[HN Gopher] What's wrong with medieval pigs in videogames
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What's wrong with medieval pigs in videogames
Author : _emacsomancer_
Score : 779 points
Date : 2022-10-24 15:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
| TillE wrote:
| Ever since sophisticated real-time 3D graphics became a thing,
| I've often heard the idea expressed that we could learn about
| history by experiencing it "first hand". An incredible VR
| experience, surely.
|
| The problem is that a meticulous recreation is _really hard_ even
| if you have a bunch of historians doing the work, and very likely
| to reproduce a ton of modern biases without good documentation of
| every tiny detail. For medieval Europe, it 's probably simply
| impossible to get right. The written record just isn't good
| enough.
| rsynnott wrote:
| There's also an aspect of "reality is unrealistic". A modern
| audience would likely be baffled, by, say, brightly painted
| ancient Roman statues and buildings; while that was the
| contemporary reality, it's not at all what people expect.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I can only imagine it's incredibly difficult and would require
| quite a bit of subjectivity, even for academics. I don't have
| any insight into that. However, being a game designer, I have a
| related point to make: "game" output should be separated into
| two distinct categories when considering accuracy. They are:
|
| 1) Video games geared towards entertainment:
|
| Historical accuracy will ALWAYS take second fiddle to providing
| a great gaming experience, as it should.
|
| 2) "Serious" games and simulations:
|
| Some of the same academics that do all of the other research on
| these topics are now using game engines and 3D modelling tools
| to make accompanying models, and though I haven't seen any
| personally, probably more involved simulations. They're no more
| or less likely to be accurate than any other academic work on
| the topic. Critique by other academics seems like a pretty
| traditional way to advance a field even if the medium is pretty
| new.
|
| Assessing the historical accuracy of an entertainment-based
| medium seems to me a bit like assessing jokes for factual
| accuracy: perhaps useful as a qualitative study, but probably
| missing the point if it's a quantitative measure of value. That
| said, if the marketing copy makes specific claims, then those
| claims absolutely deserve to be evaluated for accuracy.
| landhar wrote:
| Although I agree with the problem you've framed. I still think
| the idea of building VR experiences to learn and educate about
| ancient times has a lot of potential.
|
| Since, to a great extent, the problem you've outlined extends
| to every medium. And I still believe that movies and books that
| try to capture the state of the art in our understanding of
| previous civilizations play a major role in getting people
| interested and to care about digging deeper into the topics.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| Defile what I defile, Lisa.
| acomjean wrote:
| Assasin's Creed odyssey actually has a "Tour Mode" where you
| can get a tour of Athens or other open world locations. They
| tried to make it accurate.
|
| https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/9/10/20859403/assassins...
|
| Of course then you get a bunch of historians on youtube
| complaining that this or that detail isn't 100% correct ... But
| thats just people
| jdtang13 wrote:
| Great article. Loved the illustrations and references to specific
| medieval laws. A good example of how an earlier generation's
| "common sense" was totally different from ours today.
| adultSwim wrote:
| _videogames are the perfect medium for breaking with the
| stereotype and bringing academic insights to the larger public_
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| I'm not sure we should trust medieval artwork to provide
| anatomically correct depictions of much of anything. See, for
| example, the Bayeux Tapestry [0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry
| myself248 wrote:
| Imagine if there was a whole group of people who specifically
| study historical records and have figured out ways to tell how
| accurate the depictions of various things may be.
| hnbad wrote:
| You mean Laravel and VueJS developers, right?
| account42 wrote:
| Imagine if those people are not infallible.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Those people are going to have fun with our era, now that AI-
| generated images are a thing.
| 111111101101 wrote:
| A long as dinosaurs don't have feathers, I'm happy to have some
| historical inaccuracy in my entertainment.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Excellent work, and a great point that games' educational
| potential is often wasted. Modern agriculture tends to select for
| monoculture or prioritize one particular variety that maximizes
| something (Holstein cows for milk volume, or yellow bananas, or
| russet potatoes). We have abundance, but often of lowest-common-
| denominator options whereas periodic scarcity often means richer
| variety and greater resilience.
|
| It's also startling how focused on system sustainability medieval
| legal systems were, and how profoundly enclosure/privatization
| laws cannibalized formerly common resources.
| kodt wrote:
| Your telling me this wasn't a historically accurate depiction?
| https://youtu.be/4ST_ON9Xm7Q
| [deleted]
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This reminds me of the other day at a "medieval" festival we were
| offered turkey legs, which I have seen before on TV perhaps, and
| didn't ponder at the moment. A few hours later thought... wait a
| minute, turkeys are from North America? Why are these faux
| Europeans walking around with turkey legs?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The proper noun "Turkey" is very different from a turkey leg.
|
| A turkey leg fits our perception of medieval people walking
| around eating a huge chunk of flesh, though that is also a
| misnomer unless you're thinking of the nobility.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I thought it looked funny, but couldn't put my finger on why.
| MandieD wrote:
| To be fair, a disproportionate number of visitors in any sort
| of vaguely historic costume at a Renfest/Mittelaltermarkt are
| cosplaying at least minor nobility, in the US or Germany.
| nullc wrote:
| Imagine it's a wood grouse leg instead.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I had a similar experience. (Turkey legs are delicious, BTW.)
|
| I suspect the turkey was quickly introduced as a domesticated
| bird in Europe shortly after contact with the Americas.
|
| Otherwise, the turkey may be the closest cost-sensitive
| equivalent of whatever bird people at a lot of back then. Maybe
| it was a goose?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Hmm, medieval period was over by 1492. No mention of Vikings
| returning with them that I have found.
|
| Wikipedia says the rumor is that Spain brought them to the
| middle-east, where they came back to England with a "meat
| from Turkey" label. Perhaps before the English settlements of
| 1620- expanded trade from the region.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And where is rest of the animals? Meat didn't preserve well, so
| you eat more of it at time to not waste it.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Wait I thought Turkeys were from near Turkey.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| They're native to Northeastern United States and Southeastern
| Canada, although there is a peninsula in Mexico that has a
| different species of turkey.
|
| The reason why turkey is traditional at the US Thanksgiving
| holiday is to honor the first Thanksgiving, celebrated in
| Plymouth, MA. I live near Plymouth and there are tons of wild
| turkeys running around here. (Yesterday there were 11 grazing
| in my back yard.)
|
| It's a very beautiful animal, the male makes a display
| similar to a peacock.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Disclaimer: IANAF, this info comes from pure curiosity and
| reading.
|
| He was describing wild boar interbreeding as being the source of
| fur and tusks but AFAIK _any_ hog allowed to mature in nature
| instead of captivity will develop fur and tusks. I haven 't found
| clear explanations as to _why_ the fur happens (weather? Food?
| Sessile vs active lifestyle?), but any hog allowed to go feral in
| the wild will look like a hairy, angry, dangerous animal. edit:
| The tusks differ just because of trimming and age.
|
| Which fits with the description of the pigs being allowed to roam
| in captive forests.
|
| One thing that stands out is the timeline - the article describes
| 3 years to mature enough to be allowed into the forest.
|
| In modern factory farming, pigs are generally slaughtered at 6
| months, and if they're being bred they start breeding at around a
| year. Treating pigs as immature at below 3 years is a staggering
| difference.
| Sol- wrote:
| Very interesting. It's good to be often reminded how things pop
| culture representations of historical times can present something
| that I as a layman would consider plausible (pig rolling in the
| mud in a medieval town? checks out!), but is not really accurate.
| Of course the pig is just one symptom and there will be many more
| such things.
|
| Probably increasing use of AI to generate art may amplify such
| things. Not quite the same, but think AI colorization of
| historical photographs that just need to look plausible -
| correctness is not the objective.
| rebolek wrote:
| If anything, A"I" would make the problem worse as it depends
| only on prior art and is not capable of any critical thinking.
| kibwen wrote:
| This doesn't deserve downvotes. AI just regurgitates what
| it's been taught. It doesn't care about "correctness" in any
| capacity, only in conformity to the training set.
| jeandejean wrote:
| Very interesting article, but as these games are fiction, they do
| not necessarily need to be accurate, otherwise there are many
| more utter inaccuracies to be corrected, not to mention the fact
| that a young girl can freely hang around with her little brother
| in the 1300s while having her haircut always perfect. Let games
| be and enjoy the wonderful pictures.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| It should be pointed out that other animals are famously
| distorted in medieval artwork: https://daily.jstor.org/why-are-
| medieval-lions-so-bad/, https://mossandfog.com/the-comically-bad-
| way-medieval-art-po...
|
| Otherwise, fascinating details on communal foraging, laws, and
| husbandry.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I can't help but feel we've entered into a perverse loop where we
| make movies / games only pander to stereotypes of their viewers,
| and we breed ignorance.
|
| First of all art seems to be obsessed with medieval European, and
| all other periods and places are forgotten. The only other period
| that gets showtime is antiquity in rome/egypt/greece (which is
| more or less one period).
|
| We have a catch 22, that noone knows whats been happening in
| ancient China or India, and so movies about them are few and far
| between.
|
| Art is meant to elevate and educate.
|
| Perhaps this has entered terminal stage because holywood and AAA
| studios cant even bothered to write a new plot any more, they
| just make endless remakes
|
| Insert some grumble about late stage capitalism
| ng12 wrote:
| What's crazy to me is Hollywood is more focused on casting non-
| white actors in medeival fantasy roles rather than actually
| making culturally diverse movies. Chinese, Indian, and African
| history is fascinating and I would love to see more media
| exploring those settings.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Just setting something in a powerful nation of early medieval
| or pre-Roman times would make it naturally non-Eurocentric.
| Eastern Roman empire, Sasanian or older Persian empires,
| Alexander's Asia, Ethiopia, Pontus, Artaxiad Armenia,
| Baktria, pre-delenda'd Carthage, golden age Islamic empires,
| archaic Mesopotamian kingdoms, (further eastern empires that
| I'm honestly not educated about), ...
|
| "Cordoba was a city that had street lighting and paved
| streets while London was still just a village." - Prince
| Faisal in _Lawrence of Arabia_
| volkk wrote:
| My wild guess is that most AAA/Hollywood creators are
| completely clueless about those cultures and histories and
| the effort required to do research to hit a level of
| accuracy outweighs the budgets they have, so we're stuck
| with culturally diverse medieval ages. furthermore, i
| imagine the PR agencies that tell them that they're going
| to be wrecked and dragged all over the internet if they do
| some Persian themed thing and get something wrong. add that
| all up and they probably decide it ain't worth it.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I'm sure they can figure out the history well enough to
| depict it, or punt on the accuracy. They probably figured
| it wouldn't be a popular enough setting for the intended
| audience.
|
| It's been done a few times. _Prince of Persia_ was set in
| a fantasy land without a real attempt at historical
| accuracy, but it was sorta Sasanid Persia. Similarly,
| _Aladdin_ in Iraq. There was also the 2004 _Alexander_
| which was quite accurate, but it wasn 't a good movie.
| And _Lawrence of Arabia_ , sorta fictionalized but
| accurate in spirit, which was the best.
|
| _300_ was interesting cause they made it clear the story
| was being told from the Greek perspective by having
| Dilios narrate it, and he hyped it up even more than the
| actual Greek historians did, instead of the movie
| presenting it as a factual view. The movie still pissed
| off the Iranian government, but whatever.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Oh yeah, _Mulan_ too.
| salmo wrote:
| I have a thing for filling in gaps in my knowledge.
| Eventually one will bother me and I'll have to learn. Just
| before COVID started, it was non-Eurocentric history. I
| realized I knew the world as seeing the Persians as the
| decadent outsiders and didn't know anything "east" of there.
