Is OoT Nostalgia a "Straw Man Fallacy"?

[Cody]

I was sitting in the shoutbox watching the Hangman game when an argument started with some OoT fanboys about whether nostalgia is a factor in its treatment as the best Zelda game. Every time I brought it up I was told "STRAW MAN FALLACY", which doesn't appear to make any sense, so I feel that I should check if we are using the same definitions of "Straw Man Fallacy".

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

How is this related to my argument that people are looking at OoT through rose-tinted lens and treating it as if it is still the best game out there? I wasn't misrepresenting someone else's position, and in fact the only argument given was that my argument was a straw man, so I didn't have any position to misrepresent. Did you perhaps mean some other kind of fallacy, or or is "straw man" just being used similarly to such arguments as "tom-may-toes to-mah-toes"?

Hanyou said that he would have a long long response to show me, so I await it eagerly. :3

[Muten]

OoT isn't the best, but its by far better than that dull game known as Twilight Princess.

[Cody]

OoT isn't the best, but its by far better than that dull game known as Twilight Princess.

This isn't a poll, so simply giving me an opinion on a game without any facts to back it up doesn't contribute anything. Unless you give me reasons WHY you think that OoT is superior to TP, I can't possibly argue them with you.

[Inflexus]

You based your view of their position on something that wasn't their actual perspective, then you provided rebuttal for that false idea of what their stance was.

You assumed that they only liked because they were looking at it nostalgically, as you put it, "through a rose-tinted lens", ignoring that they may have liked the game(and probably did) for reasons outside it being the first 3D Zelda game.

[Cody]

You assumed that they only liked because they were looking at it nostalgically, as you put it, "through a rose-tinted lens"

When did I say that it was the only reason they liked it? I never said it was a bad game, I merely stated that nostalgia is a factor in it being considered superior to other later games in the series that improve on it in every way. You're misrepresenting my views, not the other way around. :3

ignoring that they may have liked the game(and probably did) for reasons outside it being the first 3D Zelda game.
__________________

I in fact asked for these reasons several times but nobody would give me an answer. I know that people DO have reasons, but nobody will give me any.

[Hanyou]

It may not be a perfect example of a straw man fallacy, I admit (shoutbox conversations are rarely as thorough as posts), but I think you're still attacking a false opponent--one who you simply assume is basing his entire argument for Ocarina on nostalgia. In essence, you're making something up about your opponent, claiming that is his position (or at least the basis of that position), and attacking it.

You have no reason to assume that Ocarina fans are fond of their game of choice simply due to nostalgia, any more than you have the right to assume that people who prefer Super Mario 64 to Super Mario Sunshine (a quite clearly inferior game) are simply being "nostalgic." I happen to prefer Star Trek: The Original Series to The Next Generation, the latter of which many would argue is clearly superior, even though The Next Generation is part of my childhood and The Original Series is not. Of course, when most people argue for TOS over TNG, TNG fans chalk it up to nostalgia. Much as you have done with Ocarina of Time. Like I said, it's not a perfect Straw Man fallacy, but it's as close as things get without being exact.

I don't have a long post in response to THIS thread. I have a few dozen reasons why I think Ocarina is better than Twilight Princess, but that's not what this thread is about, and quite frankly the limited scope of your argument here prevents me from exploring the quality of the two games any further.

You're also clearly biased against Ocarina of Time, since you've assumed as a matter of fact that people who prefer Ocarina are "fanboys."

[Muten]

This isn't a poll, so simply giving me an opinion on a game without any facts to back it up doesn't contribute anything. Unless you give me reasons WHY you think that OoT is superior to TP, I can't possibly argue them with you.

Yet you have not gave a reason why TP is better than OoT.

[Cody]

Yet you have not gave a reason why TP is better than OoT.

Actually, I did, but in the shoutbox. I feel that it improved on OoT in many ways. There was a lot of character development compared to the complete lack of it in OoT, with characters such as Colin growing throughout the story. The story itself was also a lot deeper, and obviously the graphics were too, though I don't consider that a major factor. There was also a lot more variety in gameplay, and the new functions available with the wii controller made things like the crossbow a joy to aim. These are a few of the many places in which TP improves on OoT.

