Talk:Guild of Linguists (restored)

Out-of-Cavern vs In-Cavern

I recently added the {{OOC}} template because I feel like much of this article is written in an Out-of-Cavern style, e.g. it contains mentions of "In-game" and 'real world' websites, however one thing made me hesitate: The Guild of Linguists (restored) does appear to actually exist within the universe of (online) Uru, or at least in some shards of online Uru, as there is an area (at least in the Gehn shard - I can't vouch for others) where 'Guild of Linguists' T-shirts are provided to players.

This fact makes me wonder if either:

• The article ought to have some In-Cavern and some Out-of-Cavern sections.
• There ought to be a separate article for the In-Cavern view of the 'Guild of Linguists'.

This seems like one of those areas where the lines are blurred.

I also considered what the implications would be if the Guild of Linguists has no presence in the official shard. Unfortunately that would only raise the issue of whether the Guild of Linguists should be considered Apocrypha rather than solving the OOC vs IC issue.

For now though, this isn't an issue that needs to be solved any time soon. Having a single Out-of-Cavern article seems sufficient for the time being

Pharap (talk) 06:43, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

The GoL shirt was added to MOULa on February 2017, and on Gehn, the Open Cave and Deep Island about a year before that (I'm the one who submitted the files in both cases).

The Guild wasn't one of the five picked by Cyan to be given a Pub, but that isn't necessary to qualify as an IC group, just existing in the Cavern without breaking canon is enough; e.g. see how the Great Tree group was formed and incorporated into Uru canon.

I'm not sure how the article could be complete without straddling the line a bit, because of the nature of linguistic discussions; some D'ni sources exist outside the games (as posts on the non-IC official forum, personal emails or even as easter eggs in textures). "Uru Live was closed" should probably be changed to "the Cavern was closed to the public", but I don't know if the brief mention of beta testing is worth adding an OOC tag.

Korovev (talk) 08:35, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree that it likely would be difficult to avoid 'straddling the line' as you say...

The awkward parts that I'm thinking of are:

• Mentions of Cyan, Inc.
• Mentions of "a sequel to Myst".
• Mentions of the Book of Ti'ana.
• Describing Uru as "Cyan's new game"
• Describing those who 'visit the Cavern' as "fans".
• Mentions of some 'real-world' websites, e.g. Second Life, though this may be unavoidable.

I can imagine that some of these could be reconciled as being part of an 'In-Cavern' viewpoint if, for example, it were taken to be the case that all games except Uru (and maybe Myst V?) are fictional representations of a real D'ni history while Uru (and maybe Myst V?) feature real events, but there's even an explicit "Members of the fan community were being invited to test Cyan's new game, Uru" in there, which seems to contradict the definition of In-Cavern as given by the Fictional universe article:

The IC point of view considers the Myst universe to be real, and all events that took place within it as actual history. This extends to play style in Myst Online: Uru Live, where IC players are expected to treat the game as a real place, and that all of the Ages they visit, the people they encounter, and the events that take place within it are also real.

When faced with things like that which would ordinarily be 'out of universe' for most video game wikis, it's hard to know where the line should be drawn, particularly when the existing guidelines appear to be rather scant.

Perhaps my issue here is more to do with 'What constitutes IC?' rather than this particular article? And perhaps the lack of clear guidelines is the root of that? If nothing else, I feel like some guidelines would help here. It's probably clear cut which is which for people who were there at the time and are used to the context, but for a relative newcomer like me it's not so clear cut.

That said, I think this article is certainly closer to the blurred line than the Great Tree article you linked to is. The Great Tree article mentions the disappearance of Phil Hnderson and DRC-related politics, clear In-Cavern events. The only potential Out-of-Cavern parts are the mentions of 'chat logs' and potentially (the?) 'Prologue' depending on whether that's supposed to refer to the Second Restoration of D'ni or the Uru public beta. (Both that article and the Brian Fioca article are currently linking to the Prologue disambiguation page rather than the article for the specific intended meaning.)

Also, now that I think about it, parts of the Guild of Linguists article seem like they're not so much a history of the Guild of Linguists as they are a general history of various fan groups' attempts at and contributions to uncovering the D'ni language. Granted, it could be argued that these are potentially either 'precursors', or work that the Guild of Linguists has built upon, but at the moment it still seems a little disjoint, or, as I say, a general history.

Though perhaps I am simply overthinking this?

Pharap (talk) 03:39, 3 January 2024 (UTC)