the characters when I play. You should do the same - if you want to teach, aim to teach the characters that are going to be using the library and not the puppet masters behind them.

That's just my two cents!

Lerad

By the way, it's "avant garde". You typo'd a d in there.

Also yes, writing critical scholarship in Lusternia runs up against the brick wall that there is no actual literature to critically analyze in the way real world academics do. People can't copy paste actual literature into the game because that would be plagiarism, and even if there are prose/poetry written as original works by players have the kind of literary value that academic scholars would believe worth the while to analyze, they are just too little in volume to make any actual critical writing on them work.

On the other hand, this makes it really possible to play the role of a philosopher or poet in the game. With the right wording and swapping of names, you can adapt entire philosophical traditions into the game as culturally developed lore. Of course, you'll need some obvious but non-immersion breaking disclaimers in there as well as approval from the admin if the adaptation is going to be just paraphrasing, and some things will probably be outright unacceptable no matter how much you change the names.

But there are philosophical traditions that obviously do not fit in Lusternia's world. There's really little point in questioning the existence of God when we have actual divine entities walking amongst us. Roleplaying an atheist philosopher is probably out of the question for most. Precisely because of the incompatibility, then, these works can be adapted into something that fits Lusternia if you know enough about what you're writing about to make changes while white-washing over the flaws and inconsistencies that come up subsequently. Who knows, maybe someone who read your Lusternia version will come across the RL version one day and have a epiphany.

Either way, not a lot of people will be willing to bring what they do for a living in RL into a game. Critical academia doesn't really fit into the descriptor of "relaxing and having fun". If you feel like it, though, go for it. It'll be fun to read, if nothing else, even if it does not turn out perfect.

Nocht

Sakr said:

The backstory is that I want to use Lusternia as an educational tool, by putting texts of various forms and styles as a way to educate the player base. This is the primary goal of the Library that I have set for Magnagora. For example, we are working on texts to teach mathematics of its various forms, simplified Lusternian history, Geomancer basic science, Poetry and prose writing, cooking, etc. The books are all in character, but can be applied out of character as well. Currently I'm working on a book about Advant Garde prose poetry for Magnagorans - and will move to writing about Madness and Surrealism.

But!!! The problem I am facing is that when I am going be comparing two texts to each other to show the prose and cons of each style, is that the styles are pre-dominantly non existent. If I want to write a book about Philosophy, it would be rather out of character, and I do not want to write a text expecting the reader to have read Plato. Instead, I want to write the text with an in-game reference already available so that the person can look at something like Plato but isn't Plato unless the admin can help create a set of philosophical books that can be used as a reference for more advanced streams of thought.

So the goals are:

1. I want to bring in different kinds of Manifestos into Lusternia. For example, Dada'ism, Advant Garde, Pau-Brasil Poetry, Surrealism, Modernism..
2. Teach mathematics, and reinforce it so that a person who can't afford to have a college education can be educated by the game he or she plays.
3. Teach the applied sciences with in-game application, so that again, you can use your skills outside in the real world.
4. Teach philosophical ideas.
5. Teach about geography. In game application would be a guide to exploring a new location, how to see if the natives are aggressive or not, how to create a map

Has anyone tried to use Lusternia as a teaching medium? Would there be anything inherently wrong about trying to do this?

You can introduce any artistic, literary, or philosophical styles you want in Lusternia! You just have to attribute them to someone/something Lusternian, and you may have to rename ones that explicitly reference something OOC.

My major in school is mathematics, so I love the idea of incorporating it! Again though, you have to give it application to Lusternia. Perhaps getting a little creative with some real world math/physics and then creating your own formulas for planar physics or other magical phenomena. (I actually think Hallifax may have done this in, at least, one book)

Don't feel like you have to wait for administrator approval to introduce new ideas into Lusternia, especially within the library system. If you want to rework a real world philosophy and present it as ancient Gaudiguchian teachings, go ahead! If you want to make up some formulas or theorems about cosmic vibrations, do it! If other players disagree, they can present competing philosophies or theories. Who knows? We may even end up incorporating one of your ideas into the actual history of Lusternia itself!

Lerad

Just beware plagiarism. At the very least, you'll want to paraphrase whatever you're adapting; but at least now there's the admin go-ahead for most of what you're aiming to do. Good luck, have fun!

Sakr

Lets see. I've so far presented a manifesto on block poetry, labeling it as Geometric Poetry. It is about writing poems with a ten by ten format. 10 syllables per line, ten lines down for a 10 by 10. My professor and I worked on the idea for the past 12 months, about how to write it. We both agreed that if you were to split the poem for example, you would have to be able to make sense no matter how you read it.

The problem I found with bringing in lets say Avant Garde works is with the use of bold words. Or the font size. So when it comes to bringing in the typographic revolution for instance, I was limited to repetition and combining words.

There was the other piece of poetry that focused on the typographic revolution with combining words, word placement apart from the block poetry format. For example from book 10632, page 18:

break--------ingthe  soul  eachcreation made

Test       the soul as each creation we make

breaksinsplit    'seconds'    and parts sold

we end the mirrorednoise in hallways

of (smoke)(azure)(mirrors)         Mechanical

children  made we made mechanical gears

sold flower shops        Flowering Industrial

forest with paper pamphlets of           Gods

in fast         drying dying brushes of water

The use of the ( ) is also seen in other poetry that I published, regarding that those are the facets of the poem you should be reading in. By combining words or splitting them up, you would speed up the reader or slow them down to emphasize on key words.

