Convienience

[alberte]

I am tired of people using things in there stories Visual Novels and they have not studied the context of the era and time is.. I find there are alot of people who lack research,,,
For example: people write about kings and queens.. yet somehow the person in that period is always royalty..

?

I find people like to add this too there story and don't actually contemplate what is going on in that period, for example kings and queens had the elizabethian era, simply being royalty and not seeing the architecture, people, hyigene, and other things physically relating to that, makes it seem like a weak feeble piece of literature, and adding some dateable attainables.. just gets too me.

What's everyones thought on this?

[Aleema]

Stories are meant to be fantasy. Is fantasy cheating? Yes. Is it entertaining? Yes.

This goes on for most all stories, which is why it's a rule of thumb for beginners to "write what you know." But sometimes you write what you don't know because it's exotic and more interesting. The audience that will enjoy it, however, will outweigh the audience it will offend. Like, I can't watch CSI shows and the like, because they're all too unrealistic and just for entertainment purposes (not to mention the purely fictional things they think technology can do), but they're very popular. Many nurses/doctors I know can't watch something like Scrubs (comedy about doctors), because they think it's making fun of their field, etc, but I love the show. And someone who takes pride in knowing their history will pull their hair out about historical fiction. Sure. Understandable.

Perhaps you shouldn't look at it so much as betraying the subject matter, and more as generating interest in a field that people will want to learn more about. Like for me, I loved the movie Glory (1989). Most of it is fictional, but the basics are true. I learned more about it, and I didn't lose respect for the original media at all. It was still a moving story.

And like I've said before in another thread: Never let history get in the way of a good story!
... But research is always nice.

And I don't think monarchies are limited to a specific time period, or even reality. It's just a form of government.

[LVUER]

I watched the CSI behind scene and creators interview. Even the creators/staffs know that their CSI is unrealistic. But they also realized that CSI is a show/entertainment. There's no way they could stick to reality like where DNA test that takes several days and long/complex procedures while the show must end in 1 hour.

[Meems]

I'm willing to accept some breaks from reality for the sake of entertainment, but it's nice if the writers seem to have at least glanced at Wikipedia.

In other words, even if you're going to ignore it for convenience's sake, you should still do the research. Now, watch me as I disregard my own advice.

[dstarsboy]

I agree with, I guess, everyone else here. I don't mind these "games" being well researched or not.

I'm here to be entertained not to educated.

[fortaat]

I'm not really bother by historical accuracy, but rather by stereotypical representation of a time period. This is often the result of poor research, but isn't identical.

For example, if the story is set in an Japanese American high school, and has a prom, a football team, a class argument on the Bill of Rights, and a plethora of clinched characters (jock, nerds, stupid cheerleaders) - it could make me feel it's based on lowly TV shows, and not on researched made by actually being there and seeing the diversity of reality. The writer based his story on shallow TV portrayals, instead of research.

That doesn't mean a lot of researched is essential. Tell the former story to an audience who doesn't know what's it really like, and they could deem it sufficiently reliable. Alberte's complaint falls to this category. If the writer wouldn't have picked the most common setting (member of royal family) and choose something more original (a courier), it would have been much harder to see the flaws in the settings.
Do couriers know the content of their message? Is a message delivered by more than one courier? How did they live? Who financed them?
Since we don't know the facts, the mistakes don't bother us.

Eventually, it comes down to a combination of research and originality. Pick an original setting, and you won't need too much research to back it up.

[Der Tor]

People always say that one should write about things one knows about or has experienced oneself...
I have bookstore for used books and so naturally i have a lot of old books - my oldest where from the 17th and 18th century. And i noticed that no matter what kind of book it is even if it's fiction or some early examples of fantasy and science fiction - people back then only wrote things based on their own experiences or at the very least, inspired by their own experiences and then based on extensive research that they did themselves.

But nowadays 99.99% of authors don't do it this way anymore. Even authors of non-fiction often just look up Wiikipedia or some other relatively unreliable sources and don't even dream of looking at any of the stuff themselves, collect their own experiences or draw their own conclusion based on a first hand investigation...

Nowadays people don't seem to have time for that... but what they fail to realize is that precisely because there is such an over saturation of films, books and games by people whose research consists of looking up Wikipedia... well in such a situation people will value writings from people who really did their own research or experienced it all themselves.

You might think that you have experienced nothing of interest. but that's not true. It might not seem interesting to you, but maybe to your readers. Even things that appear very menial to people in your country might be interesting to people in other countries... like this friend of mine who got published in Japan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP3wUr4BEmY He is just a pretty ordinary retired guy in Texas. But those seemingly ordinary things he talks about are quite extraordinary and interesting for people in Japan (and actually i as a German find him pretty interesting too).