Judged from the outside, my New Year's Eve was dreary. With a four-year-old to watch and wife mired in a funky work schedule, I didn't even entertain the thought of celebrating. Instead, I spent the evening trying to fix a bug in my Dragon Age module and surfing tv tropes, all while the Twilight Zone marathon played in the background.
Some might even call that "lame." If so, perhaps it was a fitting end to what was, overall, a pretty lame year. But for me, it was actually a fascinating evening. I'd just discovered tv tropes, a wiki devoted to cataloging the various cliches and crutches used by writers in various media (despite the title, it covers all media - including video games). It may not be a worthy way to spend your New Year's Eve, but it's definitely worth a Tuesday afternoon. If you're a writer, or just a jaded pop culture consumer, you might want to check it out.
At the end of each trope's entry, there's a list of examples. On a lark, I typed in "Mysteries of Westgate" and learned that it is an example of a Thirty Xanatos Pileup. I'd quote the definition of a Thirty Xanatos Pileup, but it's thoroughly entangled with other tropes - you really have to go to the site and link your way through it. Basically, it's a twist ending that's hopelessly convoluted, with various characters claiming to have manipulated things to their advantage. As someone who worked on MoW, my reaction to reading this was to LMAO. Yes, this is an accurate way to describe the ending.
Anyway, my real reason for visiting the site was to satisfy my curiosity about the use of amnesia as a plot device in video games. If you've read the description of my Dragon Age mod, or clicked on the screenshot at the top of this post, you know that it contains an amnesia element. I knew when I outlined the plot that this was one of the biggest cliches in video games (if not the biggest). But after wrestling with various alternatives, I decided to go with it anyway. Why?
