Mythic Employees Forced onto Waaaaaaaghbulance

[Sjofn]

Have you read The Lord of the Rings? There's a reason they left the Tom Bombadil section out of the films - it was as tedious as fuck. Plus, the Silmarilion is pretty much what you describe but with the local Elven Telephone Directory interspersed.

Tolkein wrote great stories and created a great universe but he wrote them really, really, REALLY badly. Lack of depth wasn't his problem, it was simple writing ability.

Lot of it is probably effect of 'different writing for different times' -- nowadays anything longer than 3 lines per paragraph is tl;dr. Parts of Tolkien's writing are 'tedious' by our standards and expectations, but compare that to say, Les Miserables with its constant dozen levels of distractions that take 50+ pages to wrap up each, and Tolkien is suddenly stellar example of brevity and focus. Attention span of the readers can change over 50-100 years to a surprising degree.

Shut up, Les Miserables was awesome.

I actually get a little frustrated with my lack of attention span these days. I can't read giant ass books like that like I used to. :(

[Rake]

I would like to add that I couldn't put the Lord of the Rings down when I first read it. It even felt rushed at the end and Tom Bombadil not being in the movie saddened me, still you have to make cuts someplace.

But seeing as this is a thread about Mythic's employees I won't say a thing.

[Lantyssa]

We had a thread go from Richard Garriot to the practicality of mecha in the real world. I don't blame WAR. 

I don't think going from talking about a person who lives in a crazy fantasy realm to discussing fantasy physics is all that much of a derail.

I actually get a little frustrated with my lack of attention span these days. I can't read giant ass books like that like I used to. :(

Me, too.  A large part of that is I'm not willing to 'waste' six straight hours reading since I don't stop once I pick up a book.  Instead I play fantasy games...

[Tarami]

That's cause they are licensed through Tolkien Enterprises. GW has licenses from both New Line and Tolkien Enterprises for their Lord of the Rings miniatures game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_Enterprises

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?aId=3800002

This was the quote I was referring to:

If you'll notice, this is how the license always shakes out. GW has Hobbit and Trilogy for the minis game, Decipher had the same for its pen and paper... the only folks I recall having all three were Iron Crown Enterprises way back in the day.

GW has licenced the lot of them at this point.

All three being Silmarillion, LotR and the Hobbit. The two latter and New Line's adaptation are easy to get and get licensed all the time. Silmarillion hasn't been licensed, ever. In fact, not even by Iron Crown Enterprises.

Or, as this employee at Decipher says, a first step to getting to license Silmarillion is to kill Christopher Tolkien.

[Delmania]

Right, Christopher refuses to license out either the Silmarillion or the Lost Tales. 

[Pezzle]

Massive tangent I guess but Christopher is right.  There is nothing wrong with leaving things to the individual.  This material is still a part of the public awareness in printed form.  Books are not dead.  Having a fit because you are unable to profit from digital media recreation or interpretation?  No sympathy.  Yeah, we may not get to digitally mash about in the first age, but that is the playground of our imaginations anyhow.

[Azazel]

meh. trippy already did it.

[MahrinSkel]

Except Christopher Tolkien is wrong.  Wrong because the LOTR and associated material is really only partially the product of his father's creativity.  The process the linked post describes, of how you do not really see the painting, but a mental model of it, is not, as Christopher Tolkien and most art scholars believe, a parasitic process that devalues the work, it is a creative process that enhances it.  Ideas have life only inside the minds of those that care for them, words on a page are simply ink and paper, dead and meaningless without a reader to give them vitality.

For most people, LOTR is the movies, maybe the books, perhaps the games.  The Silmarillion and the Lost Tales might as well not exist, because they have not been a part of the Tolkien universe they have observed.  And that means that the value to them of J.R.R. Tolkien's vision is much less than it might otherwise have been.  It is *not* "part of the public awareness", it is part of the awareness of a handful of people who have read that material (and who jealously protect it from those uncouth masses too coarse to do the same).

Eventually one of two things will happen: Christopher Tolkien will die, and through some chain of circumstance the rights will end up in the hands of someone less protective of them.  Or the process that was well underway before the release of the movies Christopher Tolkien would have stopped will play out to its inevitable conclusion, and Tolkien's work will become just another piece of forgotten ephemera, supplanted in the "public awareness" by the derivatives it inspired.