It may not be a perfect example of a straw man fallacy, I admit (shoutbox conversations are rarely as thorough as posts), but I think you're still attacking a false opponent--one who you simply assume is basing his entire argument for Ocarina on nostalgia. In essence, you're making something up about your opponent, claiming that is his position (or at least the basis of that position), and attacking it.

I'm not claiming that nostalgia is the only reason that people like OoT, but I'm claiming that it is a reason. This position is one that you've clearly been disagreeing with me on the entire time, so I'm pretty certain I haven't been misrepresenting it.

You're also clearly biased against Ocarina of Time, since you've assumed as a matter of fact that people who prefer Ocarina are "fanboys."

Well, I generally use it as more of a term of endearment, and consider myself a MM and pokemon game fanboy simply because I think they are great games. :3 I'm not insulting you or anything.

[Hanyou]

Actually, I did, but in the shoutbox. I feel that it improved on OoT in many ways. There was a lot of character development compared to the complete lack of it in OoT, with characters such as Colin growing throughout the story.

One of the assertions made frequently about Twilight Princess (I am not attributing this to you, necessarily) is that it is a proper "upgrade" to Ocarina, as though it is somehow a better version of the same game. But a cursory runthrough of every aspect makes it immediately obvious that, however much it may be trying to "tap into" Ocarina's success, it is a wholly different game with a wholly individual identity. Its characters are developed differently. For example, almost all of the children (including Colin) are dropped off after the first three dungeons and hardly play a role again; Ocarina has the advantage of implementing Time Travel, which improves the level of immersion. All characters are revisited, and fixing their problems, mandatory or not (it often isn't), becomes a great driving force behind the game. Majora's Mask has a similar advantage.

The Wind Waker did not have this advantage, but oddly managed to pull off its character development beautifully. Consider the beggar girl--a minor character. There was a ripple effect from the "main quest" events to her own narrative; the story of your sister tied in directly with her own, and in turn, two families were affected. When you finally do interact with her in (I think) an optional sidequest, you're given a piece of the overall story. Her own story feels complete, and because it fit in well with the main quest, it never felt arbitrary. Ocarina managed to do this, with the added advantage of time travel, though admittedly not as well as The Wind Waker or Majora's Mask. I do like its characters more than MM's, mainly because I feel MM's were too cynical and often too bizarre (Anju and Kafei being the obvious exception); but The Wind Waker is a perfect example of the sort of character development TP should have had.

Instead, what we get are a bunch of empty characters that you are forced into helping because the main plot drives you to it, but whose stories drop off and become irrelevant. That some become irrelevant isn't so much of a problem (arguably, Malon and Talon are somewhat irrelevant by the end of OoT, but at least their story stretches throughout) as the fact that this happens to most of the characters. Including Zelda, and if you've played the game you know exactly why.

We are left with Midna and Link. I never liked Midna. There was an obvious design decision to invest the entire plot in her character though. A puzzling decision, as Zelda games have since Zelda 2 boasted an ensemble cast that did not focus on any one character, but constructed a rich world. Regardless, through her, we are compelled to care about the Twilight Realm, the real affected world and the world which we also never see (another bad design decision); we are expected to consider the gravity of her story as the layers are peeled away. JRPG's often manage this "layered" thing well (see Final Fantasy VI or Tales of Symphonia), but they do it by giving us a quality plot, THEN turning everything on its head and giving us a twist. The exposition regarding Midna was more along these lines: "We will keep you in the dark about the main plot of this game while giving you a revolving door of characters who will barely recur or matter in the long run and a linear story. Have fun trying to figure it all out."

Link himself, believe it or not, is often developed quite well in Zelda games since Ocarina at least. He undertakes a hero's journey, undergoes some serious changes of character, and makes pivotal decisions leading up to the showdown. After the Hero of Winds, this new Link in Twilight Princess, who had virtually no will of his own but simply took orders from the badly-developed Midna and some barely-explained explorers' guild, didn't have room to develop. You weren't on his journey anyway; you were on Midna's. That's new, and it's not welcome.

