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[Linkenski]

minutiae

 (mɪˈnjuːʃɪˌiː)

pl n, sing -tia (-ʃɪə)

1. small, precise, or trifling details

(From: http://www.thefreedi...y.com/minutiae)

 

 

 

"There are roughly 17 million quarians on the Migrant Fleet (also called the Flotilla). It is technically still under martial law but is now governed by bodies such as the Admiralty Board and the democratically-elected Conclave, though ship captains and onboard civilian councils tend to address most issues "in-house" before it gets that far. Quarians are divided into several clans that can be spread across several ships, or restricted to one."

 

So this was just a basic lore-dump but it contains a lot of this "minutiae". In narrative and especially the writing of a plot, it's important for the writers to make things believable and sensical. Plot is about how the events of a story connect, like how do the characters get from A to B and etc. -- you probably know what I'm talking about. There are some pitfalls though that writers tend to fall into, from the likes of rule of cool to ignorance or misrepresenting their own established rules and contradicting events. Those are all things that can make writing "bad" if there's too much of it.

 

However, you can write a plot without focusing too much on the meaty and finnicky details of how A ties into B, and make very strong, relatable emotional beats. I often find that the more personal a story is, the less it needs the small details and heavy expository dumps to work. On the flipside though, I believe we all like complicated, compelling characters and drama. We need those moments that complicates the romance between two characters and the more relatable our villain is, the more we remember him.

 

On the flipside of all this, I think accessability and brevity is a big aspect to minutiae as well. If you get too preachy or too nerdy with it, you may lose your audience's attention and that's probably my biggest reason for why people probably wouldn't care for it, but we're all different, have different attention spans yadayada.

 

So with these idea in mind I'm asking:

 

Do you care about the minutiae in storytelling?

 

Some examples:

You can just easily have Garrus' plot from ME2 where he's had to deal with the betrayal of his former merc buddy, Sidonis. We don't really need to know much about Sidonis himself to get to the core of the story here. Garrus' is in a dark place that's making him do things he might regret. Shepard decides how to handle this and either way, he's sort of the moral compass for where Garrus might go.

 

Now for one that has more "minutiae" to it: Mordin's loyalty quest for instance. It deals with a lot of world-building first and foremost, it's about ethics and it requires you to have some basic knowledge of Krogan and the issues their race faces to get to the centre of the issue. At the heart of the quest lies a confrontation in which Mordin meets a former student who pledged to cure the Genophage through very radical experimentation and research, but also betraying the ways or teachings, if you can call it that, of his mentor. It creates an interesting dynamic and reinforces the sense that both Mordin and his student are people, individuals, with their own motives, aspirations, goals and it can make the narrative seem more believeable in that sense because everywhere you look, there is reason to be found.

 

Personally I think the danger of avoiding the minutiae when you write something, is that it can become too banal or it may have weaknesses like when there's suddenly no reasoning and no sense to be found if you dig too far into the plot.

 

But I'm sort of exploring this idea of minutiae because I'm not even sure myself. I'd like to hear the opinion of others as well.

 

So, again: Do you care about the minutiae in storytelling?

[Absafraginlootly]

Looking at your examples I think a steady mix of both is best.

[Lady Artifice]

I do care about the details, the "small" choices and how characters react to them. 

[Arcian]

All details matter.

[Deadpool9]

James Joyce was all about the possibilities of minutiae.  Just sayin'.

[Akimitsu]

Interesting topic!  I do believe you're getting to some point that you haven't let on yet, and I would like to venture a guess.  I would guess that your preoccupation is with the fact that the Bioware devs are going to have to canonize certain details over other certain details in order to link the new game up to the previous titles; and you're wondering, for yourself and others, to what degree is fudging or changing details going to matter to us players.  Am I close?

 

I think, as far as minutae goes, you have to be internally consistent in the new game.  Not to say the new game should be completely beholden to the previous games; but to use the example of Garrus... whether they pick the paragon or renegade option to use for Garrus, the rest of the story will have to be consistent.  If he kills Sidonis, they'll have to make sure not to write any details in that declare Sidonis to still live.

