01-07-2014, 06:16 PM
Only just had a chance to respond to this, but I really like the idea.
Taking Wikipedia as an analogy, there are lots of articles about individuals that just about meet their notability criteria, but in the grand scheme of things will likely be forgotten footnotes in just a few years. Not that they aren't interesting characters though, I'm thinking of the countless profiles of heavy metal bassists that played on one Alice Cooper record, the soccer players that spent 5 seasons playing in the English Conference league between 1999 and 2004, the long lists of characters from the Star Wars comics. So it does feel to me like the EG is missing that individual touch - the artists, sportspeople, politicians, etc that are very minor on a galactic scale but have a made a major impact on something more locally. There's plenty of space for these sorts of articles.
I'm personally keen to keep that 4th wall intact though so I'd be averse to having someone profiled in an EG that, in reality, the EG compilers wouldn't know about (or shouldn't know about, from a story perspective). The protagonist in my novella in Against a Diamond Sky, for instance, had a major impact on part of the version war but I wouldn't want to think that the rest of the Terragen Sphere knew about it.
In some of these cases, the Ghost Net
could be an appropriate place for profiles of characters of a mysterious, controversial or covert type.
Taking Wikipedia as an analogy, there are lots of articles about individuals that just about meet their notability criteria, but in the grand scheme of things will likely be forgotten footnotes in just a few years. Not that they aren't interesting characters though, I'm thinking of the countless profiles of heavy metal bassists that played on one Alice Cooper record, the soccer players that spent 5 seasons playing in the English Conference league between 1999 and 2004, the long lists of characters from the Star Wars comics. So it does feel to me like the EG is missing that individual touch - the artists, sportspeople, politicians, etc that are very minor on a galactic scale but have a made a major impact on something more locally. There's plenty of space for these sorts of articles.
I'm personally keen to keep that 4th wall intact though so I'd be averse to having someone profiled in an EG that, in reality, the EG compilers wouldn't know about (or shouldn't know about, from a story perspective). The protagonist in my novella in Against a Diamond Sky, for instance, had a major impact on part of the version war but I wouldn't want to think that the rest of the Terragen Sphere knew about it.
In some of these cases, the Ghost Net
could be an appropriate place for profiles of characters of a mysterious, controversial or covert type.