No. This is not a relevant distinction. It would not be a relevant distinction if Dirty Bomb was attempting to portray real historical events rather than the stylized near future that it does or, potentially, high fantasy. However, I don’t see how arguing the semantics of the word “setting” is even relevant to the point of the topic, if I understand you correctly. As such, let us pretend that I used the word, “premise.” When you read any of my posts in this thread, if you would, please mentally replace all instances of the word “setting” with the word “premise” and we should have a more clear understanding of each other’s meanings.
In that case, I’ll go over it again.
My point is that “Dirty Bomb” is a description of the premise of the game. Many, many games (and everything else) have a title which attempts to describe their content and/or premise. A “Dirty Bomb” is not a political term. This is not “prolife” versus “prochoice.” It is simply a widely used term for a radioactive, non-nuclear explosive weapon.
This point was in response to, and in disagreement with, others in this thread who classified “Dirty Bomb” as a political term.
As we have discussed, the use of a dirty bomb is not a far fetched scenario. While concern in the general population has since diminished, the large scale use of nuclear weapons was still a prominent concern when the game, Wasteland, spiritual predecessor to the still popular Fallout series, was made. The art, culture and media of a society reflect and reflect on the concerns of the society. It’s just a means for society to communicate with itself and evolve its ideas. If we happen to disagree with some of these communications, good. We should disagree and disagree vocally at add to the conversation.
This point was in response to others arguing that games should not reflect on concerns contemporary to their creation.
All this said, I don’t think the game’s name is perfect. My issue with the name is that, by themselves, both the words “Dirty” and “Bomb” have many meanings which do not accurately summarize the game. People who are not native speakers or who choose to educate themselves on current affairs and the history of the past several decades will likely not understand the two words in conjunction and, thus, the game’s name, which is, again, a summery of the game’s premise, will fly over their heads.
To me, that remains to be seen. Brink’s setting could have been interchangable with a space station or natural island. To me, it was not because of how the setting was presented by the narrative. I hope Splash Damage can give their London a sense of place both aesthetically and narratively but I’ll have to reserve judgement until the game is released.
I thought they missed all that in their other previous titles, aside from RAD Soldiers which I have no experience of.
) and as immediate as my reflex to buy one of the packages was … the title of the game concerns me.
