Behind the scenes: I originally drafted this post on May 3, 2024, and then didn’t touch it again until October of that year. It’s now March 2026. People who know me probably won’t be surprised it sometimes takes me several years to finish something that doesn’t have a set deadline, but now you have some hard numbers. And while people who follow my stream might guess the impetus for finally putting this out is my recent completion of Endwalker, it’s actually the Bibliotheca theme “Sprout” that inspired me. Does this prove my worthiness of being the Bibliotheca Boss? (No, it’s the fact I can speed-read. Probably.)
For a while there, I was really pumping out Content, as the kids say. Earlier this year I transferred a number of gelatin-related posts I made over at the Bay Area Kei blog to live over here as well and got exhausted looking at how intense some of the previous Jelly July schedules were. (To be fair, it was exhausting doing them. Jelly July kind of became a Jelly Job for a couple years until I scaled back.)
Since then, the updates have dropped off a bit, in part due to my Post Schedule being replaced with a Stream Schedule. Much like my former radio show, streaming is just less work in terms of my brain’s assembly line – the photo editing in particular really throws a wrench in the proverbial machine. And while I still stream a lot of nonogram games, sometime in the past few years (well, specifically, June 6th, 2023), I started playing Final Fantasy XIV Online.
We don’t do online gaming in Muskogee
As a kid, I had a lot of bad experiences with trying to play games online. Except for like, maybe, Neopets, and even then that’s plenty dubious. In the 90’s, if you wanted to play a game with other people in a networked sense, well, that’s what LAN parties were for. That’s not to say I didn’t own any games with online multiplayer, but…well. I remember my dad and I trying to play Age of Empires (the second one, likely) with people from the World Wide Web, and getting run over by a comic number of mods for like, spaceships and what not. On the one hand, it was a funny anecdote, but on the other, I never attempted to play that game online again.
Later on in my teens, there were really only two sorts of games people played online: first person shooters, and MMORPGs. I remember my friends walking from our high school to a nearby net cafe to play Counterstrike, and feeling very left out. You see, I have a strong family history of a lovely set of flesh sack failures broadly known as “vestibular issues”. One of the side effects of having these sorts of problems is a predilection for simulation sickness, and any sort of first person camera movement, let alone the sort of focused, rapid movement needed to aim a gun in these sorts of games, makes me very dizzy very quickly.
This wasn’t something I learned at the time – there’s an infamous story of my dad and older sister attempting to play Wolfenstein 3D back around when it first came out, and having quite a lot of fun…and then both having to lie down for hours afterwards. So I knew my fated destiny at a young age. Recently when I looked through my sister’s collection of SNES games, there’s fighting games, platformers, beat ‘em ups…but no games with an aimable first person camera.
Anyways, FPSes are out. But Kelp, my made-up reader interjects, you like RPGs! And also somehow my made-up reader also knows I had my own computer, in my own room, with an internet connection(!), by 1997. How come I didn’t get into MMOs?
Why I Didn’t Get Into MMOs
My sister is six years older than me, which means we weren’t really playmates until we were both old enough for six years to be a negligible age difference, i.e., full-on adulthood. But I paid a lot of attention to her trials and tribulations in her friends group, as a younger sibling does, and in high school, having been warned about That Time of Life many times from all sorts of sources. And one of the things I distinctly remember was one of her close friends becoming so obsessed with Everquest that she stopped going to school. I think there was a whole intervention called and everything. Of course, there were other underlying issues, as there always is with this sort of thing. But it pretty squarely scared me off MMORPGs for years. It didn’t help that, years later, during my first year at college, I had not one, but two friends get so caught up in World of Warcraft that their schoolwork seriously suffered. One even ended up dropping out. (Don’t worry, he made a full recovery. As far as I know, anyways.)
Okay, why now…three years ago…though?
I’ve always wanted to play games with my friends online! It’s been a constant sorrow of mine that, by and large, if you want to do that sort of thing, you are limited to Games Where You Shoot Things With A Gun. After Counterstrike, it was Halo. After Halo, it was all the games trying to grab Halo players. After that, it was Overwatch. It was around then I just kind of gave up. Even shooters with third person cameras were usually a no-go for me, as they typically had you aim the gun in first person, which was the whole problem.
