Oni2 talk:Grand Unified Theory

Naming

GUT to emphasize the challenge of this undertaking.

Alternative names might be TNZ+ or 0+.

Ultimately, the naming is totally unimportant right now. It is just to have something for chats. --'Dox

I welcome the initiative, but I feel like I am in the middle of an active discussion over at TNZ, and I also feel like I need to translate the French version back to English, to refamiliarize myself with the 2017 iteration, and maybe go through ASFO2 chronicles one more time. So it is a bit early for me to start contributing regularly and "well-informed"ly to this page. --geyser (talk) 20:28, 21 May 2020 (CEST)

Working title proposals

You can vote here for other names :P --'Dox

It's canon/fanon we're talking about. So, if everything goes well, it will just be "Oni". Fingers crossed. --geyser (talk) 20:28, 21 May 2020 (CEST)

If I had to suggest a catchy working title, I'd probably go with "Iron/iOn Club" or "Club of Iron/iOn" (in reference to the "Oni ni kanabô" saying). Or "Rashômon" (the Oni-Guarded Gate). --geyser (talk) 20:28, 21 May 2020 (CEST)

Calling the new Oni (extended past, present and future) just Oni actually sounds more appealing than complicated stuff like Iron/iOn Club. But "Oni" is better suited for the final thing. --paradox-01 (talk) 12:55, 22 May 2020 (CEST)

The "Club" thing has a double meaning (blunt weapon and group of people sharing a common interest).

If this doesn't work, then previously I described my approach to storytelling as "annealing": "raising the temperature" through brainstorming and debate, and then cooling down into a consolidated/hardened state - with improved strength and purity, but with all the new ingredients mixed in. We are basically using "iron" (iOɴ) to create an elaborate "alloy".

At one point I described the Daodan as a "mender and catalyst" (fixing what's broken, and empowering new change). Mender And Catalyst abbreviates to MAC, so I expect it would be popular with our Mac friends. ^_^

More simply, the search for a consensus can be described with the words "eye to eye". To "see eye to eye" with someone is to agree on interpretations or values. We are not in that state of agreement yet, but we are looking for it, so "Eye to Eye" looks like an appropriate description of our goal - whether we'll actually reach it or "die trying".

"I see you." (c) Avatar

P.S. I'd move it to the Oni2 namespace, something like Oni2:Eye_to_Eye --geyser (talk) 13:48, 22 May 2020 (CEST)

You guys don't let me move pages around without leaving redirects. So don't wait for me to do that :P --paradox-01 (talk) 10:53, 23 May 2020 (CEST)

1) Redirects can always be cleaned up, and are not an issue at all for "young" pages that are not in public view yet. 2) If you like one of the suggested names, tell me which. --geyser (talk) 11:20, 23 May 2020 (CEST)

Story graph

Discussion is fine ... but at some point it would be nice to have a graphical representation of entities and their connections, not unlike that Wasteland Flowers graph but with color coding to easily identify ideas of different authors. So that no "wall of text" emerge, potentially slowing things down. SoW, TNZ, CB all have growing pages and GUT will be probably no different.

For a story that includes years of fictional life of many characters I think text bubbles might make it easier to remember or look up certain parts. "Why was this necessary? What ambiguity (alternative routes) does this give us?" The individual parts should be of "plug-in" character.

The downside is the editing of such graph/map, not to mention collaboration. In the end this might remain wishful thinking? paradox-01 (talk) 22:12, 9 June 2020 (CEST)

Walls of text is what talk pages are for, I'd say. The amount of data seemingly grows there (because it's a series of Q&A iterations), but after the talk is "done" it can be annealed/condensed into a new version of the page itself, or an even more digest/compact document that includes only the most important/vital points. I'll illustrate with another iteration of TNZ and then we'll see about GUT/i2i --geyser (talk) 23:47, 9 June 2020 (CEST)

From what I recall, Guido and I wanted to implement graphs on this wiki, 10+ years ago, to collaborate on story nodes. It didn't go past the wishful thinking stage -- either because the wikified graphs sucked, or because graphs weren't too convenient to collaborate on in general. Guido's graph was his own work, although he incorporated some collective ideas of course. Maybe these days there are more elaborate collaborative tools, à la Google Docs but with flowcharts -- probably not wiki powered, though. If we were an actual studio, we'd have a big wall/whiteboard for that ^_^ --geyser (talk) 23:47, 9 June 2020 (CEST)

In the wiki context, I thought interlinked "nodes" could work fine (like Oni2:Node0, Oni2:Node1, etc), but only if we have some special wiki plugin that analyzes links in a given namespace and creates a chart from them, like FlowChartWiki -- it is not very appealing visually, so probably not a good idea. --geyser (talk) 23:47, 9 June 2020 (CEST)

I think if we're trying to agree on a common denominator, then such a graph shouldn't really aim to include lots of conflicting events from different theories. There will be some variants at some point, but mostly we should see a "core graph" that everyone agrees on, and ideally the consensus will grow, with differences only in minor details. --geyser (talk) 23:47, 9 June 2020 (CEST)