Hey there. So, this isn't meant to be official, but I figured I'd put it up due to how often I see stuff like this used. With this thread, I'm talking about people using IC references to 20/21st century movies/books/comics/games/etc. It's meant as a way to describe why certain aspects of this make no real sense. First off, for humans. Starbound is about 400 years in the future, as it is. At best, current movies, comics, and other forms of media, would be extremely rare and obscure to find. They would be the equivalent of some form of artifact, even. Look at how things are today. Look back to one of the first radios ever made. First phone. Hell, first edition comics, even. How easy is it to find such things that have only even really been around for, at most, 150 years, give or take? We're talking about 400 years, folks. Using those references break a lot of immersion. Surely people who are around the age of 16-20, especially, wouldn't even really know much at all about what those movies were back then. There would be far more media that has long since replaced such things over the past 400 years. This is just humans, though. Other races that reference 400 year old human media makes even less sense. Given how rare such things are even for humans, it would be nearly impossible to acquire, or even know the reference to such a thing. Like with humans, this sort of knowledge is even more immersion breaking, as there is just no way it could be possible. So, all-in-all, this is a post to hopefully try to get people to start making up original references. I mean, if you make a reference to a line now and then, that's cool. But when people are always referencing back to media that is even older than 400 years ago, it reduces the sense even further. Thanks for reading.
Ahem... So, Starbound is 400 years in the future, and thus it doesn't make sense to reference things from the past? Not to be combative, but that makes no sense whatsoever. Look at modern society- we still read things like Shakespeare (who lived roughly 400 years ago). Hell, we go as far back as Plato and Aristotle, and they were around over two thousand years ago. And now, in this day and age, we have vastly improved our capacity to save and store information (this includes books and movies) for the enlightenment and enjoyment of future generations. I get what you're saying about how other races shouldn't know about old human media, but it's senseless to think that the entire human race would have forgotten all the cultural icons from 400 years past. Just imagine that our humans think of things like Godzilla and Diehard like we think about the works of ancient poets.
As far as I know that's purely OOC and is more of an in-joke among the players than the characters actually referencing a human video game.
I do get that. However, the information we have from that long ago was also VERY influential as a whole. While we do have better capabilities to save such things, it still doesn't mean that they will be. As I mentioned, it wouldn't be impossible, but it would be extremely rare to find such pieces of media. Things like Shakespeare, Plato, and Aristotle are extraordinarily iconic, and that's why they are remembered so well. While there are iconic movies, they are still not nearly as iconic as such forms of literature. Especially items in media that aren't as well known or already buried under more current media.
What's important to point out is that Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato etc. were the exceptions to the rule, not the standard. How many Greek comedies and philosophical works do you think /weren't/ written down? I mean, look at Homer. We don't even know who the legit author of all those works is, or if there was even one author, despite the Odyssey and Iliad both being so famous. Remember that Earth was also destroyed. How much information was lost? All those libraries and information centers would be gone. Hell, even the Internet, if it was still primarily based on Earth, wouldn't have escaped unscathed, because all those connections and wires between the servers would have been lost with the planet. And that's on top of the 400 years!
But was the Earth destroyed 400 years in the past, or just recently? It's actually something that's been nagging at me for a while.
Earth was destroyed 7 years prior to the current time. For the sake of this, it doesn't matter too much, as people could have grown up on Earth. But the other points still stand, overall.