 

I think, as far as the new game goes, a certain amount of "fudging" of the details would be acceptable to me.  I imagine it would be acceptable to most people if the fudging is done in such a way that it doesn't confirm or deny the existence of something that contradicts the story and is internally consistent.  This is especially popular as we've been basically assured that we're going to be dealing with pretty much an entirely new cast, new places and new events.

[CuriousArtemis]

Definitely, especially for Mass Effect. Even with your example, I found most of Garrus' storyline, and especially his loyalty mission, really boring. I think he was one of the least fleshed out characters in the franchise. But Mordin, like you said, had all these moral conflits, and there was growth, and it was linked to specific events in the world.

 

Thane's another example... he has a dead wife whom we never learn anything about. We don't hear about any (for the most part) of his former assignments. His conversations with Shepard are flat and unexploratory: Thane: The drell are in service to the hanar. Shepard: Wow, that sounds horrible. Thane: No, it's part of culture. END OF STORY.

 

I'm someone who reads the description of every planet, so yeah Minutiae. Unlike Dragon Age, Mass Effect isn't so derivative and is fascinating to explore in its own right.

[AlanC9]

For missions that involve squadmates, I don't see how you can avoid minutiae. Wouldn't this stuff come up?

[Linkenski]

I actually thought of this topic, because I heard an interview with Mac Walters from '09 in which he admitted that he didn't care as much about minutiae as the rest of the writing team (back when he had just become lead).

I'm not natively english, but that was the first time I heard the word, so I looked it up and I had a bit of an epiphany, because I think I've been looking for this word for a long time to describe the storytelling in the Japanese games I've played lol.

I just beat Metal Gear Solid yesterday, for the first time ever, and that game has a pretty good plot but it comes with quite some baggage, and a lot of this minutiae. It never fails to exclamate the statistics of every subject it takes up in a long winded speech from one of the characters. As they're talking about nuclear warheads they have to give you an exposition dump about how many nuclear scientists are active and how the number declined after WW2 right down to statistical numbers and what year it was.

Again, it's all a balancing act, but you might say Metal Gear often takes it too far and almost surely loses the attention span of its audience because it's so long in the tooth about it.

And on the flipside, if you have too little minutiae in your story, it becomes too simple or too contrived. I see minutiae as a way for a writer to convince the audience, that what's happening in their fictional world is actually realistic.

In Mass Effect 3, there was suddenly space ninjas and millions (I guess) of cerberus combat troopers, but despite of a little twist late in the game, I felt as if there was no minutiae involved in how we got from the 100~ man splinter group from ME2 to the galactic military armada in ME3. No logistics, no minutuae, just a place called sanctuary and supposedly reaper hacking, yet none of these things had any attention to detail, at least not that I know of.

So as a result, one of the biggest suspend disbelief things in ME3 which desperately needed some convincing had too little to make it believable imo.

[MrObnoxiousUK]

Of course i like to think all the minutiae lays a solid foundation that the larger whole rests on.

 

[Snorka]

As long as the minutiae are the twigs at the end of the story tree, i'm fine with it.

[AlexiaRevan]

Those e-mails , I want them back . They were the details...that I had a save imported 

[Arcian]

I just beat Metal Gear Solid yesterday, for the first time ever, and that game has a pretty good plot but it comes with quite some baggage, and a lot of this minutiae. It never fails to exclamate the statistics of every subject it takes up in a long winded speech from one of the characters. As they're talking about nuclear warheads they have to give you an exposition dump about how many nuclear scientists are active and how the number declined after WW2 right down to statistical numbers and what year it was.

That's just Kojima's exposition cancer in a nutshell.

[FKA_Servo]

I like all manner of minutiae. But in the case of ME2 and ME3 - the minutiae, and the moment to moment story as opposed to the overall story, is what saved the games as a whole for me.

 

All this stuff fleshes out the setting. I hope they drown us in it.

[SwobyJ]

I care about details, but not about trivia/minutiae. I suppose I'm with Mac Walters on that - take that for what you will.

 

I skim over technical lists of info unless I can have confidence I can find something important to the narrative, even if indirectly. Just filling the world full of info doesn't work for me in games like this. Maybe in the futureee I can have a VR headset on and require everything to be as real as possible, but I'm playing a game right now, not a fully virtual world, so I need some 'curation' of information based on a good narrative. No, I don't really give a crap how exactly big the Citadel's arms are, unless it may actually be pertinent to something that might connect to plot.