The story itself was also a lot deeper, and obviously the graphics were too, though I don't consider that a major factor. There was also a lot more variety in gameplay, and the new functions available with the wii controller made things like the crossbow a joy to aim. These are a few of the many places in which TP improves on OoT.

First, the good: I like the controls in Twilight Princess. No complaints. Better than Ocarina.

Also, of all the Zelda games, it has my favorite overworld music, and I like the Fire Dungeon, the ball and chain, and the size of the bosses.

Twilight Princess has a more complex, but badly-established storyline. Ocarina has a very simple but layered storyline (consider the Sheikah plotline). One of the advantages of the Zelda franchise, I think, was that they've traditionally managed some atmosphere. I don't begrudge stories for being simple. The Hobbit is a simple children's story, but it's riveting. Star Wars (frankly, the whole original trilogy) is based almost completely on borrowed material and is also extremely simple. Both work beautifully. I put Ocarina in the same class as Star Wars, meaning that it manages a classic, timeless sort of storyline with minimal fluff and with maximum player immersion.

Partly due to what I thought was an abhorrent graphical style, Twilight Princess seemed to me to lack atmosphere. Where every previous Zelda game since A Link to the Past has boasted bright graphics, textured sound and music, and at least some non-linear exploration, Twilight Princess gave us a uniformly brown, depressing atmosphere that did not really change from dungeon to dungeon. How you "feel" playing a game is relatively subjective, but I "felt" that Twilight Princess lacked atmosphere and heart almost entirely--it was monotonous, dull, and a chore to plod through. Contrast this with Ocarina, which went from bright to dark and back repeatedly, but maintained a strong and heavily populated storyline. By far, Ocarina's was superior.

As for the gameplay, I think I can be brief here. The game lasts 80 hours. I thoroughly explored the entire field between dungeons and discovered that it was a whole lot of nothing. While the same case could be made against The Wind Waker, at least its many islands held secrets and provided incentive to sail around between dungeons. Conversely, mini-dungeons, as good as they occasionally were in Twilight Princess, were sparse. Compare the desert in Twilight Princess to Ocarina's--there is virtually nothing to do. Improvements to such areas as Lake Hylia just aren't that significant. Rewards for long and tedious quests (an armor that eats rupees? Are you kidding me?) are awful. The main quest is strictly linear, as opposed to virtually every other Zelda game.

So what we have in the end is just more of nothing. And sidequests? Contrary to the passable Gold Skulltula quest, in which you were given enemies that were simple to collect in principle but sometimes hard to reach (so you'd need to come back with a better item), the Poes were tedious to collect, and the rewards for them and the bugs were, once again, sparse and uninspiring. I had virtually no incentive to do any of the sidequests.

I'm not claiming that nostalgia is the only reason that people like OoT, but I'm claiming that it is a reason. This position is one that you've clearly been disagreeing with me on the entire time, so I'm pretty certain I haven't been misrepresenting it.

Nostalgia might play a role in making Ocarina my favorite game, but I'm nostalgic about it because it was amazing. Remember, I had reason to be even more nostalgic about Sonic 2, Super Mario Bros., and any number of other games when Ocarina came out...it was good enough to knock them all out of the ballpark. I'm nostalgic about a lot of games, but they're not all my "greatest game of all time," and there are some games (such as Shenmue II, Phantasy Star, Morrowind, etc.) which I've played in the last 5 years and still love almost as much. That's why I think the argument is absurd.

Also, consider this: I love The Wind Waker and The Minish Cap, the latter of which I actually played after Twilight Princess. If nostalgia accounts for Ocarina being my favorite game, it can't account for my distaste for Twilight Princess. Hell, I'll even give another example--Okami. I think that game's everything Twilight Princess should have been, every step the Zelda franchise needs to take, and though I don't like it as much as Ocarina, I still love it. So how can the nostalgia argument have any relevance at all to liking Ocarina better than Twilight Princess? It can't, not when I so intensely dislike Twilight Princess, even assuming that nostalgia is the only factor (and you now have said it is not).

