You're Ruining My Lore

This is a short interactive fiction vignette created for the Historical Games Network event centred on the theme of Player Practices, taking place on 21/03/2024.

I created this vignette to explore some of the ideas (and my own personal perspective and feelings) around "lore" in games, what it has come to mean, and the role of players in the creation of lore through wikis, fan-sites and forums. Lore is often seen as an unchanging tome of facts- a backstory and "history" of an in-game world or character that even if told only in part is "true" and therefore immutable. Lore is therefore something to be unravelled, understood, solved, and catalogued. This perception is of course counter to what history actually is. History is a written constantly changing human created thing, it should be re-visited and re-written. This view of lore, as well as how narratives are sometimes presented in games and in player-made media, can lead to tension.