|
| I've spent a lot of time learning about China, the Mongols,
| Persia, and actual Ancient Egypt. I've dabbled in general
| Islamic history. I have so much more to cover, but it's what
| I could find thorough work on easily. I like to start with
| pre-history and go forward where I can.
|
| It's crazy to me. There are so many compelling stories. And
| what we have in our media is so insanely off-base.
|
| Side request: Any recommendations for podcasts and resources
| for some of the various Indian cultures and Russia would be
| much appreciated. I prefer a bias of "from their eyes" to
| "from a Western perspective."
| majormajor wrote:
| Are movies about ancient China or India made in China and
| India? Is the claim that they aren't made, or that "noone"
| knows about it, itself myopic?
|
| Obviously trying to get Hollywood stories to cover broader
| things is a big topic, and one I think is important for people
| in the US, but Hollywood is also not the be-all-and-end-all of
| the world.
| drstewart wrote:
| > rome/egypt/greece (which is more or less one period).
|
| That's like saying Moghul India and Raj India and British-era
| Hong Kong were "all one period" because they kind of sort of
| overlapped in space and time.
| hot_gril wrote:
| When people think of Rome, they tend to unknowingly think of
| a period of Roman expansion from like 200BC to 1AD where
| Egypt and Greece were independently ruled for some time
| before Rome conquered both, which also happens to be near the
| start of Christianity. That's why "Rome/Egypt/Greece" is a
| thing.
| kixiQu wrote:
| https://witcher-games.fandom.com/wiki/Baked_potato
|
| The same kind of "and not even _accurate_ medieval Europe "
| complaint as the article, when I do agree with you that the
| myopic focus on Europe is more important, but... the
| introduction of the potato was so influential to social
| relations that it is kind of appalling to consider how casually
| it's used in supposedly pre-Columbian settings!
| aetherson wrote:
| Isn't the Witcher set in a wholly fantastic, non-European,
| realm? Like, obviously to some degree inspired by European
| fantasy, but it's not like there's an America to go to and
| bring back the potato from.
| kixiQu wrote:
| The Witcher is my specifically chosen example because
| people famously lost their minds about the Netflix
| adaptation moving to cast characters in it as nonwhite.
| ...because It Is Supposed To Be Based On Medieval Poland,
| Of Course. So you can see the weird tensions around the
| "historical accuracy" of fantasy - people have strong
| reactions, pretty high-stakes stuff.
|
| If you hadn't heard of this, there's a lot of press
| coverage, but here's a petition with 50k signatories.
| https://www.change.org/p/lauren-s-hissrich-don-t-limit-
| ciri-...
|
| (If anyone is considering commenting about their opinions
| on this kind of casting being Good or Bad, let's not - the
| point is that the Witcher's "historical accuracy" is
| something people have a lot of feelings about.)
| lrem wrote:
| Which is a hilarious detail to protest about. Given the
| whole antagonist fraction was changed from a corporatist
| technocracy to a theocracy.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Fun fact, Andrzej Sapkowski only specified a few
| characters' skin color when it was important to note that
| they were from the same region as Geralt of Rivia.
| Otherwise, the only big note is that Zerrikanians have
| sun-blackened skin (as in deep black like you'd find in
| many parts of central Africa). Everything else is
| basically just commentary on hair styles and especially
| hair dyes. Very little time is spent in his books
| discussing natural hair colors or skin color with the
| exception of people very far to the north, Geralt, and
| the Zerrikanians. In interviews back before the video
| games were made, (I'm going to paraphrase here), he
| basically said that the skin colors and hair colors were
| as diverse if not more diverse than Earth and because of
| the ease of travel for anyone aided by magic users, you
| could expect to find tons of diversities in any of the
| cities and even in large towns. As for the magic users
| and witchers, they'd be as diverse as the world itself as
| they were trained from all parts of the world.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Correct, it makes as much sense to complain that Hobbits
| like potatoes.
| hot_gril wrote:
| When the media is based around folklore from a particular
| region, it's understandable to want it to match the
| region. I don't care about the casting, but if there were
| redcoat musketeers and samurai-looking warriors in a
| movie loosely based on old German fairy-tales, it'd be
| weird.
| hot_gril wrote:
| And the Romans are British-looking people who wear nothing but
| red, while Egypt's contemporary Ptolemaic period often gets
| mixed up with some much older era.
|
| Btw, there are 11 Spiderman movies by now. Wtf.
| colechristensen wrote:
| There are plenty of films produced in China and India about
| historical periods in China and India... watch them?
|
| Likewise there are few films in those markets set in historical
| European eras.
|
| A place tends to make films regarding their own cultural
| heritage, is this a problem or are you going to start
| complaining about the lack of Bollywood productions about King
| Arthur?
| salmo wrote:
| India has booming film industries, but I haven't looked into
| historical film. I'm normally there for the escapism. The
| fact that it's considered A place or A heritage is another
| problem. It's more diverse than Europe. Heck, often languages
| are closer to European languages than they are to the
| neighboring region. I wish I knew a lot more about that than
| I do.
|
| China has some pretty serious issues with the government's
| projection on their own history and their ability to dictate
| what is or is not made. Minor example: a Tang period film
| required a change to not period-accurate clothing because it
| was too immodest. Sorry, I can't remember the name.
| vintermann wrote:
| I would bet China and India's film industries aren't great on
| historical accuracy either. The past tends to be a strange,
| different country, where people care about a ton of unsexy
| stuff which we don't care for, and vice versa.
|
| That's not ideal for engaging stories, let alone courting
| nationalist audiences.
| tabtab wrote:
| Those aren't chubby pigs in modern video games, they're humans!
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I'd venture to guess that the way pigs looked in the Middle Ages
| is not the only historical oversight in video games.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Those pigs aren't inaccurately modeled. Of course they are just
| time travelling pigs!
| peterkelly wrote:
| Next article will be about how the inventory capacity of ancient
| warriors is grossly misrepresented.
| jrockway wrote:
| You're missing the difference between being unrealistic to
| improve gameplay, and unrealistic because someone forgot to
| check the historical details. Everyone knows that video game
| characters have an unreasonable ability to carry stuff; they do
| that not because they imagined that ancient people had larger
| pockets, but because the game would suck to play if they didn't
| do it. The wrong pig model doesn't affect gameplay, it's just
| something that nobody thought to check. If they had used the
| right one, it would still be the same game.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Medievalists are going to medieval, but I can't help but feel
| like the framing is strange...
|
| An article that describes how today's pigs are different from
| yesterpigs is indeed interesting, but do we particularly care how
| medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds
| more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs;
| neither of which detract from the game. It's probably a much more
| entertaining game for them...
| mcv wrote:
| > do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs
| are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual
| errors than the correctness of its pigs
|
| Of course, but this particular author chooses to focus on the
| pigs. Possibly because of personal expertise? The fact that
| other errors exist does not mean this one should be ignored.
|
| In any case, it's an interesting thing to learn about.
| ranger207 wrote:
| In particular, no, most people don't care about the accuracy of
| medieval pigs. In general though, realism is often important
| for its consistency and for the ability to link the game to
| outside resources.
|
| A lot of writers, artists, worldbuilders, etc like to
| incorporate realism into their creations, but in my opinion the
| more important part is having consistent systems, and realism
| is just used as a shortcut to consistency. Obviously a fantasy
| story with dragons isn't realistic, nor is a sci-fi story with
| superluminal starships. But what good media does is ensure that
| what it shows is consistent, that there's no magic or
| technology that would break the system or create a plot hole,
| and that in general what you see on the screen or read on the
| page is the natural result of background systems. Like, the
| article says that mature male pigs were rarely found in pens in
| the village; this is the result of the background system of how
| pigs are farmed. If you're watching a movie or playing a game
| and see a pigpen in a village and it only has sows and piglets
| (assuming you can somehow tell male and female pigs apart),
| then that hints that the creator knows about those background
| systems and takes them into account in their works.
|
| The second reason that realism is values, especially in games,
| is that it means that you can use your existing knowledge of
| real systems in game, and similarly use your game knowledge to
| better understand real systems. For example, I play a game
| called Hell Let Loose, a WWII multiplayer shooter whose maps
| are created with period maps and aerial footage. Going into the
| game for the first time, I may not know how the game plays or
| what its specific mechanics are, but I know that, for example,
| Pavlov's House is going to be a great defensive position.
| Similarly, when I watch a WWII documentary or show like Band of
| Brothers, I can see where they're fighting and recognize the
| location from my experience on the Normandy maps, and think
| about how difficult it is to take those objectives in the game.
| Of course, the game is a game, its systems aren't directly
| transferable to real life, and playing a game isn't nearly as
| difficult as real life would be, but because the core of the
| game system and the real system are the same, the game helps me
| better appreciate what the real soldiers went through.
|
| In my opinion, people fundamentally like making connections
| between things they know. Novelty is appreciated as a way to
| form new connections. If people can look at a piece of media
| and make connections to it, they'll enjoy it more. Similarly,
| if people can look at a piece of media and make connections
| within that media, making predictions as to what's going to
| happen, or connecting the actions of two characters when the
| media doesn't make an explicit connection, then they'll enjoy
| it more as well. These connections are facilitated by
| consistency and accurately following the rules of the systems
| in play. If the show is realistic, then people have an
| intuitive better understanding of those systems and can make
| more connections, increasing their enjoyment of the piece.
| Realism isn't required, but it offers more potential
| connections and helps ensure the background systems are being
| followed.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| _> do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs
| are?_
|
| Details like this are a big part of what makes historical
| fiction compelling! The more things one encounters that diverge
| unexpectedly, yet believably from the present day, the greater
| the sense of immersion.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| And the more we can learn from it! Ubisoft has shown an
| interest in using this series to teach history, with museum
| modes where you can harmlessly walk around, appreciate the
| architecture, and talk to locals about what life was like at
| the time.
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| Too bad their games are wildly inaccurate to the point of
| being another hollywodification of what we know it to be
| like https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-
| on-ass...
| bleuarff wrote:
| I'm (badly) paraphrasing Brett Devereaux, but for most people,
| knowledge of the past comes not from history books, but from
| popular culture. When pop culture is wrong about some aspect,
| the collective mental representation gets a little more distant
| from the historical reality.
| tomcam wrote:
| Having done tech support I think it's possible they made the
| decision deliberately on the assumption that users would
| complain the (period correct) swine looked wrong.
| regentbowerbird wrote:
| The way we perceive the past informs our perception of the
| present. Of course there are elements of fantasy in fiction,
| but the conceit is that outside of what is clearly fictional
| everything is real.
|
| In the case of Assassin's Creed, there is a special draw
| regarding historical accuracy since the game purports to tell
| the "real" story, so everything that's immediately outside the
| fiction should be accurate -- and in fact the games have been
| noted as arousing interest in history among players.
|
| This is why this kind of approximation can be problematic: if
| you play the original game from 2007, sure you'll disregard the
| conspiracy theory story, but will you notice that there are
| buildings in Jerusalem that didn't appear until centuries
| later, making the city look much more "arabic" looking than it
| historically was at the time? And if you think the modern pig
| is in its natural state, won't you have a subtly different
| outlook on modern animal husbandry?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I like to start from historically accurate then go from there
| in my hobby games.
|
| My friends ask why I care about accuracy. It's really simple!
| The world 1,000 or 2,000 years ago was VERY different than
| today, and trying to replicate it is usually enough to create
| an interesting and foreign world.
|
| If you want to morph things for gameplay's sake, you still can.
| But there's a difference between purposefully introducing
| inaccuracies and ignorantly doing so.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| My opinion is: make it correct unless it distracts from the
| story/gameplay. Most people won't notice but those who do will
| be happy. On a AAA game, you can afford to hire a couple of
| medievalists and get these details correct.
|
| Sometimes, factual errors are actually deliberate in order to
| improve gameplay. For example, accurate architecture may take a
| back seat to level design. Weapons may react in completely
| unrealistic ways, but it is understandable because in real
| life, people didn't fight with controllers. People go much
| faster than they should, distances are shortened, there is
| either too much or too little variety because having too much
| of the same thing is boring and having variation is every small
| detail is too expensive. All that is not just excusable, it is
| actually good design, it is a game, not a history lesson.
| Sometimes, though it is more relevant in movies, there is a
| deliberate inaccuracy just because that's what people expect
| and doing it differently would make the audience focus on an
| unimportant detail or mess with the pacing. And sometimes, it
| is just to save money that is better spend elsewhere.
|
| I don't think having period accurate pigs is any of these, so
| for me, it is a mistake, no more, no less. Not the worst, but
| it deserves a "bug report".