--Dave

[Ubvman]

Have you read The Lord of the Rings? There's a reason they left the Tom Bombadil section out of the films - it was as tedious as fuck. Plus, the Silmarilion is pretty much what you describe but with the local Elven Telephone Directory interspersed.

Tolkein wrote great stories and created a great universe but he wrote them really, really, REALLY badly. Lack of depth wasn't his problem, it was simple writing ability.

Lot of it is probably effect of 'different writing for different times' -- nowadays anything longer than 3 lines per paragraph is tl;dr. Parts of Tolkien's writing are 'tedious' by our standards and expectations, but compare that to say, Les Miserables with its constant dozen levels of distractions that take 50+ pages to wrap up each, and Tolkien is suddenly stellar example of brevity and focus. Attention span of the readers can change over 50-100 years to a surprising degree.

I suspect "different times" and the style of writing has a lot to do with how the work is being published and distributed. The initial publication of  Les Miserable was in three volumes - the last volume printed several months after the first two. Never meant to be digested in one sitting, thats why you had huge asides into the Battle of Waterloo for instance. Almost all of Charles Dickens novels were printed in serial format in monthly magazines; thats why his novels are riddled with mini-cliffhangers throughout - got to keep the readers coming back next month.

I suspect, in the next few decades "books" as electronic media will be the next big thing and they will get incredibly shorter and truncated to suit the format its published in. [SMS Novels for instance. Also, I'm quite certain - there will be novels written exclusively for Kindle (I believe Apple is working on a 7 in. screen I-Touch type reader). Short sentences and paragraphs for easy reading on small screens!

On the other hand, I don't think reader attention span has taken that much of a dive. Not in the face of 10 year old kids devouring 870 page Harry Potter novels. JK Rowlings can be just as tedious concerning Hogwarts and all that magic stuff (no, I couldn't plow my way through her books - I gave up after the first 2.)

[tmp]

Except Christopher Tolkien is wrong.  Wrong because the LOTR and associated material is really only partially the product of his father's creativity.  The process the linked post describes, of how you do not really see the painting, but a mental model of it, is not, as Christopher Tolkien and most art scholars believe, a parasitic process that devalues the work, it is a creative process that enhances it.

But the linked article seems to try and make a point that Christopher Tolkien sees it as creative process indeed. And by refusing to license the other books he's trying to preserve that creativity in the readers of his farther's works. Rather than allow the situation where people simply take someone else's "mental model" from the movie etc, instead of forming their own from the original source.

[Modern Angel]

How the Hell did MERP include all sorts of First Age and Second Age stuff then? There was a book of nothing but the Maiar and Vanir and they were never mentioned by name in the trilogy. Hell, half the story of Turin is in one of the supplements.

[Rake]

No matter how much of Tolkein's works remain unlicensed, it's already had a huge influence on many of the games we play now and in lots of other things.

Creative people are influenced by what they've experienced, and it seems no matter whether the real licensed versions of his works exist, or not. We are all immersed in his world just by having played any of the fantasy MUDs, MMOs etc.

I wonder if there is a trend for younger people to shy away from books that are slightly larger than the take out food menus these days, but I was pleased when one of my children recently asked for the LotR set for a gift. She still wanted a Mac computer too, but life is all about mistakes.

[raydeen]

She still wanted a Mac computer too, but life is all about mistakes.

Make it so that it only boots into single user mode. When she learns to run with that, then she can have the GUI. Kidding of course. If nothing else, she won't be beset with all the foulware that comes with Facebook and Myspace and all that other stupid teenage shit.

[Tarami]

How the Hell did MERP include all sorts of First Age and Second Age stuff then? There was a book of nothing but the Maiar and Vanir and they were never mentioned by name in the trilogy. Hell, half the story of Turin is in one of the supplements.

There was quite an affair regarding what was and what was not considered part of the appendices back in the days; it may very well have been when I.C.E. dug a little too greedily into them. In short, they may have have breached their license but it wasn't revealed until later. Just a theory.

Or, as this suggests, most of it was made-up make-believe (worst kind!);

Iron Crown Enterprises and the Middle-Earth Role-Playing System have moved a long distance beyond Tolkien in their efforts to create a playable universe. So, too, with Tolkien’s languages. Most of the words or names you will find in MERP have been invented, more or less felicitously. As a rule, it is not safe to assume that a word or name in MERP is attested in Tolkien. Often, particularly in the first edition, it is not even safe to assume that the word or name is composed of attested roots or is in accordance with known phonological and grammatical rules of the languages.

