@PXAbstraction said:
I use the term pretentious but I don't even think that's a bad thing in general sense. High-brow, intellectual stories are a great thing and I'm all for strong narrative in games that explore unique and different themes.
Pretentious does not mean "high-brow, intellectual" at all, and people should not use it to describe those things.
"Pretentious" is used to describe a statement about something which is unfounded, assumes a lot, or contains pretense; pretense is an attempt to make something sound true which is not, or is presumed to be true without a supporting argument. Pretentious is always a "bad thing in general sense," because it usually comes out in the opinion of someone who doesn't understand what they are discussing. Just saying "professional sports sucks" is pretentious because it objectifies someone's opinion by defining an object with a subjective experience; saying that Peyton Manning is the best quarterback in the world is pretentious for similar reasons; talking animal movies (or all anthropomorphic stories) are, by definition, pretentious because they presume that animals think and act like humans would if they had animal bodies. Racism is also pretentious.
(However, calling any work of "fiction" pretentious is usually not apt anyway because -- as it is called "fiction" -- never tries to pass itself off as truth. If we use "pretentious" in this way: Star Wars and Tom Sawyer are both equally pretentioius)
My idea of intellectualism is when people have concise and consistent arguments for things because they have thought about them, and therefore (true) intellectuals are not pretentious because they can support their arguments.
So, yes, pretense is a bad thing because it means someone is trying to sell you a line of misinformed crap as authentic. Anyone calling Swords & Sworcery "pretentious" is being vastly more pretentious than the game could ever be, as the game -- a work of fiction -- does not assert itself to be anything other than it is; the people calling it "pretentious" are actually being pretentious by making assumptions about the aim of the game based on the language, art, or whatever else.
The appropriate word for describing something you think is trying too hard to be smart -- which is also sometimes involves being pretentious -- is "haughty," which is generally what people think of posts like this.
So if the word pretentious was being in appropriately used in my posts, what word would you say would have been more appropriate? I'm genuinely asking because I thought I was using the word correctly from the definition I looked up. The word doesn't matter to me so much as the meaning I was trying to convey with it.
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