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Weapons may react in completely unrealistic ways
|
| And your character is also likely carrying more of them than
| their period counterparts, or in some cases, is humanly
| possible
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Loadouts in most RPGs are so absurd even with limits. I'm
| surprised no game (that I know of) capitalizes on this
| issue by giving you access to stuff but making you stage it
| strategically, eg leaving ammo along your line of retreat
| so you can surprise your pursuers. Maybe designers have
| found that it's too much prep and planning whereas players
| want action, but then again the From Software * _Souls_
| games suggests many players enjoy having to work at it.
| account42 wrote:
| Most games try really hard to make it impossible to paint
| yourself into a corner where you have to re-do a large
| stretch because you messed up. I guess somthing like this
| would be a great difficulty option - much better than
| bloated HP enemies.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Most weapons are fairly light. Could easily lug around a
| diablo inventory of swords in a large sturdy backpack.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| For how long? Over what type of terrain? How would it
| impact your stamina level? Could you fight with the
| backpack on? When you set it down to fight, could an
| opponent steal it?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A sword can weigh as little as 1 lbs. On average maybe
| 2-2.5. If the weight is sensibly allocated, that is not
| something that will significantly bog you down. If it is,
| you really need cardio.
| crtasm wrote:
| > it is a game, not a history lesson
|
| In the case of recent Assassins Creed games, it's both.
|
| "...freely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking
| Age to learn more about their history and daily life.
| Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover
| these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and
| stories curated by historians and experts."
|
| https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-
| creed/discovery...
| baud147258 wrote:
| Regarding the latest Assassin's Creed, that reminded me of
| a (long) blog post [0] by a historian, though it deals more
| in themes than all the historical inaccuracies present in
| the game. He then did another post on Expeditions: Rome, a
| game that claimed historical verisimilitude and all the
| mistakes it made [1].
|
| [0] https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-
| on-ass...
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/04/15/collections-expeditions-
| rome-a...
| MikePlacid wrote:
| Thank you for the links. From [0]:
|
| _The first two mission chains in England involve
| replacing the 'bad guy' anti-pagan king of Mercia with a
| good guy reasonable king Ceolwulf (and his good guy
| reasonable son) and rescuing the Dane-ruled settlement of
| Grantebridge where, I kid you not, we are told that this
| settlement was just a tiny village when the Danes moved
| in and built it up into a big, multi-cultural trading
| town and all of the local English folks are just totally
| OK with this and it is just the mean nasty Saxon army
| (led by a bad guy member of an evil conspiracy) who are
| ruining everything. Apparently all of the Danish vikings
| only really came by for infrastructure week.
|
| This problem is infinitely compounded by the way the game
| treats, or more correctly does not treat, the Norse
| practice of slavery._
|
| This, for me, is a much bigger - history-wise - problem
| than a color of pigs.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Among things that if done realistic, might take you out of
| the game experience, I'd also expect dialog. Leaving out how
| any given vocabulary and pronunciation has radically changed,
| I'd also expect just the flow of a conversation, what people
| valued and what they took for granted for things like social
| hierarchy and everyday customs would be completely
| alienating. I have no concrete examples, but I am sure that
| just observing interactions within a family or between a
| store keeper and a customer would be totally alien to anyone
| playing a modern video game.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| >... what people valued and what they took for granted for
| things like social hierarchy and everyday customs would be
| completely alienating
|
| One such historical custom which has gone by the wayside:
| an entire family used to share a single bed. If you had a
| stranger over, they were likely to hop in as well for the
| night.
| mizzao wrote:
| So, co-sleeping is totally consistent with the Lindy
| effect!
| q-big wrote:
| > On a AAA game, you can afford to hire a couple of
| medievalists and get these details correct.
|
| The financing of AAA titles is actually rather tight; the
| fact that AAA titles hardly ever do experiments in gameplay
| and the fact that in many studios crunch time happens show
| how tight the financial planning of AAA titles has to be to
| work out.
| kcexn wrote:
| This is not because the publishers can't afford to spend a
| bit more. But because they would rather capture every last
| dollar of profit.
|
| There's an argument to be made that getting some of these
| details right would improve their profitability. For sure
| people will be talking about the strange pigs wandering
| around outside the villages.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I would love to know what percentage of that budget has
| anything to do with development vs advertising. I see ads
| for games on buses, billboards, tv commercials, etc that do
| not seem cheap.
| ummonk wrote:
| A lot of the marketing happens post launch and is thus
| low risk as you can adjust the budget based on sales
| performance. The same isn't true for game development
| itself, which must be limited to a fixed budget based on
| anticipated future sales.
| q-big wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_
| video_g... for a list of estimated development and
| marketing costs for various AAA games.
| prox wrote:
| For Kingdom Come Deliverance I thoroughly enjoyed the focus on
| historical detail. It gives the game a creative edge and for me
| also an educational edge "a glimpse of medieval life."
| karolist wrote:
| This is my all time favorite game. Every few months I
| remember to look if they've announced KCD2 yet.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I know the leader of the project, Daniel Vavra.
|
| They dedicated a lot of time to getting all the details
| right.
| prox wrote:
| It really has enabled me to "get" medieval life more. How
| people and society worked together and what was important
| to them. And by proxy how my ancestors lived. Absolutely
| one of the best games!
| sedatk wrote:
| I'm enamored with this game. Its focus on historical accuracy
| is unmatched, and it has actually taught me a lot on medival
| life in Europe.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Yesterpig is a _great_ word
| [deleted]
| jaza wrote:
| We could make it the catalyst for a whole new vocabulary.
| Yesterman. Yesterland. Yesterlore. Yestergames. Yesterfood.
| Yestersex. Yesterlife. Yesterdeath. Yesterdog. Yestercow.
| Yestertech. Yesterworld.
|
| Or not.
| LegitShady wrote:
| no one cares about medieval pigs, and it won't get clicks, so
| the video game angle is there to draw interest from more normal
| people.
| frostburg wrote:
| You have no idea about how much Tuscan municipialities care
| about medieval pigs, especially if they can get a protected
| designation of origin out of them (also not everyone is
| willfully ignorant, but I support accurate medieval pigs in
| videogames, too).
| LegitShady wrote:
| if you have to live off selling articles that only Tuscan
| municipality staff care about, you're going to be eating a
| lot of beans and rice.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Well, it's not exactly the only blog post on this site about
| medieval pigs. At the bottom of the post there is a link to
| their other posts about those animals[0], of which there are 12
| at this moment. It seems like some medievalists at Universiteit
| Leiden are interested in pigs, and that looking at medieval
| video game pigs is just one of the ways they talk about them.
|
| [0] https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/tags/medieval%20pigs
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Some people certainly will.
|
| My wife trains horses. It irritates her to no end seeing
| characters in movies who supposedly spend their lives in the
| saddle, played by an actor who has clearly never been on
| horseback before.
| mirko22 wrote:
| Don't think this is important for gameplay at all, not like I
| expect skyrim to be historically correct, but as a random
| trivia and kinda of a tongue-in-cheek article I find this super
| interesting.
| Someone wrote:
| FTA: _With their ability to digitally animate fantastical
| fauna, videogames are the perfect medium for breaking with the
| stereotype and bringing academic insights to the larger
| public._
|
| I agree.
|
| Even ignoring that, there's a relatively broad interest in
| movie bloopers, where people complain about such things as
| _"2011 Chargers were replaced by the earlier models. You can
| easily tell it by the taillights"_
| (https://www.carthrottle.com/post/alqlmmp/) or _"Both
| Apatosaurs and Stegosaurs went extinct before the point of
| divergence of this alternate history"_
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1979388/goofs/). I think that
| naturally extends to game bloopers, and this is one.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| They state with only a few examples that medieval pigs were
| different. Pigs come with such variety it is hard to say that
| current depictions are wrong based on such a small sample.
| hardolaf wrote:
| They also state that the games are wrong despite many of these
| games having put in farm more period and location specific
| research than the author. The author cites a few translations
| of a few summaries of laws and a bunch of stuff about England,
| Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and then extrapolates across the
| entire medieval period and all of Europe.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| No. Modern intensive training of pigs is a change that's well
| within historical periods with extensive records. I guarantee
| you pigs are like dogs in that the huge majority of modern
| breeds are less than 200 (250 to be conservative) years old.
| Before that there were landraces and we know what they look
| like, at least roughly.
|
| Using modern pigs gives a false impression _even if I'm wrong
| about that_ because until after WW2 pigs in the West that were
| raised industrially were raised for lard more than lean meat.
| There have been huge changes in what most pigs look like in
| living human memory.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's wrong if modern pigs are the result of modern breeding and
| breeding techniques. Modern pigs are often (usually? almost
| always?) purebred, for instance, which isn't something you're
| going to get with pigs that wander around the woods herded like
| sheep.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| What might even be weirder is if you take modern pigs and let
| them run wild for just a few weeks they'll start looking very
| feral. It's bizarre.
| chongli wrote:
| Definitely an example of the Coconut Effect [1]. If they had
| consulted a historian versed in swine culture and produced
| period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird
| and alien the pigs look. People don't care about period accuracy,
| they care about art that matched their expectations.
|
| Suspension of disbelief is the operative word here. Trying to
| fight against it is tilting at windmills.
|
| [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect
| ziml77 wrote:
| The kung-foley point is the best example for me because I've
| seen fight scenes in old films that didn't have any of the
| sound effects. It was unsettling how quiet it was and it
| actually felt (more) fake.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not a gamer, but aren't games trying to differentiate
| themselves? A weird pig would be good thing.
| btilly wrote:
| The phrase "tilting at windmills" is an interesting one.
|
| It is a reference to Don Quixote attacking windmills because
| they were giants oppressing the people. Which, today, just
| seems ridiculous.
|
| However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills
| was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when
| the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every
| peasant and collect taxes there. Not only was it more
| efficient, but lords who forced their peasants to switch often
| raised taxes simply because it was easy to do so.
|
| This was all current events when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote.
| And therefore his audience would have been expected to
| understand that windmills truly WERE "giants oppressing the
| people"!
|
| No point. Just fun trivia about how different a modern phrase
| looks when looked at from the point of view of its history.
| Bakary wrote:
| Reading Don Quixote was fairly mindblowing in general because
| the humor seemed so modern... in a time when the novel as we
| know it was itself a recent invention.
|
| Now your fun fact makes it even more mindblowing.
| lupire wrote:
| Are you sure? If the windmill didn't make milling more
| efficient, and if hand milling at home was an effective tax
| dodge, people would avoid using the windmills.
|
| And the tax collector coming to the house is just as
| oppressive as being taxed at the windmill.
|
| A quick web search suggests windmills increased grain
| production by a factor of 5.
| Someone wrote:
| > However the main reason to switch from hand mills to
| windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to
| collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax
| collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there.
|
| I think you're mixing cause (larger windmills are more
| efficient, making it a win to centralize them) with effect
| (that makes it easier to tax flour production).
