man-man Posted:

The counter to “it’s just a game” is that suspension of disbelief only really works on the fictional premises of a story, not things that break the rules that have been set up (internal consistency fail) or that just don’t make any sense in any setting (common sense fail).

That Hobbit example, Tolkien’s readers are willing to nod along with the fantasy setting of elves and wizards and dragons, because that’s the setting the story chooses, but if halfway through The Lord of the Rings it was suddenly declared that elves can fly then we’d all be going “WTF, no they can’t, you should have mentioned that before if you wanted flying elves”. I haven’t heard about this “bringing the gold back” complaint but it’ll be out of some perceived illogicality within the rules that Tolkien created for the setting.

So for forumwarz, we’ll go along with the idea that people are willing to pay good money for you to “pwn” forums, we’ll even go along with the idea of “pwnage” being a real thing that everyone will notice happening to a forum. We happily accept a storyline full of conspiracy theories and borderline insane characters, because all of that is just part of the story. But when you have something that doesn’t make any sense within the little fictional world of fwz, then it breaks that willing suspension of disbelief and reminds us that it’s all very very fictional by making us think “what the hell were they thinking when they wrote this?”

tl;dr – In fiction you can make up new rules because it wouldn’t be fiction without them, but people will call bull**** if you break your own rules or have characters do things that are stupid even with fictional rules.

Exactly. Both I and my BFF Jalapeno Bootyhole have a new favorite poster.