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(12-14-2015, 06:35 PM)Calliope Cloverbloom Wrote: I'll offer an example in support of Ms. V - strictly speaking, as far as I'm aware there's no reason explicitly stated by any NPC in the game for us to believe that our characters require sleep or food on any recurring real-world-similar basis, but people choose to "fill in the gap" with what they decide is right. That is to say, we decide as players that because it's familiar to us, and beds and food do exist in the setting, clearly characters must sleep about 8 hours a day and eat three times a day just like we do in the real world.
A totally strict lore purist might note that nowhere in Eorzea do we encounter a toilet, and therefore from the perspective of total lore, our characters never need to go to the bathroom. Presumably, whatever they eat is simply used in entirety by their bodies. Or, since we have no evidence of our characters even having a two-opening digestive system, perhaps there aren't any toilets in Eorzea because what comes out emerges the same way it went in (and there are plenty of real-world creatures whose digestive systems work this way, so this isn't especially far-fetched). Yet players assume that our characters "do their business" just like we would in real life, because that's a gray area that we fill in on our own.
There are apparently children in the lore, and reproduction, etc. But we have no specific evidence that this occurs in the same way as real world reproduction, because "at most naked" all we can see is underwear. For all we know, humanoids in this setting reproduce by budding. Still, everyone assumes the Eorzean genitals are similar to the real world, and people go about their ERP accordingly.
The point here is the same one Ms. V was trying to express - in any MMO setting there are always areas where the setting doesn't specifically say either way, and so the players are left to either BS their way through areas of it, or, maybe, extrapolate in debatable ways from what information does exist and might be arguably - but not definitively - relevant to the topic at hand.
I'm not Teadrinker so I'm not sure how he's trying to go at this, but just from reading, there are two ways that this can be thought of / handled, in my mind.
The first is this: Yes, this is all true. We cannot assume that people use the bathroom / have sex / live on a planet and not in fact on a set of interconnected planes that result in total darkness when exited. However, this fact still has no bearing on what is true and not true within the setting, and therefore only highlights a person's preferred interpretation of what is actually so. This, in fact, makes what is right and what is wrong even more binary.
The second is this: There is a difference between creation and representation. The World as it is made by Square Enix is intended to be a representation of our own, with additional, created elements that do not represent anything, and are therefore fictional. Debate of "Lore," therefore, is focused entirely within the created elements. Representational elements, such as whether or not that thing on your screen is Dirt on the Ground or a Texture placed on a Polygon Mesh, are not included in lore debates.