There’s always been people in my broader social circle playing FFXIV; statistically speaking, it’s just improbable for there not to be. But they didn’t really talk about it, let alone try to bring me into the fold. It’s only been in the past couple years once I started streaming that I ran into the proselytizers.
And it would have to be proselytizers, people I know and (somewhat) trust, to convince me to start. Putting aside the fact that the official advertising for the game often doesn’t sell it very well to say, a weird goth girl (I always forget that Johnny Stubbleboy is supposed to be the player character), the main draw would be “your friends play this! You can play with them!”
There’s a second, more compelling reason I decided to start playing that perhaps you already guessed. That’s right – my parasite single lifestyle. Thanks to (handwaves vaguely), I’ve been more-or-less unemployed and living rent-free at my childhood home. So what if I get sucked into an MMO. My schedule is wide open. And it’s a good thing too, because due to both the largely single-player nature of this particular ‘MMO’ and a distinct lack of overlapping interests when it came to group content, I ultimately ended up playing most of the game ~♫ all by myself ♫~
(Addendum from Future Kelp: now there’s the new addition of what the kids call “friend slop” which is also…almost always first person camera. There’s some exceptions, though.)
Course Correction
Based on everything I’ve written so far, it would sound like several years ago I stopped blogging altogether to instead dump my many hours of leisure into a particular video game, but clearly that’s not true. I just have trouble starting stuff if I have no external motivation to do it. Basic brain problem. Luckily I am still good at keeping up with the dishes.
The actual point is to introduce a new series of blog posts I’ve been thinking about for months years now, but just haven’t pulled the trigger on. I take a lot of screenshots in FFXIV, and most of the time I take those screenshots, it’s because Someone Made A Writing Choice. For example, something that really struck me when I first started playing was the game’s very widespread usage of something called universal he. Specifically, this refers to sentences like:
If an employee spills something, he should notify a supervisor immediately.
where ‘he’ is supposed to be understood to mean any employee, regardless of gender. However, the phrase universal he often gets applied to other uses of masculine-gendered terms to refer to everybody, such as mankind, or just man, as in “the folly of man”.
Ultima Weapon eats man, woman inherits the earth
Okay Kelp, a different imagined reader pipes up, it’s only recently that this sort of thing has been criticized, and you’re talking about a 10+ year old game…
Nope. The ramp-up in arguments about other gender-related grammar choices, like singular they, is definitely associated with the 21st century, though I would argue that avoidance of that usage is also unfashionably old-fashioned. But in singular they’s case, it has only officially been AP Style since the 2017 Stylebook, so there’s a bit of an argument there. Eliminating universal he, on the other hand, has been discussed for quite a long time, with concentrated efforts to stamp it out in the North American context really heating up in the 1980’s. (See the APA style guide’s treatise on universal he from 1986) That’s why I noticed FFXIV’s usage of it right away – these efforts have been very successful! It’s pretty rare to run into this anymore! Of course, major style guides are understandably not used when writing fictional dialog, but still. It’s what we call in linguistics ‘marked usage’, similar to how George R.R. Martin really seems to like lady’s names that start with M or whatever.
Notice gender isn’t mentioned. Also what language is dividing us, surely not, you know, Eorzean
Oh, so this is the blog version of
the Extreme Copyediting stream tag
Yes and no. In terms of screenshots, there’s just too much at this point to easily put together Dedicated Dialog Didactics. We’re talking upwards of 25 gigabytes of pngs as of writing. I’ve tried organizing them into categories, but those categories are more Main Scenario Quests or Job Quests, not so much Incidences of the phrase must needs or Holy Apostrophes Batman!. So I decided I should just go through them by writing about my experience playing through the game, but a big part of me playing the game is…noticing the use of language in the game, so it should work out. Hopefully. This is very much going to be one of those “it’s better to do it sloppily than try to do it neatly and it never happens” sort of projects. (Seems like motivational speaker types call this Done is better than perfect. I feel like there’s prolly a four-character compound equivalent for this.)
