Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31536324-20190117214835/@comment-27136653-20190312050101

Use a different term then, because I've given you plenty of examples of actual meta, yet you've constantly chosen to ignore them.

I'm not going to invent new terms when I can just reuse them. The meta comes from the fact that the standard tropes are being regarded as canon. Even though they actually are canon in this case, without necessarily relating back to the real world, unlike in games like Oneshot or DDLC. Still, I'm not gonna invent new terms to describe what a layman might call basically the same thing.

Except it never does the latter, everything is played as real, so it all is real.

It doesn't need to explicitly tell us. I gave an example of how the logic of it all is speaking for itself. If it truly does work like a game, without actually being addressed as anything else, then we might as well regard it as canonically being a game or a simulation, because, as I said, Occam's razor.

Furthermore, explanation =/= proof. It's all very nice that you can argument in favor of your thesis, how such world would work, etc, but I must stick to what I know, that it acts like a game, with there being no proof that it's not actually a game on some level of reality (other than ours). If it acts like a game, then the default assumption is, that it IS a game, rather than the opposite.

I'm starting to think that Toby didn't think this one through. Literally. He didn't worldbuild the game THIS much, so now, we're looking way too deep into it.

No, the simplest explanation is that it's just another possibility in the sea of infinite possibilities.

I'm sorry, but that makes no sense whatsoever.

The world is depicted as acting like a video game without making the world a video game.

Where and how is the game making itself NOT look like a game? By making Sans oblivious to this fact? I could list a hundred different explanations for that, from him not being aware yet, to him already nowing but hiding it, plus all the possibilities in between included.

''Dragon Ball's shenanigans can be explained as it being an Anime, yet the world itself is not an Anime. Scott Pilgrim's world acts like a video game, but isn't even one to begin with.''

I don't know either of those things, so I cannot relate. Besides, we all know that unrelated media should not be used to argument for Undertale. Else I might just claim that Frisk is canonically non-binary because Toby used to work with non-binary characters in the past. You can see how broken this logic is.

These things are natural to these worlds, because that's the logic these worlds operate on.

Of course they are. Why wouldn't they be? The Matrix may also seem natural at first, that is, until you step out of it. Or dreams.

First off, what meta things did it do that "made it all meaningless"?

If the world is fake, if the main story is the interaction between you and the game, then how are you supposed to take anything else, such as the overall message of the game, seriously? It's fake, ergo it's unimportant. Take Chara for example. They give you a hard consequence for killing everyone. But... why? It's pointless, because it's just a game for us. We can hack it, we can undo it, it's not like it matters. So why did Toby even bother adding it in? Play experience? To have that, you must first believe that the world you're playing is "real" instead of just pretending to be real. If the game is canonically a game, then suspension of disbelief doesn't really apply.

Like, if it's canonically a game, then you might imagine it as controlling some "inner player" who is actually playing the game. In other words, it's not you who is playing the game, it's someone in between, some middle man, so your actions do not impact the game itself, they impact this middle man instead, and it's this middle man whom Chara "punishes," not us.

No really, ask yourself, what is the difference between Undertale which is pretending to be real, and Undertale, which is canonically just a game? The latter doesn't seem as relatable, it has no power to pull you in, if it first and foremost convinces you not to regard it as something "real."

In spite of, you know, the in-universe explanation of us being the in-universe Anomaly that's playing the world like a game because it acts like one.

That was Flowey. At least, what Sans was researching. So, who's to say that the current anomaly, us, isn't canonically just Frisk? How do you know the player has any effect on the world at all? Because we're playing it? Isn't that just building Frisk's story, rather than controlling them like a puppet, like in any other normal video game?

Ironically, the simulation hypothesis that you keep preaching

You must have misunderstood. I'm trying to show how ugly it is. What I'm actually preaching, is the "unmeta," to retroactively explain all meta elements as something that would not imply a simulation, for the sake of letting our disbelief stay suspended.

Unmeta 2: Flowey is talking to the Player - who takes the role of the in-universe Anomaly - via adressing Frisk, and thinking that they're Chara.

That is factually wrong though, because Frisk isn't a puppet. Unless you like your anomaly head canon more.

It's a world that acts like a video game, exactly as I said.

Once again, how do you know? Explain, and then also explain the same for Undertale to me.

''If by that you mean things like hacking and coding, then no, no one does that. The world acts one for one like ours, just with the logic and mechanics of a game added on top of that.''

I'd argue that it does happen in Undertale. We are, after all, modifying our save file constantly, no? Does that not count as accessing it? This is a valid theory by the way, that we, Frisk, are modifying the game directly through our actions. Even more valid than your "it's a gamen't" theory I'd say.

Oh, so you're suddenly the be all end all judge of whether or not the word of the CREATOR OF A WORK is actually valid or not?

Uh, yes? What ever happened to bullshit police? Is Hermione black, just because Rowling said so, despite writing that she's white in the books? And on a related note, are you now saying that we should be paying more attention to Toby's own words, or did I mishear?