For the second edition, MERP editor Chris Seeman made a concerted effort to improve linguistic aspects of the books. Those who have worked on improving words, phrases, and lettering have included (in alphabetical order) David Salo, Arden Smith, and Patrick Wynne. The Snow-Elvish dialect Lossidilrin (The Northern Waste) and the Silvan tongue are inventions of David Salo. (dos)

Link to source

[Modern Angel]

Oh they went quite a bit further than just mucking around with the appendices. I still have a fair number of MERP supplements. They've got the entire Morgoth Silmaril thing there... I could go on and on about stuff directly from the Silmarillion but citing examples would be insane because there's just so many. That's why I always thought they had the Chris Tolkien stamp of approval. It's fucking wild that they didn't because they sure as Hell acted like they did.

[Numtini]

Just my guess, but at the time 1) nobody took gaming seriously and 2) nobody took Tolkien seriously.

[Modern Angel]

Just my guess, but at the time 1) nobody took gaming seriously and 2) nobody took Tolkien seriously.

1992?

[Numtini]

Just my guess, but at the time 1) nobody took gaming seriously and 2) nobody took Tolkien seriously.

1992?

Wow! I had to look it up, had no idea the license lasted that long. I remember it from the mid-80s and it faded off the radar pretty quickly as far as I could see. I figured it had a couple of year run like the Bond game had--had no idea it stuck around until 1999?! I still wonder how much of the off the reservation stuff came from the 80s when LOTRO and gaming were something freakishly odd.

[Rake]

It's no wonder no one was looking forward to Tolkein's licensed stuff in the 80's with games like these being released on the popular machines of that time

This one wasn't so bad

This was BAD

The better use of his works were the ones not licensed from the Tolkein estate at the time like this

I was pretty sure that no one would ever do the books justice and when the Peter Jackson Movies were announced I was pretty much expecting the worst, after having seen a lot of the stuff that had gone before. Fortunately the films were quite watchable and as long as you aren't a complete LotR fanboi, the changes were acceptable for "arts" sake.

Even Turbine's licensed MMO is good, not my cup of tea, but not terrible at least. Was surprised they got this license at the time they did, must be some very persuasive guys.

Tolkein's license doesn't equal total crap anymore. That has to be a good thing.

[Ratman_tf]

I was pretty sure that no one would ever do the books justice and when the Peter Jackson Movies were announced I was pretty much expecting the worst, after having seen a lot of the stuff that had gone before. Fortunately the films were quite watchable and as long as you aren't a complete LotR fanboi, the changes were acceptable for "arts" sake.

So "art" is what they call shieldboarding elf dudezors now? 

[Kageru]

I tend to agree with MahrinSkel, material being "protected" to the extent that it sits in a cryogenic vault is not doing it a service. Obviously you want to keep the material out of the hands of short sighted profiteering but if someone has a new way to tell the story (that probably suits their time better) then the whole becomes richer and the original is refreshed. It's not like the original is lost. Keeping the Silmarrilien unavailable has simply made it even less relevant than it was originally.

The medium I tend to follow (anime) still impresses me that they're willing to reboot, retell or refocus while keeping the world. Sure, 90% is crap (sturgeon's law), but the experimentation keeps the world alive and allows for the occasional gem. Heck, one series had three versions with the same characters and world but history was reset, focus changed and each character had a different role.

[Modern Angel]

I don't think Tolkien was freakishly odd from the early 70s on. The hippies latched onto it in a weird way and it became kind of a cultural zeitgeist for awhile. Led Zeppelin, the animation, the songs, etc, etc.

As for gaming and LOTR, don't forget that the Tolkien estate sued the fuck out of TSR though the details are hazy to me. Given that lawsuit, I'm trying to wrap my head around a small company in Virginia making high profile gaming stuff (MERP was one of the big ones back in The Day) absolutely cribbed verbatim from a license they didn't have access to.

[sidereal]

This thread: from WAR to cellar door.

EDIT: because this was better.

# of people in this thread who get a cellar door reference?  Hmm. . it's pretty geeky.  I say 5.

[DraconianOne]

# of people in this thread who get a cellar door reference?  Hmm. . it's pretty geeky.  I say 5.

More beautiful than, say, Sky.

[Hindenburg]

# of people in this thread who get a cellar door reference?  Hmm. . it's pretty geeky.  I say 5.

I'd say everyone in it.
I hate that reference sooo much.