Aforementioned apostrophe catastrophe
Now, the English localization of the FFXIV is, what people might say, ‘widely praised’. ‘Beloved’ even. And my point here isn’t to argue otherwise – the scale of that ongoing project alone is terrifying. I don’t envy anyone on that team. They do Good Work, and they do A Mind-Numbing Amount Of It. All my critiques, even the decisions I think are clear failures, are specs of particulate in an ocean of otherwise terrifically translated text. And many of the more annoying issues aren’t on them, but the original developers, such as delivering information in pop-up bubbles that quickly disappear while you’re busy “killing monsters” as my dad would say. But as I play the game more and more, I see a Pattern of Writing, one which is common to English language high fantasy writing in general, and one I am so, so weary of.
Things the Localization Team is Notably Good At
- Poetic usage, especially poetry
- Humor, particularly in otherwise missable flavor text
- Working in pop culture references for people of a certain age (Gen X/Early Millennial seems to be the sweet spot)
For just three easy payments of 19.99…
Wandering Minstrel: Yes, this has all the makings of a tragic tanka… Ah, forgive me. A form of classical Hingan poetry I was but recently taught by the actors here. It goes without saying I have yet to master it, so I will thank you for not laughing at my fumbling attempt!
‘Neath the half-moon’s glow,
lily-white petals unfurl,
Rooted in malice,
The bloom drinks in the darkness,
And is swallowed by the night.
I was very impressed by this properly constructed tanka given how often writers just bust out milquetoast haikus
A selection of said humorous flavor text
(Did you spot the bonus universal he)
The movie this quest title ostensibly references came out in the early 90’s
Things the Localization Team is Predictably Not Good At
- Readability
- Phonetics
I tried to make both lists three things, but readability by itself is like, a dozen things, and I didn’t want to force it
I say predictably here, because hallmarks of the fantasy genre, like poetic dialog, often make the text inherently less readable. (So does humor, generally.) And the average English major often has poor grasp of phonetics – just ask this former instructor of English majors on that very topic.
They know
I’ll expand more going forward obviously, but the short version here is these two things are almost always non-priorities for writing teams in general, and this is where I insert my joke about why I don’t have a job. But regardless of genre, they should always be priorities! For instance, a fairly normal percentage given for “people with dyslexia” is 15%. Fifteen percent! And many of the decisions that make it difficult for people with language related disorders to read and comprehend dialog are decisions that make it difficult for everybody.
You know how once a building installs a big button you can hip check to automatically open a door, lots of people use that button who aren’t visibly disabled? Maybe this is you! It’s sure been me, because some times, that door is hella heavy. Other times, I’m wheeling a dolly, or my bike, or carrying something that makes it difficult for me to open the door normally. Yet other times, I see people push it in lieu of physically holding the door open for a group of people.
Anyways, my point is that even if the decision-makers think it’s fine that roughly fifteen percent of the population is SOL when it comes to comfortably reading their dialog in a game that is primarily about reading dialog, by not only not prioritizing stuff like readability, but also actively making choices that make things difficult, they hurt everybody. Everybody’s struggling. People who speak different varieties of English other than the Proper British Stuff. People who have trouble close-focusing on small paragraphs of text. People who can’t speed-read all the pop-up and flying text that is often just flavor but sometimes is critical information. I bet you prolly struggled to get through that long-ass sentence I wrote to start off this paragraph! There was like, 10 subordinate clauses in that baby. I did try to break it up. We’re pretending I left it as-is on purpose to prove my point and not because I gave up rewriting it.
Don’t worry, I don’t expect to get a job out of this – if anything, I think coming across posts like these would prolly discourage any given team from hiring me, especially since I have multiple friends with similar backgrounds who have already been let go for pointing out similar issues at their workplaces. My blog posts are just for fun, hence the lax schedule as mentioned earlier. But regular viewers of my FFXIV do seem to not only tolerate my in-depth explanations, but come back for more, so there’s apparently an audience for this sort of thing.
Legal Obligation Text
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