Visuals and Dialogue

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Roondar
Jedi Knight
Posts: 462
Joined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 3:03 pm

Visuals and Dialogue

Post by Roondar » Thu Mar 20, 2008 6:12 pm

I've been reading some forum posts over on Spacebattles.com for fun and I've repeatedly seen them issue the stance 'Visuals trump Dialogue' in various posts.

I've tried to find out what starfleetjedi.net's policy is on that (and failed), but in itself it doesn't seem to be a very wrong point of view.

My problem with how it's usually implemented is however twofold.

The first is that debaters (on all sides) seem to feel this mostly goes for whoever they're debating against. Surely if visuals trump dialogue this goes across the board and not just for one side?

Secondly I've noted that preconceptions tend to rule over visuals in any case according to debators.

If a low-end visual result exists and a high-end visual result for a similar thing also exists almost all debators tend to dismiss one of those results based purely on their preconceptions as to what an SF side should be capable of. Clearly this is not correct - dismissing high-yield (or low-yield) visual effects because they don't support your point of view is silly at best and dishonest at worst.

I really wonder why this is. I'm not going to deny* low-yield ST examples, or high-yield SW examples. On the other hand, I'm not going to deny* high-yield ST examples or low-yield SW examples either.

*) Deny means both flatly denying the posibility and posting endless arguments why what we see on screen does not actually happen as we see it on screen. If it happens on screen, deal with it (as in accept it and move on).

A good ST example would be the Voyager episode in which that planet explodes in their face. It's crystal clear that the blast was a) big and b) survived by the ship. Claiming otherwise (like saying the blast was actually small or that Voyager was not in fact hit by anything of significance) is dishonest.

A good SW example would be the Hoth asteroid scene, in which a Stardestroyer does a rather nifty bit of stone removal. Claiming the rock to be really, really small or the TL used to be the biggest model when we can't actually tell which TL was used is equally dishonest.

(Note that I'm not trying to debate these issues here, I'm merely showing them as good examples for what I mean. If you don't agree with me on these specific points please take it to a thread on the VS Forums themselves and I'll gladly debate with you)

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