User:Murgh/A fourth school

Overview

Some narrative ideas are difficult to reconcile with the existing "schools" of Elite (and Oolite) lore. Alienated by the Syncretist ideas, and dissatisfied with the apathy of the Pragmatist approach, it is more tempting to elaborate one's stories in the Purist realm.

But at what point does a sub-category of Purism deviate too much, and become its own school of thought? This is the Brutalist branch, as it is emerging.

Divergence

To make sense of the Elite universe, we are given the peculiar game data, alongside Holdstock's The Dark Wheel and The Space Traders Flight Training Manual to make of it what we wish. We decide what we take at face value, and some certainly have reservation about the information offered by Holdstock.

The Purist makes sense of the Elite game data by accepting it all. Lobsters, edible poets, unusual mating traditions and all, the wonderfully clever maths of Bell&Braben that pushed the technology of its day to the limits provide the whimsical world-reality that is there to accept..

But if the information you are willing to accept diverges before any of that, it is no longer Purism. If your instinct says that the data itself feels corrupted, censored or artificially engineered, it is IronAss Brutalism. To the Brutalist, the whimsical elements of the presented universe are unnatural; they are glitches in a failing simulation.

The red flag

The unnatural symmetries are the primary evidence.

• 8 galactic charts/sectors
• 256 (2⁸) systems per chart
• 8 government types
• 8 economic models
• 8 non-human races..

These "limits" are typically dismissed as low constraints of early 1980s computer code, but to the Brutalist they are deliberate clues. Why shouldn't the artifice be a crucial key to the story.

If you are abruptly dropped into the middle of a maze, and given a limited set of very strange instructions, you have to suspect the possibility that the information is wrong, and that someone is lying to you. The scepticism places the entire universe under a dark, harsh light. If you cannot trust the manual, you are on your own to solve the challenge of who is in authority, and what sinister intentions lie behind.

The philosophy

Where the rational Purist thinks,

"The universe is weird, so I must find a scientific explanation for the weirdness to make it feel real" The IronAss Brutalist thinks,

"The universe is weird because the machine controlling it is broken or evil. The weirdness is the story."suddenly places everything under a dark, harsh light. If you can't trust any of the information, you are on your own, to solve the challenge from who ever is in authority, and what ever sinister intentions that lay behind.

Where the rational Purist thinks,

• "The universe is weird, so I must find a scientific explanation for the weirdness to make it feel real"

The IronAss Brutalist thinks,

• "The universe is weird because the machine controlling it is broken or evil. The weirdness is the story."