|
| If that were the main reason, we would have stories about
| people clandestinely milling at home. I'm not aware of any.
|
| (I also think, but am not sure, milling already was
| centralized before the introduction of wind power)
| stewbrew wrote:
| I assume people didn't have mills at home for the same
| reason most people of today don't have full blown data
| centers at home. People did have mortars though like
| today's people have PCs and smartphones.
|
| I think you're wrong to assume that of two things that co-
| evolved, one thing had to cause the other.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| You'd have a quern at home, at least in Scotland,
| probably most of England too.
| dllthomas wrote:
| People didn't have giant millstones at home, but (IIUC)
| had various forms of handmill at home at various times
| and places.
|
| Interestingly, per
| https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-
| did-... several Mediterranean cultures equipped their
| soldiers with handmills, with the Romans also including
| sickles so they could process grain from the fields they
| were marching near, allowing an earlier campaign season
| then were they forced to wait for it to be harvested.
| dllthomas wrote:
| > If that were the main reason, we would have stories about
| people clandestinely milling at home. I'm not aware of any.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quern-stone#Laws_against_use
|
| Laws against a thing often indicate that it was common
| enough to be a problem, although there are exceptions.
| Someone wrote:
| Thanks!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Home mills -- that were small enough to keep hidden from a
| surprise inspection -- might be fine for small amounts but
| unlikely efficient enough for full harvests.
| galt_drakkor wrote:
| Flour spoils much faster then unmilled grain. So the bulk
| of the grain would always be left as grain for storage.
| Armies would be the ones who would want to bulk mill an
| entire harvest taken from a region.
|
| For those without access to windmills, the daily grind
| would produce flour/ meal for that day.
| jlawson wrote:
| People did clandestinely mill at home. It was treated as a
| serious crime. There are specific historical laws about
| this and the punishments were pretty severe. It was
| something the lords were quite concerned about.
| scarmig wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see if the initial windmills when
| introduced were more efficient, post-tax and capex, than
| traditional methods.
|
| There's a parallel with grains: staples like rice and wheat
| are more legible to states than other alternatives like
| legumes, tubers, and starch plants, even though the latter
| were comparable in terms of calories generated by unit
| labor. E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax
| collectors. States which enforced cultivation of the
| legible grains had a greater tax base and outcompeted those
| that didn't.
| adwn wrote:
| That's not very convincing. Before the introduction of
| the potato, there were no below-ground alternatives that
| were superior to cereals in Europe and Northern Africa.
|
| > _E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax
| collectors._
|
| Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's
| above ground and very visible. Why should that be any
| less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?
| scarmig wrote:
| > Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's
| above ground and very visible. Why should that be any
| less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?
|
| It's a combination of factors. Cereals like wheat and
| rice tend to ripen seasonally and simultaneously. They do
| so visibly, and must be harvested soon after. So a state
| sends its tax collectors around when the grains are ready
| to be harvested, and the amount that was generated is
| immediately visible. They also keep well: tubers go bad
| relatively quickly (and can be kept underground until
| actually needed for consumption), while rice and wheat
| can be transported over long distances and times with an
| order of magnitude less loss.
|
| Consider the case of the Incas. As a civilization, they
| relied on two crops for calories and nutrition: maize and
| potatoes. Despite that, efforts at taxation primarily
| focused on maize, because it was so much better suited
| for taxes and commerce (though they did eventually invent
| a way to freeze dry potatoes).
| dllthomas wrote:
| Do you have a citation? I'm not nearly confident enough to
| think you're wrong, but I'm surprised early 1600s Spain
| wasn't already provisioned with wind- or watermills and I'd
| be curious to learn more of the context.
| btilly wrote:
| It was from in a philosophy course I took 30 years ago. I
| didn't keep the textbook, but I wish I had.
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| Today in the US the 3 music industry giants tax(via legally
| required license fees) the venues where musicians play
| instead of taxing the musicians for the exact same reason.
| The venue doesn't come and go as quickly and has a set
| location. Musicians change band names, people, etc often and
| are harder to track.
| rapind wrote:
| > tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes
| there
|
| I suspect that this individual collection raised the risk of
| getting a beating if the peasantry was in dire straits.
| (drought, raiding, over taxation, etc.).
|
| Inefficiency isn't all bad.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I love this.
|
| Similarly, the expression "pull yourself up by your own
| bootstraps" was originally used ironically or mockingly, as
| it is physically impossible. Some time in the early 20th
| century it began to be used as an unironic exhortation.
| Loughla wrote:
| I do love these. I wonder if there is a collection of these
| sayings that have shifted entirely to mean something else.
|
| Like "blood is thicker than water" was originally "blood of
| the covenant is thicker than water of the womb." The
| meaning is literally the opposite, but it got co-opted and
| changed at some point.
|
| These things are fascinating.
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| A pair of examples: "bought a pig in a poke" and "let the
| cat out of the bag." "Poke" is an archaic term for "bag"
| [0], related to "pocket."
|
| Apparently a common medieval scam was to try to sell a
| cat as a suckling pig, concealing the cat in a bag [1].
| One who buys such a pig in a poke is cheated. One who
| lets the cat out of the bag reveals a secret too soon.
|
| Note however that [2] argues that this etymology for lack
| out of the bag" is not plausible.
|
| [0] Etymology 2, https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/poke
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke
|
| [2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/let-the-cat-out-of-
| the-bag..., referenced from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Letting_the_cat_out_of_the_b...
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Poke means bag in Scotland. You get a poke of chips for
| example.
| scarmig wrote:
| I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon. Eggcorns
| aren't quite right, as they're more about mishearing a
| word or phrase in a way that still makes sense in context
| (e.g. Alzheimer's disease -> old-timers' disease).
| Mondegreens are about mishearing a word or phrase and
| substituting them for something different. Those are
| errors in interpreting phonic elements, but there's no
| misinterpretation of the words for these phrases/idioms;
| it's just disregarding the meaning entirely and
| substituting a new meaning.
| [deleted]
| dllthomas wrote:
| I am often amused and frustrated at the common
| institutional excuse of misbehavior being due to "a few
| bad apples" as though the saying were "a few bad apples
| are no big deal, get rid of them (or hide them elsewhere
| in the barrel) if anyone happens to notice them."
|
| I've heard that "a rolling stone gathers no moss" tends
| to differ in sense between the UK and the US as to
| whether "moss" is desirable.
| btilly wrote:
| The few bad apples saying actually dramatically reversed
| meaning.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/one-bad-
| apple-...
| dllthomas wrote:
| Right, that was my point exactly.
| yellowstuff wrote:
| That seems to be a popular internet myth, but without
| much evidence:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water
| Nition wrote:
| Another one I've seen recently circulating on the
| Internet is an idea that "The customer is always right"
| was originally "The customer is always right, in matters
| of taste". Also not true.
| Loughla wrote:
| That might be even better! Now there's no meaning other
| than what you, individually, choose to attribute to it.
|
| I love living languages.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| "Gangbusters" has become a sort of generic intensifier
| but the original phrase was something like "to come on
| like Gangbusters", referring to a radio show with an
| obnoxiously-noisy intro (it's on Youtube if you're
| curious). Increasingly distant metaphorical use and
| people falling out of familiarity with the origin of the
| phrase led us to modern constructions like "my tomatoes
| are going gangbusters!" which don't _really_ fit with the
| original usage.
| foobarian wrote:
| Pretty sure the origin of this in tech came from compilers,
| where it actually is almost magical which the analogy does
| drive home pretty well (though exaggerating a tiny bit).
| hnbad wrote:
| Don't know about that but the origin I'm aware of for
| "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" are the tales of
| Baron Munchhausen, who is supposed to be a fantastical
| liar telling tall tales that are clearly ridiculous.
| Specifically I think he retells an adventure that
| involves him pulling himself out of quicksand (which btw
| also does not behave in reality as it does in fiction) by
| pulling on his own bootstraps.
|
| So I guess the original use does kinda resemble "an
| incredible feat that strains belief" with the difference
| that it is supposed to be incredible because it's
| physically impossible to pull off. The current use for
| "making sensible spending decisions" seems to be the
| result of the phrase being overused to the point where
| the feats it describes become increasingly mundane.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I don't have experience with quicksand, but one can
| retrieve a stuck boot (that you're still standing in)
| from thick mud by pulling up on your bootstrap (or where
| it would be). You break the suction by lifting the heel,
| but the foot itself pulls out of the boot, so you have to
| free yourself by your bootstrap ... you just can lift
| yourself into the air that way!
| ouid wrote:
| I think it's still used that way. Exclusively. Someone
| saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is not
| claiming that it is possible to do so, they are cynically
| disclaiming their own responsibility in the act.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I have never heard that expression used unironically. I
| feel like the idea that there are people out there saying
| it in earnest is itself a meme that was never true.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| At least according to a few internet sources, it was in
| initially invented as a critique with the irony intended.
|
| Over time it became idiomatic speech for initiating
| something difficult
| jlawson wrote:
| It can and is used with both opposite meanings.
|
| The same as how "literally" means both "literally" and
| "figuratively", depending on the context.
| dllthomas wrote:
| > The same as how "literally" means both "literally" and
| "figuratively", depending on the context.
|
| I disagree with that analysis. It's true that "literally"
| is often used when the modified phrase is figurative, but
| that's not quite the same thing is it _meaning
| "figuratively"_ - were we to remove the "literally" the
| utterance would not be more likely to be interpreted as
| literal. The role it's serving is as an intensifier, and
| I contend that it's a fairly ordinary example of
| hyperbole. In the same way, when someone says "you left
| me waiting for days" we don't say that sometimes days
| means a handful of minutes depending on context, but that
| sometimes people exaggerate.
|
| (And I recognize that at least one sufficiently respected
| dictionary disagrees with me; I think they got it wrong.)
| mark_undoio wrote:
| I believe it's the origin of "bootstrapping" as a verb,
| in which it immediately becomes unironic technical
| jargon.
|
| i.e. as in getting a start-up off the ground or, when
| shortened further, "booting" a computer.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think you're correct about the origins. That said, a
| typically ironic idiom can still give rise to non-ironic
| derivative words.
| bena wrote:
| I don't think it's entirely non-ironic. I think the term
| acknowledges the inherent risk in the situation. You are
| attempting something statistically impossible. So many of
| these ventures do not pan out.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think we are obviously quibbling, but that's okay. I
| think it's not about risk but the meaning is simply
| making something from nothing, or making much from very
| little.
|
| I don't think booting my computer is inherently risky or
| statistically impossible
| bena wrote:
| Sorry, I was referring to the term bootstrapping with
| regards to startup companies.
|
| I agree that in reference to computer startup, it's just
| being cheeky.
| jakereps wrote:
| You've never heard of a bootstrapped startup? On this
| site?
| Bakary wrote:
| The term itself is not sarcastic but the concept
| acknowledges the inherent sarcasm of it, since the chain
| of programs must have an initial mover
| jaclaz wrote:
| On a similar theme I always liked Sir Winston Churchill on
| taxes:
|
| >We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into
| prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to
| lift himself up by the handle.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It's a great line, but it's highly misleading. You don't
| tax Nations, you tax richer individuals (more). So it's
| like asking a strongman to lift a child.
|
| The child is weak through no fault of it's own, and the
| strongman is well fed because the child spends all day
| preparing food for them.
|
| Instead we demand the children to carry oneanother.
|
| Sorry, but this sort of comment (Churchill's) smarts, as
| in the UK we've just faced a budget that very negatively
| impacted the poor and gave more to the wealthy. Alexander
| Boris de Pfeffle Johnson was a noted lover of Churchill,
| and I can't help feel that this sort of empty rhetoric
| would have been his (Johnson's) answer to why it was fine
| to reduce taxation on Champagne at a time of increasing
| poverty and after his government had spent years
| increasing the wealth gap.
