Lore Hunt posts are separated into two categories: Topics and News. Today I would like to explain the purpose of these two categories. My desire is to inform you, as the reader, on how to get the most out of Lore Hunt.
Topics are formally written essays that assert some thesis. The process for making one of these essays is far more than just writing down a theory. They involve hours of pouring over item descriptions and dialog, in-game exploration, and active and purposeful contemplation and analysis. I strive to write these similar to academic white papers and go through a fairly thorough revision process for each one. I remove first and second-person perspectives, unnecessary rhetoric, and make sure my tense is consistent. I use tooling that runs my sentences through the Automated Readability Index to help me make my sentences concise. I strive to make sure each essay is self contained and has a flow to it which I can outline in my introduction and summarize in my conclusion.
For me, this is a painstaking process. In my natural oral or written communication I tend to cram as many concepts, anecdotes, and connections into a single sentence as I can. Transcriptions of my natural speaking would be chock-full of em hyphens and parenthesis. For me, speaking is not merely a means of communicating my ideas, but another tool for making connections. And it’s not uncommon for those around me to get lost along the way.
The purpose of the News posts is to talk about these parts of my creative process. I will be a little more relaxed in these posts. As a heavily right-brained creative, I appreciate when content creators are willing to share a behind the scenes look at their creative process. If I am successful in writing the Lore Hunt essays in the format I am striving for, I suspect it will remove a lot of the human element from this site. These News posts give me a place to inject the human element back in.
My goal is to write one of these News topics every week that I have been working on an essay. For that reason, when I am done with Lore Hunt, there will likely be more news topics than actual essays, although the essays will be significantly longer.
In these topics, I will be more lax in my language. I will use these to provide updates, and periodically to initiate discussion on a topic if I feel I am struggling to resolve the lore behind it. Primarily though, I will use these to provide updates to the site and insights into my process.
Currently I am working on an essay on Oedon. This is a topic that I had previously written, but through the process of revising it, found what felt like a gap in the reasoning of the essay. I had to revisit the original thesis and see if it still stands.
With that in mind, I will likely split this essay into two parts. The first essay will assert a theory about Oedon based on the evidence I found, while the second essay will attempt to defend that theory based on the implications the first theory would have on the overall lore. I hope that you will enjoy it, and I hope that you will provide your thoughts on the theory once it’s published. I have no problems redacting a theory if there is enough evidence to disprove it.
“Farewell, good hunter. May you find your worth in the waking world.”