 

But I'm also not anything close to an engineer. If I ever write a sci-fi game, I'd definitely need some people to counterweight my attitude.

[In Exile]

The difficulty with minutiae - quite apart from keeping track of them - is that science fiction is hard to write. It's hard because science is hard, and the writers often misunderstand it. So when they write it, they can easily produce gibberish by going into the minutiae. So with that in mind, there's an important distinction IMO between "lore" related minutiae (which should always operate on a "less said, better" rule) and "character" minutiae (which should always be in). 

[BabyPuncher]

Details are always nice, although it's incredibly easy to screw up if you aren't careful. Mass Effect has generally done a significantly better job than most stories.

[TopTrog]

....

 

Some examples:

You can just easily have Garrus' plot from ME2 where he's had to deal with the betrayal of his former merc buddy, Sidonis. We don't really need to know much about Sidonis himself to get to the core of the story here. Garrus' is in a dark place that's making him do things he might regret. Shepard decides how to handle this and either way, he's sort of the moral compass for where Garrus might go.

 

Now for one that has more "minutiae" to it: Mordin's loyalty quest for instance. It deals with a lot of world-building first and foremost, it's about ethics and it requires you to have some basic knowledge of Krogan and the issues their race faces to get to the centre of the issue. At the heart of the quest lies a confrontation in which Mordin meets a former student who pledged to cure the Genophage through very radical experimentation and research, but also betraying the ways or teachings, if you can call it that, of his mentor. It creates an interesting dynamic and reinforces the sense that both Mordin and his student are people, individuals, with their own motives, aspirations, goals and it can make the narrative seem more believeable in that sense because everywhere you look, there is reason to be found.

 

Personally I think the danger of avoiding the minutiae when you write something, is that it can become too banal or it may have weaknesses like when there's suddenly no reasoning and no sense to be found if you dig too far into the plot.

 

But I'm sort of exploring this idea of minutiae because I'm not even sure myself. I'd like to hear the opinion of others as well.

 

So, again: Do you care about the minutiae in storytelling?

Nice examples. And my answer is yes, I do. The big picture sets the tone, but it is the little details that fill it with life and make it engaging and believable. I don´t care about the smallest technical details of starships and guns, but minutiae and consistency are highly important when it comes to the motivations of characters. 

[Linkenski]

That's just Kojima's exposition cancer in a nutshell.

It is, but it is also a lot of minutiae which accounts for a lot of the context which makes the game's story believable. I thought for sure there were some cheap twists until I rewatched some of the cutscenes and realized that a lot of early moments leading up to a twist later in the game were actually written so it made sense after knowing what the twist is. The character motivations worked and nothing quite seemed laboured to me.

[Linkenski]

I care about details, but not about trivia/minutiae. I suppose I'm with Mac Walters on that - take that for what you will.

I will actually say too, that I am with Mac Walters in a sense, at least when you compare it to how most dialogue went with Tali in Mass Effect 1 for example. I did also start zoning out once or twice when Cortez (written by Patrick Weekes) wouldn't stop going into ultra-minutiae nerd-talk about G-suits and something-emissioner-dampeners and Kodiak-something. But on the flipside while I don't personally care, I think it's the writers' jobs to account for these things by all means. I'd rather be bombarded with information that would be too much than I would sit through the simplest and most patronizing story in my life, but these are both extremes of course.

 

Balancing it out is most important but I think the minutiae is super important when the setting is Mass Effect's, no matter what kind of story. I guess you have to ask yourself, if the story told here doesn't really need the setting at all, then why even have this setting? That's where a lot of the bland fluff from ME2 falters, like Miranda's daddy issues or some of James Vega's backstory from ME3 because it's technically Breaking Bad kind of storylines but in Mass Effect which, while it is humanizing doesn't effectively take advantage of a sci-fi setting, so it's good they were only subplots, I guess.

 

 

As long as the minutiae are the twigs at the end of the story tree, i'm fine with it.

Really, really good analogy.

 

I guess you could put it like this to compare:

 

That ^ is a Mass Effect game

 

This is Mass Effect 3's main story:

 

and this is a Hideo Kojima game:

 

You can then ask yourself, what kind of balance that's better for you, and where you think ME:A should go.