| jaclaz wrote:
| I don't see why (or in what) it is misleading.
|
| The sentence (which is smart) can be read either as a
| funny, smart one or taken seriously, if you do the
| latter, you need to put it in its context, Free-Trade vs.
| Protectionism in very early 20th century:
|
| https://richardlangworth.com/taxprosperity
|
| BTW the sentence has been paraphrased from the original
| one.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well that's pretty wild, I can now add "windmills were a tax
| thing" to the pile of random facts I never thought I'd know.
| axiolite wrote:
| > period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how
| weird and alien the pigs look.
|
| That apparently wasn't a problem for the listed counter-
| example: "Kingdom Come: Deliverance"
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I don't know how truthfully they've handled it, but
| historical accuracy is one of the main selling points of
| KC:D. I've only heard about the game through word-of-mouth,
| but that's been the most repeated detail I've heard. Less
| fantasy and hollywood, and a more accurate representation of
| the time period.
|
| One of the main features listed on their Steam page:
|
| > Historical accuracy: Meet real historical characters and
| experience the genuine look and feel of medieval Bohemia.
| hnbad wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that the "historical accuracy"
| comes less from a medievalist perspective and more of an
| appeal to tradition. The characters and setting are often
| amazingly historically accurate in some parts while
| following the same old revisionist tropes in others. Given
| some of the political statements of the developers, this
| isn't all too surprising.
|
| It's a bit like reconstructing a vision of the 1950s US by
| exclusively looking at 1950s TV ads. Yes, you'll get a lot
| of details right to an astonishing extent but the result
| will not at all be representative of what living in the
| 1950s was actually like.
| njdvndsjkvn wrote:
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Except of course the very coconut that this effect is named
| after has long since died: TV and film doesn't use cococnuts
| for hooves anymore except when warranted, and people aren't
| weirded out by horse tread sounding like what horses sound
| like.
|
| The coconut effect exists as a self-reinforcing problem that is
| easily broken but for people going "but the coconut effect!".
| Repetition familiarises: if all the games you play start
| showing period-accurate pigs, then after a few games that force
| a bit more realism into your experience you stop going "my
| immersion!" and instead go "oh neat, this is what they looked
| like in the era this game is set in?" and then immediately move
| on because you're not here to start a period-accurate pig
| farming business.
|
| ...usually...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Representations of computer screens in movies generally fall
| under this category
| pjungwir wrote:
| That is a fun article, but they left out my favorite: the dial
| tone when someone hangs up.
|
| Speaking of phones, it's interesting to see movies' choices
| about the UI on mobile phones. Do they try to show something
| like a real phone, or do they give a simplified UI that the
| audience can read at a glance?
|
| I remember seeing the Net as a teen, and in the climactic scene
| when the bad guys were trying to break into the room, and
| Sandra Bullock was hacking their computer and waiting tensely
| for a progress bar to finish, while it slowly crept towards
| completion and the bangs on the door got louder, the audience
| could see it and read . . . "resolving IP address."
| nottorp wrote:
| I believe Matrix 2 had an actual proper hacking scene. All
| command line, showing a script exploiting some ssh
| vulnerability that was actually real at the time they filmed.
| detaro wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_ha
| c...
| Macha wrote:
| > But then, the film does take place in the future. Is
| Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running
| in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people
| to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a
| bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."
|
| Zalewski here is a security analyst.
|
| At least that's one thing that's improved, but I suppose
| this was the era of SQL injections in every second
| website.
| account42 wrote:
| Interactible computers in general are common in video games.
| But rarely does the interface even have nearly the complexity
| as a real OS. I imagine there must be some games that go all
| the way and run an actual OS in a VM or emulator though.
| Similarly to some games that let you play the
| predecessor/inspiration from an in-game device like e.g. Day
| of the Tentacle which includes a fully playable Maniac
| Mansion.
| javajosh wrote:
| DNS resolvers can be slow, ya know.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Period accuracy, especially in the context of medieval
| settings, is championed by a very small-yet-vocal minority of
| gamers. But it's a essentially a bad faith argument used to
| criticize the existence of non-white characters in a game.
|
| Basically, 'period accuracy' is to racists what 'ethics in
| gaming journalism' is to misogynists. But a Venn diagram of
| these two groups is pretty much just a circle.
| jsight wrote:
| Its kind of funny, but that article itself has some
| misconceptions. Bullets flying overhead don't sound like that.
| Its more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuuOiWgVZ0
| Kye wrote:
| I want my spaceships to rumble and whoosh.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >People don't care about period accuracy, they care about art
| that matched their expectations.
|
| Then let's not educate people as they might get upset to
| discover their assumptions were false.
|
| What if people start believing 2 + 2 = 5?
| dathanb82 wrote:
| Unless the purpose of the game is educational, I don't think
| it's incumbent on them to educate their players about
| anything. Just like I don't expect everyone who sells
| something at the Renaissance Faire to use medieval furnaces
| for their blacksmithing or to eschew lathes for turning wood
| bowls. It's not their responsibility.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| But the education will happen, whether you mean it to or
| not. Most people have nothing but what they see to base
| they're expectations on, so if they see your game, and
| don't specifically read about pig herding in the middle
| ages, your game comprises the total information in their
| head on the topic. Congratulations, you're an educator! Now
| take some responsibility.
|
| Your point about authentic fabrication methods is entirely
| orthogonal. It's really hard to see why you brought that
| up.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Perhaps you didn't mean to, but I think you've made an
| even stronger claim than @DeathArrow was trying to make.
| Following your logic, you have an obligation to all the
| English-learners who may believe your English errors are
| the proper way to write in English.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yes, I did, but not quite as strong as you're portraying
| it either. As an artist or other creator, you have to
| balance the inevitable impressions people will get
| against other concerns, notably that of never finishing.
| But you absolutely can't ignore it.
| cgriswald wrote:
| If your statement does not apply to your post, then the
| lines are blurry enough that your demand that people
| "take responsibility for it" seems far too prescriptive.
| Even claiming one " _absolutely_ can 't ignore it"
| (emphasis added) seem unsupportable.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Do you want to point out a specific error in my use of
| English that's bad enough to make me a hypocrite, or are
| you just being pedantic for the hell of it? Bright-line
| rules about what you must or mustn't do are an
| unreasonable expectation in the domain of creating
| complex artistic artifacts. But if you know that what you
| create has an effect on people, and you don't care
| whether that effect is good or bad, well, I don't see
| what other possible basis you could have for morality or
| ethics.
|
| This is barely debatable when it comes to chemical
| pollution, or building technology that enables predatory
| businesses, or even mental and ideological concerns like
| carelessly spreading falsehood because it benefits your
| political allies. Fiction is not so different, and in
| some ways just as powerful, just as dangerous. Why is it
| even a question whether this should be taken seriously?
| account42 wrote:
| There are over 300 comments in this thread alone. There
| are only so many big budget medieval video games. The
| impact of a single comment on the english education of a
| random reader is simply not comparable to that of a game
| getting the pigs wrong.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That responsibility is optional and it's fine for people
| to decline. It is also fine for someone like the author
| of this blog to highlight the topic so that some people
| may make choices to accurately depict pigs.
|
| It Is entirely unnecessary to bring morality into it.
| account42 wrote:
| The thing about morality is that the details can differ
| from person to person, including what should or should
| not be covered by morality. Nothing wrong with advocating
| for your beliefs, especially if it comes with an argument
| about the impact on others.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wasn't saying video games should educate people, I was
| referring about not meeting demands of the people with
| absurd expectation about reality.
| njdvndsjkvn wrote:
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| If everyone believes 2+2=5 and a video game tells them
| otherwise I think they would rather trust their gut than
| assume a video game of all things is correct.
| virusduck wrote:
| Total off topic, but I followed the link to read about the
| Coconut Effect. Not looking at the URL, I ended up about 10
| tabs deep before I realized it was friggin tvtropes!! I haven't
| been over there in a while, but I'm glad to see that site still
| has that effect on people.
| anyfoo wrote:
| But just like we've now come to accept again, through modern
| productions, that horses' hooves don't sound like coconut when
| running on dirt, we might start accepting that medieval pigs
| looked different.
|
| The question is rather how feasible that is to depict with
| consistency.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| the period accurate pigs don't look that weird.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Off topic, but this is why all guns sound like they are just a
| bucket of screws being shaken around. It may surprise movie
| goers to realize that guns don't make noise unless you cycle
| the action or fire them.
| dathanb82 wrote:
| "I wouldn't use a gun that sounded like that" - me to my wife
| just about every time we watch an action movie
| majormajor wrote:
| I can't think of an example of this off the top of my head,
| do you have one?
|
| I'm just coming up with a lot of counter-examples - anytime a
| character with a gun is sneaking around in silence, when not
| actively using the gun. Like, I can't think of a time a
| character tried to sneak around but took a step and their gun
| rattled...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Guns being handled (picked up, shifted to the other
| shoulder, handed out, just any time they're being handled)
| tend to make lots of little clacking noises in movies and
| TV, as if all the parts are really loose and rattling
| against one another.
| smcl wrote:
| It's the little subtle clacking sound that some games play
| when player moves around or a gun is handled in some way.
| Like here:
| https://twitter.com/intellegint/status/1576087308121432065
| - when the player starts running there's a rattling noise
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is one of those things that's hard to recall, but
| impossible to miss once it's pointed out. In that respect,
| I'm sorry. Watch this video from the otherwise-on-point
| John Wick.
|
| Everything just .. rattles. Even the magazines, like
| they're just bags of bullets or something.
|
| Nevermind the noises the knives make when he picks them up.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIalODmFrZk
|
| or
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IDtenBMN0o
| majormajor wrote:
| The noise when he tilts the rifle is a really good
| illustration, thanks.
|
| Some of the other ones I honestly never even noticed,
| like picking it up off the stand - I would've thought
| that was just the stand shaking from having it taken off.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| It's the sound they make when they are picked up or handed
| out.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I think he's referring to the ka- _clack_ of gun cocking
| noises that is used when a weapon is drawn, even if it 's a
| weapon that doesn't have to be cocked.
| mcv wrote:
| Sometimes, if the other person doesn't get the hint, they
| cock it again!
| Pxtl wrote:
| The simple "punch" sound is even more obvious example of
| movie sound design tropes. I remember getting into a fight as
| a child and being surprised at how quiet hitting a dude was.
| jaclaz wrote:
| As a side note, the apex of coconut use is in Monty Python and
| the Holy Grail:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai...
|
| >Originally the knight characters were going to ride real
| horses, but after it became clear that the film's small budget
| precluded real horses (except for a lone horse appearing in a
| couple of scenes), the Pythons decided their characters would
| mime horse-riding while their porters trotted behind them
| banging coconut shells together. The joke was derived from the
| old-fashioned sound effect used by radio shows to convey the
| sound of hooves clattering.
| baud147258 wrote:
| And on the same subject, quoting the tvtropes article linked
| above:
|
| > Ironically, in a major sense-of-humour failure, Monty
| Python founder Eric Idle threatened to sue an independent
| film-maker who used the "that's not a horse - you're using
| coconuts!" gag, claiming he had originated it for Monty
| Python and the Holy Grail. Saner counsel prevailed, when it
| was pointed out to him exactly how old the gag was, and that
| (for instance) a radio comedy show Idle himself had written
| for had used this gag way back in the 1960's - ten years
| before the Holy Grail movie. And the BBC radio comedy
| archives preserved older examples still...
| LegitShady wrote:
| Comevius wrote:
| It's a legitimately interesting observation that we think that
| domesticated pigs always looked like they do now, when they
| didn't, and without people like him researching these things we
| would be equally wrong about many things concerning history.
|
| He plays an important part in preserving history. I don't know
| how we ended up in a situation where selling advertisement on
| the internet is a more respectable job than preserving history,
| but it explains a lot.
| coldpie wrote:
| Worked on me and I learned something interesting. Seems like a
| win-win!