Any of these factors alone would not have been enough to make Twilight Princess an unpleasant game for me. Together, I think they made for a terrible experience, when compared to other Zelda games. On the opposite side you have Ocarina, which I believe is brilliant in the sum of its parts, even if it does not boast as much area or as many hours as Twilight Princess.

[UsayEldaZay]

It may not be a perfect example of a straw man fallacy, I admit (shoutbox conversations are rarely as thorough as posts), but I think you're still attacking a false opponent--one who you simply assume is basing his entire argument for Ocarina on nostalgia. In essence, you're making something up about your opponent, claiming that is his position (or at least the basis of that position), and attacking it.

You have no reason to assume that Ocarina fans are fond of their game of choice simply due to nostalgia, any more than you have the right to assume that people who prefer Super Mario 64 to Super Mario Sunshine (a quite clearly inferior game) are simply being "nostalgic." I happen to prefer Star Trek: The Original Series to The Next Generation, the latter of which many would argue is clearly superior, even though The Next Generation is part of my childhood and The Original Series is not. Of course, when most people argue for TOS over TNG, TNG fans chalk it up to nostalgia. Much as you have done with Ocarina of Time. Like I said, it's not a perfect Straw Man fallacy, but it's as close as things get without being exact.

I don't have a long post in response to THIS thread. I have a few dozen reasons why I think Ocarina is better than Twilight Princess, but that's not what this thread is about, and quite frankly the limited scope of your argument here prevents me from exploring the quality of the two games any further.

You're also clearly biased against Ocarina of Time, since you've assumed as a matter of fact that people who prefer Ocarina are "fanboys."

This is the best possible answer for this thread I believe.

Back to my answer- It is not the best example, it is some what biased because you can only see your side of the argument. There will never be any ''proof'' as to why tp is better or oot is.

[DvSag]

Ok, I'm just trying to get up to speed here. I've never heard of the term before, and I'm trying to make sense of it.

So, a "straw man fallacy" would be an argument where PartyA claims: 'OoT is the best game ever'; while PartyB refutes: 'OoT is only great to you because you view it with nostalgia'.

This would mean PartyB has encurred a "straw man fallacy" because they attacked a previously unproclaimed statement that may or may not be PartyA's view?

[Cody]

One of the assertions made frequently about Twilight Princess (I am not attributing this to you, necessarily) is that it is a proper "upgrade" to Ocarina, as though it is somehow a better version of the same game.

Yeah, it's a common complaint that so many Zelda games since aLttP have been running on a very similar formula. I don't think it's a remake of the same game, but I can definitely see the family resemblance between the two.

But a cursory runthrough of every aspect makes it immediately obvious that, however much it may be trying to "tap into" Ocarina's success, it is a wholly different game with a wholly individual identity. Its characters are developed differently. For example, almost all of the children (including Colin) are dropped off after the first three dungeons and hardly play a role again; Ocarina has the advantage of implementing Time Travel, which improves the level of immersion. All characters are revisited, and fixing their problems, mandatory or not (it often isn't), becomes a great driving force behind the game. Majora's Mask has a similar advantage.

I think that Majora's Mask is undoubtedly the best game in the series in terms of making you feel for the characters. Watching people through their three last days and how they coped with the upcoming end of the world. The scene in which the reunited Anju and Kafei decide to spend their last minutes together, their love so strong that not even the knowledge that they would die could phase it, was probably the most emotional scenes in any Zelda game. Watching the postman on the last day, caught between his desire to flee and his dedication to his job as a postman, really brought depth to him as a very dedicated man. There are so many thousands of examples (there's an article on a few of them here).