For the other text, as what I mentioned above from the Geometric revolution, I've tried emphasizing on the amount of poems you can put into one poem. Take this for example:

Tainted Tea for Aristocrats

Draconian    || A teapartyforAristocrats

Inclination    || With the smokey air coming past

Azure           || We cannot disguise ourselves with only masks

Wind            || MasksMasksMasksMasks, red blue white red black

Sky              || Sipping on tea

Tainting       || We cannot disguise ourselves with only masks

---------------++

World          || Tainted tendrils wrap on the edges of the face

becomes     || Tainted tendrils wrap on the edges of the mask

Beautiful     || Tainted tendrils wrap on the teacups as we sip

and sip sip sip sip sip sip sip sip

The understanding of this tea party

comes in the morning

comes in the evening

at last

For this, there is the one large overall poem. I've written a small guide in the Geometric revolution about reading this kind of poem, in which you have to focus on the entire thing as a painting instead of as a set of lines. You can split up the poem into 

11 different poems, which would all make sense. The left side are the singular words that can be read as a poem, or be placed as the emotive words to read the rest of the poem in. For example, draconian, and you would read the rest of the poetry in a draconian mindset. Azure, read it in an azure mindset. The fact that we have to use adverbs and verbs and adjectives to pinpoint a feeling is obnoxious and instead the reader should be given a noun to describe the different possibilities available in a poem. By adding more facets, the depth increases. That's in book 10638 if anyone is interested.

Now for philosophy, so far I've submitted an essay regarding Determinism (Book 10644), a comparison between the Soft and Hard Determinist over the game of Fates. Existentialism can be done, going to make Xentri write about that as he was more energetic than me about the topic. With the idea of reaching immortality, but we have an almost permanent immortality with the fates not cutting us off until we complete an unknown goal.

Created the Magnagoran School of Poetry, which would contain those different ideas and the Magnagoran School of Thought for our philosophy.

--

Also submitted a fun case study about the juvenile delinquency rates among serfs in Magnagora, related to them reading too much information at the library. If anyone wants to laugh a little.

Fun stuff right?

Eritheyl

Daraius

Artistic and cultural movements aren't really that meaningful outside of their social and historical context. That is to say, it's useless to tally up and teach the qualities of Dadaist artwork or Transcendentalist poetry if you're not exploring why those schools developed, what their practitioners were commenting on or reacting to in their society, and how they influenced other fields of art and thought. So none of it has any bearing on a fictional world where none of these schools developed organically.

That's part of the problem I had with the Aeromancers' philosophy angle. It was, to me, a real-world concept lifted in whole from its real-world context and very much shoehorned in to our little fantasy world.

BUT! Having said all that, anything that encourages contribution to Lusternia's art and culture scene is okay in my book. The Aeromancer philosophy thing wasn't my cup of tea, but some folks ran with it and created work in a Lusternian context. The motivation here is a little weird -- no one is going to get a college-level understanding of real-world concepts through a text game like Lusternia -- but if the end result is an enhanced interest in writing and theatre in-game, go for it.

Arkzrael

I once wrote a fifteen-ish page bit, at the request of Siam (mayhedieinafireforthatone), covering the flora of Glom from a botanist perspective. Being neither a botanist in real life nor Lusternian life, it was a challenge discovering and adapting the proper vocabulary to a world where volumes of prior studies in botanical subjects simply didn't exist. There are, in fact, things that can cross over to the game, certainly. However, the intent isn't to simply mirror real life into an intentionally different universe. Each city/commune already has its own basis for its own philosophy and arts that we can build off of, that's the beauty of it. Aristotle, Machiavelli, and DaVinci don't have a place within the universe of Lusternia because their adaptations to real life do not consider nor find themselves similar enough to even be applicable to the game.

Maellio

It is rather interesting [and terribly fun for my DM brain] to play around with all the sorts of fancy philosophies and sciences that could exist in the Basin, so actually incorporating and adding in is great and I approve.

Though you do have to tailor and invent, in lieu of copying in. For instance, I'm trying to write a book of particle physics and quantum mechanics but there's no possible way to describe things like they are in reality. Nor does the existing lore really support using the models we have. As such I'm basically doing it from scratch, albeit built on the Institute and general planar lore, and its rewarding [even if some Admin says its bogus in the end, but I hope they won't >.=,<]. But the key from the rambling is adapting contextually. Wholesale adaptations/imports don't quite work, sooo... less educational and more creative I say?

Ehem, my only regret is writing this at 230am and rambling. 

Eritheyl

Arkzrael said:

I once wrote a fifteen-ish page bit, at the request of Siam (mayhedieinafireforthatone), covering the flora of Glom from a botanist perspective. Being neither a botanist in real life nor Lusternian life, it was a challenge discovering and adapting the proper vocabulary to a world where volumes of prior studies in botanical subjects simply didn't exist. There are, in fact, things that can cross over to the game, certainly. However, the intent isn't to simply mirror real life into an intentionally different universe. Each city/commune already has its own basis for its own philosophy and arts that we can build off of, that's the beauty of it. Aristotle, Machiavelli, and DaVinci don't have a place within the universe of Lusternia because their adaptations to real life do not consider nor find themselves similar enough to even be applicable to the game.

Well said! Though there are a few things already in place that draw at least partially from RL sources (the Collectivist Manifesto, for Hallifax), I would be more interested in player-written philosophy if it's original and specific to things within the game, rather than pulled from some long-dead scholar and trimmed up with ribbons and fresh paint.

Moi

In honor of this thread, I'm making an in game play based on the Pirate Problem in game theory entitled "The 2n+1 Lucidian Pirates and the Bag of g Gold", featuring a variable number of perfectly logical lucidian pirates trying to divvy up a booty between them. All I need to do is teach people how to say "Yarr!" in a monotone.