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Oh come on. Fun read.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Most notably, however, the medieval pig was not naked and pink
| at all, but covered in long dark hairs. In appearance, it was
| therefore not dissimilar to a boar with which it was often cross-
| bred. Even in the seventeenth century - long after the middle
| ages - domestic pigs retained some of these traits, as the
| drawing below from 1610 shows._
|
| This seems uncomfortably close to perpetuating falsehoods about
| modern pigs, which are not uniformly "naked and pink" but in fact
| often are covered in hair and come in many colors. And I'm not
| talking about cross-bred boars. I'm talking about pigs. I've seen
| pitch black pigs with more hair than a bear. Hairy pigs spotted
| like dalmatians. Pigs with hair as red as a ginger's. Pigs that
| are mostly pink with black splotches, or mostly black with pink
| splotches.
|
| As for pigs being fast, pig racing is a sport today. Some pigs
| today are athletic with long legs and move very fast. The fat and
| lazy ones are probably that way due to their lifestyle as much as
| their genetics.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| One video game pig I really enjoy is the giant hog enemies in
| Bloodborne, the first you encounter being in a sewer of Central
| Yharnam. Imagine my surprise when I found out that this pig was
| actually based on an urban legend from the era of feral hogs in
| the sewers of London (victorian era London being the model for
| Yharnam in the game). It's these kinds of details in From
| Software games that really make me appreciate the lengths they go
| to and the effort involved in creating the worlds for their
| games.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| kotlin2 wrote:
| lordnacho wrote:
| acoup blog is great for this kind of thing, I've spent hours
| reading about all the inaccuracies in historical stuff.
| erikig wrote:
| https://acoup.blog/ - For those as lazy (or lazier) than I
| bashmelek wrote:
| The article mentions pigs wouldn't be wandering the village
| streets, but as a counter example there were the "St Anthony's
| pigs" owned by the friars that were legally protected and had
| free run of the city. Dante alludes to these in Paradiso, where
| they took on a metaphor of some friars' greed.
| Contax wrote:
| And you can still find loose pigs in some places. I personally
| know the one in La Alberca, Salamanca, Spain, named San Anton
| (from Antonius/Anthony), the pig wanders the streets for months
| being fed by random villagers until it's raffled on San
| Antonio's day.
| kixiQu wrote:
| I have read that perceptions of pigs as dirty differing in
| various cultures comes back to whether pigs in that region were
| raised as garbage-scavengers or as wild-feeders. Fun to think
| about!
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Total tangent, but you just made me realize how fast humans could
| have lost our fur in our past. This is a contentious issue in the
| debate between hypotheses of savannah and semi-aquatic ecological
| orgigins. But wow, it could have happened quick.
| jhbadger wrote:
| And it is clear we still have the genes for full-body fur, they
| are just turned off normally. They can still be turned on in
| some cases (hypertrichosis)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertrichosis
| dTal wrote:
| Note that pigs are sexually mature around 1 year old, so their
| generations are rather shorter than ours (especially
| domesticated pigs, which we tend to kill young). If it took
| pigs 500 years to lose their fur, it might have taken humans
| 10,000.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| 10000 years is not that long in evolutionary terms either.
| waffle_ss wrote:
| The common ancestor from which all of today's Homo sapiens
| can trace a shared lineage to (i.e. the oldest branch
| point) is thought to be only 5,000 to 15,000 years ago: htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point#Of_H..
| .
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| This is absurd. You are citing computer models that
| assume no geography and random mating. The MRCA is around
| 150,000 years old and probably from east Asia, and the
| identical ancestors point must be older than that and
| originating in Africa.
|
| When a sentence starts with "given the false
| assumption..." it is best not to adopt the conclusion as
| a fact.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| But not unprecedented either. Tibetans got their high-
| altitude adaptation in perhaps as short as 3000 years.
| Andeans have a different high altitude adaptation which
| took no more than 11,000 years.
| hathym wrote:
| [deleted]
| WJW wrote:
| It's cold plenty often in Europe, but no fur is needed. We
| just wear clothes.
| hathym wrote:
| It was a joke
| ambyra wrote:
| Reminds me of a passage in Jesse Schell's game design book.
| Playtesters were confused seeing flags of pirate ships blow
| forward, toward the front of the ship. They were told that
| sailing ships have the wind at their backs, so everything blows
| forward. However, so many playtesters were confused and made
| comments that they just made the flags blow back.
|
| Maybe it was the same with the pigs; people just want to see pigs
| squealing around town, adding to the atmosphere of the game.
| tpurves wrote:
| Okay, lot of bad takes here. As a real-world sailor, here is
| how this works. A flag will only stream forwards in the special
| case of sailing dead down wind (DDW). An even in this case, the
| flag will tend to be limp as the boat will likely accelerate to
| close to the speed of the wind (dependent on length/hullspeed
| of the tall ship relative to wind strength etc.). Sailing ships
| don't often sail DDW because this is not the fastest point of
| sail. It is usually advantageous, and common, to sail at a
| slight angle to the wind.
|
| On all these other points of sail, the sails are bending the
| wind around the boat and there is a generally smooth, attached,
| laminar flow of air on both sides of the sail (if you are doing
| it right). Even square sails work like this, even though they
| are not an ideal airfoil shape. This mean the airflow is
| parallel to the sails. And the flag would also follow this
| direction and flow close to parallel to the sails as well.
|
| There is a concept of apparent wind. The flags will follow
| apparent wind which is the vector sum of the true wind plus the
| boat's velocity. That wind direction, combined with the sails
| effect of twisting the local wind direction, is the wind that
| the flag is experiencing.
|
| Generally the play testers are right, blowing straight forward
| is usually wrong.
|
| here is a picture of a flag blowing on a tall ship that is
| sailing across the wind:
| https://sailtraininginternational.org/app/uploads/2016/06/ve...
| perilunar wrote:
| What a tough choice: make it correct, or pander to the
| ignorant? /s
| treeman79 wrote:
| Have it be correct. Then include a short dialog Where a
| salior me asks about it and the captain makes fun of him
| somedude895 wrote:
| I love this!
| fartsucker69 wrote:
| Damn in my next game I'll have to make all the NPCs
| unvaccinated and afraid of radiation in nuclear power plant
| cooling tower vapor
| Tao3300 wrote:
| It _is_ a tough choice! See also foley work for nature
| documentaries. I don 't even think it's ignorance so much as
| intuition - even if mistaken - is a central component of
| aesthetics. There's an expectation that it should sound like
| this, it should blow that way, etc.
| tsol wrote:
| Yeah that seems like a strange choice. Why not just keep it
| in and let people figure out eventually that they just don't
| know how boats work?
| bentcorner wrote:
| There's a ton of compromises like this in video games. Like
| "shotgun=short range damage" or the ability for players to
| alter their trajectory mid-air. Similar changes are often
| made in the name of atmosphere.
|
| Even AC: Black Flag does this the "wrong" way:
| https://youtu.be/6JwjuwPW8hg?t=891
| perilunar wrote:
| Everyone does it the 'wrong' way, and we end up with a
| bunch of ignorant people who don't understand that a flag
| on a sailing boat indicates apparent wind [0].
|
| It's all very well to claim 'atmosphere', but shit like
| this ruins the atmosphere for people who notice the
| details.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_wind
| eru wrote:
| > It's all very well to claim 'atmosphere', but shit like
| this ruins the atmosphere for people who notice the
| details.
|
| Alas, you are in minority there.
| adrianN wrote:
| Clearly this needs to be a config option!
| ido wrote:
| Because instead of assuming the game is correct and
| assuming their understanding is wrong, they would complain
| the game got it wrong.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| This is why bathrooms on ships are called the head. They were
| placed at the front of sailing ships so the wind would blow the
| smells away.
| msrenee wrote:
| So, the idea that sails work by the wind blowing on them from
| behind is a common misconception. They actually work like an
| airplane wing in some ways.
|
| I'm going to skip trying to remember all the technical
| details from the last time I sailed anything and just say
| that the head is at the head of the boat, but it has nothing
| to do with "blowing the smells away". Boats do not always
| sail the direction the wind is blowing. We'd have never got
| anywhere before marine engines if that were the case.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > Boats do not always sail the direction the wind is
| blowing. We'd have never got anywhere before marine engines
| if that were the case.
|
| Seafarers would not learn how to sail against the wind
| until the early Christian era. Still, they got somewhere
| even before that.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Seafarers would not learn how to sail against the wind
| until the early Christian era. Still, they got somewhere
| even before that.
|
| You're referring to the Lateen sail that appeared in the
| eastern Mediterranean as early as 100AD, but it was
| imported from possibly Egypt or the Persian Gulf, so its
| origin is older and elusive. But the spritsail can also
| sail upwind and is far older, only appearing in Greco-
| Roman navigation in the 2nd century BC.
| ciceryadam wrote:
| Polynesian expansion to Eastern Islands and Hawaii wasn't
| a small feat.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| You're speaking universally, but what you're describing is
| only true about _fore-and-aft rigged_ sails.
|
| During the "Age of Sail" those were not common for
| oceangoing ships, which predominately used square rigged
| sails and would primarily or exclusively run downwind.
| crdrost wrote:
| Square rigs do not sail directly downwind, at least not
| if they have multiple masts. You always sail at an angle
| and tack the yards appropriately. Otherwise the
| foremast's sails would luff.
|
| Square masts can sail upwind, it's not as effective but
| you can get 50 or 55deg into the wind.
|
| Sure, they "primarily run downwind"... the same way cars
| "primarily drive on asphalt." It's not that they can't
| drive on gravel or brick or off-road, it's that during
| the Age of Sail the main priority was swift conveyance
| and obviously if that's your priority you try to get back
| on the highway as soon as you can.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Not sure why you're objecting, here. No one said
| "directly," and "primarily" specifically leaves room for
| the fact that they could sail into the wind.
|
| Maybe you missed the context: the comment responded to
| the claim that it's a "misconception" that "sails work by
| the wind blowing on them from behind."
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| One time sailing with my dad we tried to launch from a
| sand spit after the wind came up. Each time we tried we'd
| get blown back on. We then tried doing it with the sails
| down and paddling like mad and we made it. We found we
| could point about 45 degrees into the wind with the sails
| still down. And so we just tacked across the bay to the
| dock like that.
| mcv wrote:
| I once tried tacking against the wind through a gap
| between two lakes that acted like a funnel. The funnel
| effect created such strong waves that I couldn't get my
| boat to turn into the wind. Eventually I gave up and
| tried it on the motor, but it was too weak to power
| against the waves and the wind. So what I ended up doing
| was sailing, tacking, but using the motor to force the
| boat through the wind for the tack. That worked, but it
| was one of the weirder hacks I've done in sailing.
|
| (My English sailing terminology might be incorrect; I'm
| Dutch, and sailing terminology is the only area of
| language that I only know in Dutch.)
| eloff wrote:
| That would also throw me, it seems intuitive from our land
| based experience that the flag blows backward with moving
| things as they push through the air. Like flags on cars. But
| sailing vessels are propelled by the wind, and usually move
| slower than the wind as well, so the flags would blow with the
| wind, forward. I'm sure sailors would not get confused about
| it, but for people who don't have that experience it seems
| counter-intuitive. Now if you had a sailing ship moving faster
| the wind, which is actually possible, I guess the flag would
| blow backward, well at an angle, because I think you have to be
| moving at an angle to the wind to go faster than it.
| pmontra wrote:
| Modern sailing boats sail windward too, usually at an angle
| not greater than 45 degrees. Flags blow 45 degrees backward.
| Old ocean vessel didn't sail much against the wind. They were
| not built for that, hull and sails.
|
| America's Cup foiling boats sail faster than the real wind in
| any direction (even 3 times as much) so they always
| experience an apparent wind against them, same as a car or to
| a lesser degree a bicycle. However they don't have flags, I
| just checked on videos. They would blow backwards at a small
| angle, just as on cars.
| mcv wrote:
| > America's Cup foiling boats sail faster than the real
| wind in any direction
|
| Against the wind maybe, but I don't see how that's possible
| sailing before the wind. They're probably never going
| completely before the wind but instead alternating between
| broad reaches[0].
|
| [0] I had to look that one up. Sailing terms are one of
| those things I only know in Dutch, and the English terms
| are completely alien to me in a way almost nothing else is.
| pmontra wrote:
| You might want to check the diagrams and animations at
| https://sailing-blog.nauticed.org/americas-cup-apparent-
| wind...
| mcv wrote:
| Nice animations! They explain a lot. And this is exactly
| what I mean: they're going from broad reach to broad
| reach (and not even that broad a reach!) instead of going
| straight before the wind, because they need a sideward
| component to the wind force.
| amlozano wrote:
| For sailing maybe not, but a vehicle can in fact be made that
| can go downwind faster than the wind
| https://youtu.be/yCsgoLc_fzI
| nroets wrote:
| Sailing downwind faster than the wind is possible.
| "Apparent wind sailing"
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_sailing
|
| Even more astonishingly are the remote controlled sail
| planes than not only exceed the speed of the wind, their
| performance is limited by the sound barrier. "Dynamic
| soaring" https://newatlas.com/aircraft/dynamic-soaring-
| speed-record-s...
| mcv wrote:
| I think it's important to distinguish between downwind
| sailing and sailing before the wind, which is straight
| downwind, and cannot possibly go faster than the wind
| (you'd have a perpetuum mobile if you could do that).
|
| From what I understand, faster-than-the-wind downwind
| sailing involves tacking between broad reaches, where the
| wind still comes in at an angle.
| ummonk wrote:
| They won't blow forward if you're tacking into the wind though.
| kgilpin wrote:
| Square rigged ships (the pirate ship most people imagine) are
| designed primarily for speed running with the wind. They
| would sail more or less down a line of longitude to a trade
| wind and then sail in the direction of that wind. They could
| tack of course but they were really not very good at sailing
| upwind and that was essentially a design trade off to make
| them better at sailing in the trade wind.
|
| Ship builders of that time did, of course, know how to make
| more maneuverable ships with different types of rigging.
| These would all be used for different jobs, eg coastal and
| fishing.
|
| But for long distance transport, speed with the trade wind
| was the most important consideration.
| somat wrote:
| I did a quick survey of boat games.
|
| sea of thieves (rare) does it right. flags fly with the wind.
|
| black wake (mastfire) wrong. flags fly with the boat.
|
| skull and bones (ubisoft) wrong flags fly with boat.
|
| ac black flag (ubisoft) wrong flags fly with boat.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| So pirates only sailed in one direction?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Sailing ships have to tack to sail against the wind, so to an
| extent, yes
| smsm42 wrote:
| No, with skillful use of sails and maneuvering you can go any
| direction, even into the wind:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)
|
| That applies to any sailing ship, whether it is manned by
| pirates or not, of course.
| Retric wrote:
| It's often described that way, but tacking doesn't really
| let you sail directly into the wind.
|
| Instead you combine two vectors which on net result in the
| ship moving in the direction you want on average. But, with
| noticeable limitations if you also want to avoid obstacles
| etc.
| msrenee wrote:
| The flags wouldn't be blowing straight to the bow of the
| boat tbough. On a tacking course, they'd be blowing
| towards the stern +/- 20 degrees.
| mcphage wrote:
| Huh? How did you conclude that from what you read?
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Pigs were recorded in Domesday as having woodland to support
| them. Note that woodlands supporting pigs was primarily comprised
| of oak, since the pigs fed on the acorns they dropped.
|
| Source 1: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/discover-
| domesd...
|
| In the modern world, you can manage about 5 pigs per acre. You
| should be able to do that many pigs or more per acre in the
| medieval world since the animals were physically smaller for the
| most part. So in an 80 acre pannage woodland, expect about 400
| swine.
|
| Some tree types are far more damaged by pig foraging than others
| since, if they don't get the yummy acorns, they tend to dig up
| roots, eat the saplings and do other damage. So the oak and the
| pig are good neighbors. The elder or the olive tree, or even the
| wild apple tree, all tend to suffer far more damage when used as
| pannage.
|
| Source 2: https://acrcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Pigs-and-
| Trees....
| soco wrote:
| I imagine a pig won't get acorns the whole year round - so
| outside acorn season there will be enough damage done.
| jimmywetnips wrote:
| Why does a marketing manager at Scylla know so much about
| pannage lmao
| OJFord wrote:
| Answer one: we all have our hobbies; actually pig rearing is
| a bit quaint but perhaps not as obscure a hobbie as you might
| think. Like competitive marrow growing or something.
|
| Answer two: pig farmers have sons and daughters who don't
| necessarily follow in their footsteps, just as you and I
| probably know more about <what our parents did/do> than the
| average <what we did/do>.
| moss2 wrote:
| The Hundred Acre Wood can support 500 Piglets
| tomxor wrote:
| > pigs fed on the acorns they dropped
|
| I walked some extremely undulating oak woodland valleys
| recently, which seemed oddly absent of squirrels but perhaps
| that's normal close to a windy coastline - as a result the
| floor was completely coated with acorns. I can imagine the more
| agile swine depicted would be far more suited to gobbling them
| up in such a challenging landscape; I'm pretty sure a modern
| pig would have little chance of safely navigating the slopes.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| In Spain now the best pigs (for eating) are fed foraging on
| acorns.
| pezezin wrote:
| Yes, I'm from Extremadura (west of Spain), and we have _a
| lot_ of pigs roaming on the fields. Cows and sheep too,
| just drive down any road and you will see them.
| markdown wrote:
| A pig gone feral will adapt very very quickly. The'll get
| fitter, their hide and hair thicker. Within a year a pink
| factory pig will be quickly transformed. They're very
| intelligent and would have no trouble handling that terrain.
| ijidak wrote:
| Wow. Do you have a reference for this? That is interesting!
| markdown wrote:
| Just personal experience. I googled and found this:
|
| > "Any pig that gets out can revert back in a matter of
| months to a state where it can exist in the wild," said
| Brown. "It will get hairy, grow tusks and get aggressive.
| They're so good at adapting, and with their scavenging
| nature, they can get by pretty much anywhere."
|
| https://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/outdoors/2007/11/domes
| tic...
| tomxor wrote:
| Oh interesting, I had assumed some level of gradual genetic
| changes in domestication were responsible. So you are
| suggesting it's mostly phenotypical changes that could even
| be somewhat reversed in an individual... I wonder how far a
| new born would revert to what is being depicted in the
| illustrations.
| markdown wrote:
| I can only speak from personal experience (what I've
| seen), but I googled and found this:
|
| > "Any pig that gets out can revert back in a matter of
| months to a state where it can exist in the wild," said
| Brown. "It will get hairy, grow tusks and get aggressive.
| They're so good at adapting, and with their scavenging
| nature, they can get by pretty much anywhere."
|
| https://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/outdoors/2007/11/domes
| tic...
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but it makes me wonder if free range forest
| pigs could help prevent major forest fires by keeping brush down.
| exhilaration wrote:
| They don't stay in forests hence "feral pigs are widely
| considered to be the most destructive invasive species in the
| United States": https://nyti.ms/3TLKZRy
|
| Check out this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeGyVrcS9eo
| shitpostbot wrote:
| [deleted]
| roywiggins wrote:
| Similar pig lifestyles found a second wind:
|
| Hogs of New York https://qz.com/1025640/hogs
| cmauck10 wrote:
| I think this strikes a common theme throughout much of the gaming
| and production industry.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Well, we do have the Cinta Senese breed:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Il_Pa...
|
| that is (still today) actually very similar to what the Author
| describes as "medieval pigs".
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| I thought one of the most interesting points of the article was
| towards the bottom. Part of inaccuracy is that you'll be
| wandering around the village in the game and you'll find adult
| pigs in pens. It sounds like pigs were mostly free-range and in
| the woods for their adult life. Later on, as the "wilderness"
| shrank they transitioned to more of a farm animal.
| skybrian wrote:
| It sounds a lot like sheep and shepherds. Hopefully, modern
| ideas of how sheep were taken care of are more accurate?
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Not medieval times, but when my grandfather was a kid (nearly
| 100 years ago now), the pigs would roam his Sicilian town and
| its outskirts. He was about 6 when he decided to piss off a
| sow in a field. It mauled him and near killed him.
| masklinn wrote:
| That's still standard in Corsica (and I think Sicily though
| less sure), local pigs are partially feral.
| usrusr wrote:
| Parts of Corsica, other parts seem to be run by a small
| breed of cattle who keep pockets of human tenders around.
|
| Observing the pigs at the Col de Vergio I imagined to
| notice a pattern of the bigger/older pigs venturing
| further away into the wild, as if they eventually
| developed a certain nagging suspicion but were too
| trusting minds to really act on it.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I love this on a deep level. Great writing.
|
| 'Imagined to notice' is a lovely way of embracing those
| flights of fancy.
|
| The imagery of the older pigs subconsciously coming to a
| conclusion they'll never quite get to really touched me.
|
| Thank you.
| yreg wrote:
| I visited Georgia (the country) a few years ago and their
| pigs were roaming freely around the villages.
|
| Here's a photo I took: https://imgur.com/a/ehETWOK
| MikePlacid wrote:
| You could have also looked for pigs and cows at their
| _tea_ plantations. Kinda surreal view.
| yreg wrote:
| I had no idea they had tea plantations, that's kinda
| surprising. Seems I need to go back.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| They are probably much harder to come by than in my days,
| but still exist:
|
| https://www.teaandcoffee.net/feature/2061/georgia-works-
| revi...
|
| _With government support and private-sector interest,
| Georgia aims to rebuild its once highly regarded and
| significant tea industry - dating back to the Russian
| Empire - that was destroyed following the collapse of the
| Soviet Union.
|
| In its history, first in the Russian Empire, then in the
| Soviet Union, Georgia played a crucial role in the tea
| market, producing at its peak up to 133,000 tonnes of
| packed tea per year from nearly 70 species, enjoying
| demand not only within the country, but also in some
| export destinations, including Mongolia, Iran and
| Afghanistan. However, this ended with the collapse of
| Soviet Union, when communism-style, tea-growing
| cooperatives appeared not to be ready for any competition
| with import supplies.
|
| As a result, the tea industry was almost completely
| ruined, as annual volume of production dropped to nearly
| 4,000 tonnes. Approximately 95 percent of tea plantations
| have been closed, while out of nearly 100 tea factories,
| only 12 are operating now._
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| oh boy, arent they like 200 kg of angry meat?
| wahern wrote:
| As a kid I briefly lived in a rented trailer on a
| smallish farm which grew mustard greens and raised hogs.
| The owner was missing half an ear, taken by a hog. At
| least, that was the story he told when he caught me one
| day about to stick my hand into the hog pen. True account
| or not, the lesson is true all the same: hogs eat people,
| and angry or hungry hogs are not to be trifled with.
| OJFord wrote:
| But some can be truffled with.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Big enough that when the cousin he was with returned with
| adult help, the sow had shredded all of his clothes and
| he had bites all over his body.
| rodgerd wrote:
| The largest domestic breeds push up to 300 to 400 kilos.
