May 3rd, 2023
Le Morte D’Arthur is a thought-provoking design, and several people have offered some of the thoughts I have provoked with my design. Here are some of the most carefully written critiques, exactly as I received them.
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Hello Chris,
I finished your Le Morte D'Arthur for the first time. The ending Arthur got in this reading was the one where he died in single combat with Mordred and received a positive assessment from Merlin in the video. I feel that in my guidance of Arthur I made many mistakes but I tried to learn from them and from Merlin's lessons.
I liked the story and enjoyed the experience of making my way through it. I feel it was a worthwhile use of my time. Thank you for all your efforts in making it!
You say on the Advice page that you spent three years thinking about how to express the ideas in it. I'll certainly have to spend more time thinking about it to arrive at better understanding, but I wanted to give you some feedback already now that the work is still fresh on my mind.
My current reading of the storyworld is that we should strive to leave a meaningful impression on the world during our lives. Everything we do affects how others will think of us, remember us and tell our life story to those who did not know us personally. I find this inspiring. In the daily struggles of life and in the mundane decisions we make we can and should do things that will build a good and lasting memory. I think this will help me in making some better decisions in the future.
I found the story dramatic and exciting. It had warmth, humor and wisdom and the language was clear and lively and an enjoyable read. I also liked the tactical decisions in combat and the political and personal considerations in governing the people and interacting with them. The whole felt coherent and I felt some real weight in the decisions to be made.
Some background to my feedback: I'm a gamer and a reader. I enjoy many of the films you mention in your Advice. I prefer games with story in them. I play a lot of video games and board games. I read a lot and so does my wife. Books fill many walls in our home. I'm interested in warfare as a subject (one of many) and I found your depictions of it very well done and very smart.
All in all, I'm glad Le Morte D'Arthur by Chris Crawford exists and I think the world and the fields of art and interactive stories/games/storyworlds is richer and better for it. Thank you for creating it and sharing it with us!
All the best,
Jarmo Petäjäaho
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From Prownie:
first thing's first, there are many ideas i agree with in LMD - the main one being that you must look beyond your own self, help many others beyond yourself and you conveyed that idea beautifully
however, the biggest point i disagree with is the relationship between life and death
my belief is that life and death are in conflict with each other tl;dr (too long didn't read) is that conscious life is valuable and we should do all we can to resist it's end, and that death is at best a necessary evil and at worst a horrible phenomenon
i am aware that we may be coming at this from different perspectives so my own biases will be obvious
a couple of disclaimers before i make my point:
- whether or not death is inevitable isn’t really going to be the main focus because it will not really mount to much in terms of my argument.
- i am not asking you to make any changes to LMD's core story - maybe the Merlin dialogues at most
- i support the liberal argument for death, in that one can choose how long they want to live and when they want to die.
- i am a big proponent of HEALTHY life extension (where ageing is reversed and or retarded and thus treatable), although i do not think this challenges death per se, it does challenge a large cause of death (cancer caused by ageing), there are also many social, economical, healthcare related reasons why i think ageing should be cured.
the first point I would like to tackle is when merlin talks about someone's life being like a story having a beginning, middle and end.
there are a couple of flaws i find with this argument:
a stories ending is different from ones life ending, a novel can be re-read, re-experienced and shared when one's life ends, all their knowledge, experience, relationships are gone - they cannot be spoken to again or do anything in the world maybe an autobiography or other people's opinions of them may remain, but that person - an emotional, intellectual and conscious being is gone. it's like a book that gets written and then burned up RIGHT AFTER it is finished.
another flaw with this argument is that death is not required to leave a legacy behind - retirement can do the trick. also saying that an ending to one's life gives every other event meaning ignores the fact that the moments themselves can be meaningful regardless of whether or not one's life will end or not
if you do something you enjoy with a friend, I doubt that a termination would give that meaning, the joy you share with that friend is what gives it meaning, not an eventual death. in fact, i could go on to say that death takes away meaning from life. going back to the friend example, if i were to organise an outing with that friend, however i die before it happens - that would be tragic to the friend, and by extension anyone who ever cared for me.
cutanas death was quite a shock to me, however i was frustrated at the way Merlin told me to deal with it. i thought that cutana died a horrible death - yet Merlin calls it magnificent. yes, he defended Arthur, and sacrificed his life - but I still think it's a tragedy. in fact, the tragedy of cutanas death is a function of how magnificent his life was.
you don't need to die to celebrate a life, i could say that invitnticus was someone who greatly contributed to Arthur's help, and Arthur died before him. i don't think the horse would need to die to prove that he severed Arthur well.
there is also the argument he mentions that we are a part of nature and on death we go back to nature. i do understand that many things are interconnected, we depend on electricity, food, water, shelter and personal relations. however, this is a different argument to saying that you are i or that i am a bird, or the clothes i wear is the same thing as me. the difference between a leaf and a conscious being is that a leaf cannot think, feel joy or pain, we feel them however seeing it from the perspective of nature is not a very good idea, nature is indifferent to everything, cancers and ageing (the decline of function in the body with the passing of time) are creations of nature yet both are a determent to life.
i do not think that humanity should be seen like a sports team where individuals come and go, but the sports team is still there - i see humanity as a large collection of INDIVIDUALS, all with their own opinions, experiences, relationships etc. there is definitely something noble to be said about one caring about humanity over themselves - but this can only be true insofar as one is alive and conscious. unless heaven exists (i am sceptical of heaven existing), when you die, you are permanently gone - you can no longer care about humanity and more importantly, you cannot do anything to help it, no matter how much you believed in it.
despite all this, i think the nature of death does fit in decently into the time period that LMD is set in since it was well before modern medicine, you really couldn't do anything about nature back then, so if you were someone living at the time, believing that death is a blessing in disguise and getting on with your miserably short life would be fine. although i reckon that they probably believed in heaven, which i would much rather believe in than deluding myself into believing death gives life meaning. nowadays many reach an old age, and ageing is the largest cause of death in the world it would be preposterous to believe the rational implications of ageing (emotional stress on families, burdens on healthcare systems, burdens on society as a whole) is somehow meaningful to life
i could not care less whether or not death is inevitable i do not want to die, i do not want my family to die, i do not want my friends to die, i do not want anyone to die which includes you death is at best a necessary evil - when an unfortunate situation like one being buried underneath the earth happens at worst it's the ultimate evil that is in direct conflict with life itself and its many joys
here's also some additional links where i got my ideas from: