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SLP 'Telephone' Maps and Graphics Game 3

Right, so I got this movie poster, and for a while I didn't know what exactly to do, but then I thought, why is this movie about English things in German? Clearly, some German place is a big film city! How about Vienna? So I came up with some other movies that might come out of an alternate historical central European movie industry. And then I tried to find a picture of a piece of paper on a table that had more things and came up with this mess:

1617483704227.png

Again, I must apologize to @Wolfram for the weird Christmas-ey backdrop. Maybe it's the end of the year and Mr. Clark just wants to finish his column before cleaning up.

Basically, the other movies here are a bunch of jokes that my friend and I found funny, going from obscure light novel references to semi-legendary Tumblr posts. Also, the idea of The Room being a popular movie sure was a choice.

Regarding Ripper, I figured it was something where Sherlock Holmes was Doyle's alter ego who tried to solve the case of Doyle's murders, which would've been right ironic.

Anyhow, on to Wolfram's continuation!
 
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Caprice said:
Right, so I got this movie poster, and for a while I didn't know what exactly to do, but then I thought, why is this movie about English things in German? Clearly, some German place is a big film city! How about Vienna? So I came up with some other movies that might come out of an alternate historical central European movie industry. And then I tried to find a picture of a piece of paper on a table that had more things and came up with this mess:

View attachment 35539

Again, I must apologize to @Wolfram for the weird Christmas-ey backdrop. Maybe it's the end of the year and Mr. Clark just wants to finish his column before cleaning up.

Basically, the other movies here are a bunch of jokes that I found funny, going from obscure light novel references to semi-legendary Tumblr posts. Also, the idea of The Room being a popular movie sure was a choice.

Regarding Ripper, I figured it was something where Sherlock Holmes was Doyle's alter ego who tried to solve the case of Doyle's murders, which would've been right ironic.

Anyhow, on to Wolfram's continuation!
Click to expand...

Oooh! Very neatly done! Far more professional composition than my own contribution, I must say!

Also, I do love how the fact that I wrote A. C. Doyle as opposed to Arthur Conan Doyle seems to have managed to survive two steps down the rabbit hole.
 
zaffre said:
fairly amused by the fact that we haven’t had even a single attempt at a map so far
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Not to say that there's anything wrong with a good map or anything, but I actually do kind of appreciate that we are a bit more willing to experiment with things other than maps. @Alex Richards said last time that he was pleased that me and him ended up accidentally having our place in the list changed because it ended up playing to our strengths better, and I kind of do like the idea that rather than having people feel that they have to produce a map specifically, they push the boundaries and go with something they feel is more natural for them to do.
 
I went with the "Croatian uranium plant" idea, in part because as a Texan and a political science student I could easily see how to make that into an interesting-looking academic paper.
wIWwodW.jpg

Some notes:
  • My general idea for the international situation was "downstream effects of the 1848 Revolutions lead to a more stable Austria-Hungary [why else would Vienna remain a cultural center that makes films about Croatia?] and knock-on effects in other parts of the world; later on, Austria-Hungary has a heavily subsidized uranium mining industry [inspired by a vague memory of Czechoslovak uranium mines being used in the Soviet program] that it initially uses for domestic power, but after a major accident, uses as part of trade diplomacy with its scary eastern neighbor in Imperial Russia rather than drawing down production and incurring the wrath of domestic unions"
  • I plain forgot that the title of the film contained the date it happened. I'm choosing to reinterpret that as "the film is largely fictionalized but based on real events".
  • My headcanon for Ms. Okerlund's background is "Russianized Finland-Swede family in Russian upper class," hence her use of a different term for "nuclear" than either the original list or the American educational assistant.
  • I have never received such detailed feedback on a paper that wasn't mostly about grammar or formatting. She got the margin wrong because I wanted to provide more space for content, but realized that that didn't leave as much space for the opening note.
  • It amuses me that "fictional document with real creator's finger visible" is a recurring theme.
 
Having no clue that A. C. Doyle had escaped to kill again, my first instinct was to go "oh, Chernobyl" and make some sort of movie or prestige TV poster (this would have essentially reverted us a step, oddly enough) but ultimately settled for sending @BClick a minimalist riff on Papers Please But You're Homer Simpson, set in the long twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

With such a worldbuilding heavy thing to work off of, my own extrapolation got to be fairly light - that said, in my head-canon "Fission" is rather something of a double meaning, since the long-term fallout (sorry) of the Andrássy Incident is what ultimately brings the whole federalist superstructure crashing down in the Eastern Spring. Possibly the game explores this tension via your nuclear plant worker also having to answer to two separate, contradictory authorities throughout the main course of the plot, while in Hard Mode they add - dammit, I'm a poster not a game designer


1617489020466.png
 
So we've got a contemporary video game from an Anglophone country where Austria-Hungary are nuclear-powered boogeymen. Being a big idiot and already feeling an idea coming on, I missed the "fission" pun and the slightly retro aesthetic, and went straight into thinking who would be A-H's cold war ideological opponents today. This would have to be a world where 1848-style liberal nationalism was still the progressive option and had backing from another big power. And what's the visual language of OTL's contemporary liberals? That's right: preachy and partisan social media infographics. I downloaded a free trial of Canva and got to work.

(Entirely by accident, my decision to call this latest round of unrest the Third Spring of Nations means that even though my entry has A-H surviving into the twenty-first century, @Wolfram 's Eastern Spring could still be retconned in!)


What's going on in Austria_.png

(@Von Callay had to shout out your alternate social media site from a couple challenges ago)
 
zaffre said:
the long-term fallout (sorry) of the Andrássy Incident is what ultimately brings the whole federalist superstructure crashing down in the Eastern Spring
Click to expand...
BClick said:
@Wolfram 's Eastern Spring could still be retconned in!
Click to expand...
What's funny is that I meant Eastern Spring as a "false friend", though with some latitude for creativity - frozen relations between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire thawing and giving way to the free flow of trade, people, and ideas. (Also thought it was amusing - and I mean this with no disrespect - that the stuff about nuclear power went to one of the few people on the forum who not only finds opposition to nuclear power to be a reasonable opinion but actually holds that opinion, and you went for something entirely different.)

That infographic is entirely on point, and the idea of contemporary Western organizations being called things like "Committee for the X Race" is delightfully disquieting.
 
For me, I received a propaganda leaflet (or so I thought) regarding the collapse of the Austrian Empire in 2021, a bit Syria-style. This all made me think also of a much stronger Habsburg domain in general. The only thing I had clear was that I wanted to make some sort of The Economist-style thing, and I ran through several ideas, including showing the level of democracy of the post-collapse states but reasoned it would have been too early to have definite borders.

So instead I decided to look at how a neighbouring, Habsburg-dominated state reacted to the inflow of likely refugees from the internal strife of Austria.

I originally thought to also show the ethnic makeup of the refugees per province but I wasn't too happy about how it looked so I decided against it.

And so this little thing came to be. And then I sent it off to @Alex Richards

j3egKYG.png
 
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