| We had one free-range pig on our farm that was certainly
| over a quarter-tonne, and she was agile enough that she'd
| occasionally run down chickens and eat them, and jaws
| strong enough to chew up cow skulls left over from home-
| kill.
|
| Pigs are generally smart and friendly if they haven't
| been mistreated. I would not want to mess with one.
| jimmux wrote:
| People like to joke about all the native Australian
| animals that can kill you, but the animal I was most
| afraid of as a farm kid was the feral pigs. I saw photos
| of recently shot pigs that were too big to fit on the
| back of a ute, and often found small trees completely
| uprooted by them.
|
| Fortunately the largest feral pigs I ever ran into were a
| litter and a small sow that preferred to scatter than
| stand their ground.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I've seen wild hog videos of them charging forward, full
| tilt against much larger animals. Things that would eat
| pigs for dinner, I tell you, they don't care and their
| charges mess you up.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is a funny quirk of evolution that herbivores or
| mostly herbivorous omnivores often end up being more
| aggressive than predators. The predator would prefer
| dinner that doesn't fight back!
| sequoia wrote:
| On an extended visit to a small village in Mexico where the
| pigs would wander, I made a sport of stalking the piglets
| and attempting to pick them up. I achieved my aim once and
| the mother sow came charging at me & thereby convinced me
| to yield up the piglet toot suite. No mauling ensued thank
| goodness.
| wincy wrote:
| FYI, tout suite is a French term meaning immediately. The
| toot suite sounds like where the hogs go on holiday.
| sequoia wrote:
| "toot suite" is slang in English, an intentionally
| incorrect derivation from the French. But it probably is
| where the hogs go as well :)
| bigiain wrote:
| > The toot suite
|
| Claiming as my band^h^h^h^hMastodon app name.
| palata wrote:
| I did not know it was a thing in English! This said, in
| French it is "tout de suite", but apparently both are
| correct in English.
| tempestn wrote:
| Since the second 't' in tout isn't voiced and the 'de' is
| very quick and blended in, "tout de suite" sounds like
| "toot suite" to an English ear, hence the 'de' often
| being dropped (as well as spellings like the above).
| palata wrote:
| Yes, in French it tends to be pronounced "tou tsuit" (if
| I can spell it this way :D).
| umanwizard wrote:
| Calling it "correct" is maybe an exaggeration. It's an
| extremely colloquial, jokey intentional misspelling.
| robnado wrote:
| If I may invoke Muphry's law, the french term is "tout de
| suite"
| Beldin wrote:
| Then I'll happily contribute my second improvement of
| french: suivite.
|
| (For the curious, the first one is "toujourd'hui". And
| yes, this is tongue-in-cheek -- until these catch on and
| I'm celebrated by the Academy Francaise. Then it's Very
| Serious Business and was always intended as such, this
| post notwithstanding)
| emmelaich wrote:
| It's actually "Toot Sweets" :-)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMFha1nmeXc
|
| The song "Toot Sweets" from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"
| jaclaz wrote:
| Not exactly "roaming in the town", but just last week I was
| talking with someone that remembered how - in the late
| 1950's or early '60's - her family (in Tuscany countryside)
| had usually three or four pigs that were routinely brought
| (by her, at the time 8 or 9 years old) to the nearby woods
| and it happened more than once that one of them would flee
| and get to the village, and be later brought back by this
| or that neighbour.
| jccooper wrote:
| In villages they probably managed to mostly keep the pigs
| under control, but in towns and cities there do seem to have
| been free-roaming pigs. They were known to eat babies on
| occasion, and the French, at least, liked to put them on
| trial for this (and execute them).
| hardolaf wrote:
| I suspect that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has the pigs in
| their work accurate to what it was at the time and the author
| is taking sources about specific regions and then
| extrapolating over all of Europe. Yes, there are inaccuracies
| in most games, but I suspect that the author is also
| themselves inaccurate.
| girvo wrote:
| What do you base that on? This seems like a pretty long bow
| to draw; pigs didn't look like they do now, that's a pretty
| accepted fact, even if you might quibble with their other
| points.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Probably based on the sheer level of detail and research
| that went into making that game.
| ummonk wrote:
| It's easy to overlook something and get it wrong. And
| they also took plenty of artistic liberties, like having
| highly anachronistic clothing and armor for Hungarian
| Cumans in the setting.
| hardolaf wrote:
| And it's very easy for an author of an opinion piece such
| as this to overlook something or over extrapolate
| something or assume that medieval drawings are accurate.
| In the case of this article, most of what the author has
| cited is information about the British Isles and then
| extrapolated that information to cover all of Europe even
| though regional differences almost certainly existed and
| things likely changed over time as well. It's not like
| the world was just static for 600+ years.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Part of this is because without full-time pig herders, the
| pigs tend to go feral and cause a hell of a lot of damage.
| There are huge numbers of feral pigs in America. They can be
| quite dangerous:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/pigs-san-francisco-
| cal...
| ummonk wrote:
| I once read about a medieval case where a sow and her piglets
| attacked and killed a random villager. The medieval court
| sentenced the mother to death but concluded that the
| offspring were too young to know right from wrong and were
| acting under the influence of their mother, ruling them
| innocent.
| technothrasher wrote:
| There's an old book from about 1906 where the author goes
| through a bunch of old European cases of animals being
| tried in court for crimes. It's an interesting and bizarre
| read.
|
| https://archive.org/details/criminalprosecut00evaniala
| mellavora wrote:
| It also is one of the (potential) bases for laws
| regarding self-driving vehicles/robots/drones.
|
| Because law builds on precedent. And it can be argued
| that self-driving vehicles are a bit like an animal (has
| a "mind" of its own, but has a human owner responsible
| for it).
| ChoGGi wrote:
| I'm sure it was just a suspended sentence.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| The practice, and the woodland used for it, is called
| pannage. Somebody below pointed out that it's still done in
| the New Forest in England.
|
| You used to have the right to fatten your pigs by letting
| them go root around in the forest during the late
| summer/early autumn. Pigs can eat acorns and beechmast just
| fine without processing; and in the late fall they get
| brought in and slaughtered. This also keeps underbrush down,
| fertilizes the forest floor, and is less smelly than keeping
| the pigs confined. Nicer for the pigs, too.
|
| There are lots of places around New England called "hog
| island", which was usually the place the farmer would row the
| pigs out to-uninhabited, and filled with oaks and beeches.
| Pigs are unwilling to swim too far from shore, keeping them
| on the island (and away from crops!) until bacon time.
|
| (Here is an article touching on the practice of pannage, and
| how it was related to the first indian wars in New England,
| as well as the Hog Island that I grew up near!)
|
| https://www.sjsu.edu/people/ruma.chopra/courses/h170_MW_S13/.
| ..
| unglaublich wrote:
| That's a better role model indeed.
|
| But the author doesn't say that medieval-looking pigs are
| uncommon around the world right now.
|
| They say that pigs in medieval themed games are represented by
| pigs as seen in intensive pig farming: confined, fast growing,
| furless and pink.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Yep, they (the videogame designers) got the wrong models, in
| case any of them read the comments here (and accept the
| critique in the article), the Cinta Senese is proposed as an
| alternative model.
|
| To be fair, if you quickly look for pigs breeds, you will
| probably find images like this one:
|
| https://www.breedslist.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/03/Types-...
|
| where all breeds seem rather chunky and short-legged.
| dcuthbertson wrote:
| Aw. The Gloucestershire Old Spot looks kind of like a
| floppy-eared puppy. Very cute.
| wincy wrote:
| Also they're delicious. Our local farmer had some of them
| and it's the best bacon I've ever eaten.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Purely from a visual standpoint it's also pretty much the
| only one that still looks to have somewhat natural
| proportions and skin. The rest just look adipose and/or
| at risk of sunburn to me.
| simonh wrote:
| Also what they're fed on makes a huge difference, for any
| breed.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| these look much cuter than the farm variety
| stcredzero wrote:
| Di Young - Pixel Pig
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiC7_167hQ0
| btilly wrote:
| That article also includes
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Ambro...
| which is an actual medieval picture with a very recognizable
| Cinta Senese pig in it. Which is a testimony that at least some
| medieval pigs looked exactly like that.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Domestic pigs will grow tusks and thick hair if left to go feral.
| Curious how much of the visual change in medieval pigs is due to
| the fact that they were free range, more or less.
| natural20s wrote:
| Looks like a great opportunity for a community driven patch to
| provide period accurate pig renderings... wait that didn't come
| out right =)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| knowing the gaming and mod community, it would just be 3D
| models of Blizzard execs
| hot_gril wrote:
| Most old food is going to be inaccurate. Everything has been
| selectively bred since then, and it's easy to forget how many
| plants were only found in the Americas.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Yeah, breed improvement was a major landowner hobby in the
| seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] Britain's King George
| III was nicknamed "Farmer George" because he understood the
| importance of food for national security.
|
| There's also a story about a German prince trying to get his
| subjects to grow potatoes, and when they wouldn't, he made
| potatoes a royal vegetable, only to be grown in one royal
| garden. The garden was carefully arranged to be laxly guarded.
| Sure enough, potatoes took off.
|
| Most of our modern farm animals (and crops) look a lot
| different to their medieval forebears.
|
| 1.https://georgianpapers.com/2017/01/19/farmer-georges-
| notes-a...
| darknavi wrote:
| Google says potatoes are from South America and only came to
| Europe in the 1500s.
|
| TIL!
| Scarblac wrote:
| And tomatoes!
| account42 wrote:
| Which are both nightshades, even of the same genus along
| with eggplants.
| pp19dd wrote:
| And ... conversely the pigs that we know came to North
| America from Europe around that same time.
|
| The early settlers brought them over and released them
| thinking the pigs would just do the 'pannage' thing in the
| vast unmapped, unbordered and unfenced forests of America and
| they'd collect them come winter time at will. Instead, they
| ran off and procreated and went feral, and rest is history.
| supermatt wrote:
| My understanding is that domesticated pigs quickly revert to
| growing fur and tusks within months when feral - effectively
| becoming more like the pictures in the article.
|
| I wonder what causes this change to their "natural" appearance
| when raised in captivity.
| Loughla wrote:
| It's not that they revert, it's that the care and feeding is a
| part of this. Most hogs grow tusks, but they are docked or
| trimmed in some fashion. All pigs, even the "classic" pink cute
| ones you might think of when you think farm pig are covered in
| coarse "fur" though it is not as thick as you find on a feral
| hog like a razorback or some other such thing.
|
| Source; was a farmer.
|
| Edit: also, I didn't even think about this when I first wrote
| this, but we also butcher hogs VERY young, so they haven't had
| time to develop those "wild" traits yet by the time they are
| market size. So that might be part of it, too.
| Pxtl wrote:
| That explains the tusks, but AFAIK even very young wild hogs
| have proper feral fur, not the thin coat of bristles you get
| on a farm pig. I wonder if there isn't an environmental
| component there, not just age... or it might just be genetics
| from interbreeding with wild species.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yeah, I've always been curious about this too. The article
| describes 3-year-old pigs roaming the forest, so that sounds
| very close to a wild lifestyle compared to a modern pig that
| spends its whole life in a small pen and is slaughtered at 6
| months old.
|
| I wonder is it just age that causes fur growth? Hunger? Not
| having 4 walls an siblings to rub against? Exposure to the
| elements?
| tialaramex wrote:
| Right now the New Forest not far from where I live has pannage.
|
| https://www.thenewforest.co.uk/explore/wildlife-and-nature/p...
|
| [The word "Forest" in "The New Forest" does not refer to what
| you'd call a forest today, at that time it would be understood
| similar to "Nature Reserve" today and its actual purpose was
| somewhere for the King to hunt deer as recreation. So there are a
| lot of trees, but not as many as the word "forest" might cause
| you to expect]
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(page generated 2022-10-25 23:02 UTC)