Gargaune
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2020
- Messages
- 3,257
Referential humour is almost always a mistake, you're scuttling your own fiction's suspension of disbelief for some cheap gag at the expense of another property or, worse, current events. I get the instinct, felt it myself, you're working on something and it suddenly comes to you that it's the perfect opportunity for an inside joke, but it's best you control that urge - it only works very sparingly, and typically only off the critical plot path and referencing the same or related IPs.You think when they played MGS5 they were like, "Dude, that line is brilliant! We so need to add that into our mod!"Oh come the fuck on dude.
Again, you don't add dialogue like this that is from other works and take it seriously. I am a novice writer and even I know this. The only time that you add dialogue like this is with a joke like Wild Wasteland. Doing otherwise makes you look like a hack.
Two examples that come to mind:
- In NWN HotU, you can talk to Deekin about his latest book, which actually tells the story of your adventure in SoU, and you can answer that "the ending was rushed". This just about works, it skirts by, because while it's obviously acknowledging the most common complaint about the SoU expansion, it's also well contextualised within the current fiction.
- In the Umar Hills inn in BG2, you come across a book that's an obvious joke on the Blair Witch Project, and this doesn't work. Sure, it brought a smile to my face, but it also immediately kicked my focus out of the diegesis. Instead of staying rooted in the fictional world, I started thinking "wait, the Blair Witch came out before BG2?" and, naturally, "man, I'm old."
Sadly, modern writers just can't seem to help themselves and will gleefully sabotage their own fiction at every turn.