On the other hand, Ocarina of Time really didn't have nearly as much character depth. It's true that you can visit the areas in two different time periods, but when you're AT those time periods, time is basically frozen. You have the choice between hearing one line of text from them as a child or a different line of text from them as an adult. Sure you occasionally helped some people out on errands, like when the guard at the gate to Death Mountain was given a mask that he could bring home to his child, but there was no development, no "character" in the characters that you could get attached to. I feel that this was OoT's weakest area, and this was one of the main reasons that I loved MM so much, just as the growth of characters through the course of TP brought me to actually feel something apart from the kind of simple "neutral" reaction that I would get from reading a signboard.

(I didn't quote the rest of this point because it was personal opinion on how much you liked the characters that I can't really debate against. Some people like certain characters and some people don't.)

Link himself, believe it or not, is often developed quite well in Zelda games since Ocarina at least. He undertakes a hero's journey, undergoes some serious changes of character, and makes pivotal decisions leading up to the showdown. After the Hero of Winds, this new Link in Twilight Princess, who had virtually no will of his own but simply took orders from the badly-developed Midna and some barely-explained explorers' guild, didn't have room to develop. You weren't on his journey anyway; you were on Midna's. That's new, and it's not welcome.

Link, by design, is generally not given as much character-building as those around him. The idea of Link is that he is the "link" between you and the game, thus the lack of any speaking lines - it's up to your own imagination what he is thinking and saying. I wouldn't call the Link of OoT a character as much as a representation of the player within the game. In later games we can get some glimpses of character through facial expressions, but back in 1998, graphics weren't at the level where you could have detailed facial expressions.

Wind Waker Link certainly has a lot of in terms of character than OoT Link - by virtue of art design he is basically a huge face to make expressions with that has a body attached so he can swing a sword. WW Link felt human not only because of his expressions but because you knew he cared for people, such as his sister, who he risked his life to save. In OoT, Link goes on quests seemingly just because it's the right thing to do and it's his job as a hero. Wind Waker really did improve on that aspect, and is my #1 choice in the Zelda series in the area of the character of Link himself.

TP wasn't quite at that level, but still had the graphical advantage of being able to show what a character is feeling through body language and expressions that OoT didn't have. I didn't mind the focus on Midna during the plot advances, but I realize that particular argument is just a matter of personal preference so I won't argue it.

First, the good: I like the controls in Twilight Princess. No complaints. Better than Ocarina.

Also, of all the Zelda games, it has my favorite overworld music, and I like the Fire Dungeon, the ball and chain, and the size of the bosses.

Yeah, I really like the work they put into the music too. Music is a powerful tool in guiding the player's feelings to match the game.

Twilight Princess has a more complex, but badly-established storyline. Ocarina has a very simple but layered storyline (consider the Sheikah plotline). One of the advantages of the Zelda franchise, I think, was that they've traditionally managed some atmosphere. I don't begrudge stories for being simple. The Hobbit is a simple children's story, but it's riveting. Star Wars (frankly, the whole original trilogy) is based almost completely on borrowed material and is also extremely simple. Both work beautifully. I put Ocarina in the same class as Star Wars, meaning that it manages a classic, timeless sort of storyline with minimal fluff and with maximum player immersion.

I do like simple storylines where they fit. When I play a first-person shooter I really don't care why the zombies/aliens are there, what I want to do is shoot them. However, when I'm playing huge adventure/RPG in a massive overworld I really like similarly epic stories. The Hobbit had characters that you can identify with, and exciting adventures, yes, but a well worked epic storyline can have everything that the simple ones have, and more. The Hobbit was a good side-story/prequel, but the amount of work put into his epic story "The Lord of the Rings" is beyond comprehension. The interaction was so deep that each race had their own completely developed language, and the background and history of the world was every bit as detailed as the history of our own world. Now that's a book that excelled in storyline rather than just "sufficing". What it did was change the world of fantasy forever, and created millions of die-hard fans across the world.

Er, I got a bit sidetracked. <_< My point was that simple storylines can be ok, but if you can pull off a deep storyline, it has much more potential.

Partly due to what I thought was an abhorrent graphical style, Twilight Princess seemed to me to lack atmosphere. Where every previous Zelda game since A Link to the Past has boasted bright graphics, textured sound and music, and at least some non-linear exploration, Twilight Princess gave us a uniformly brown, depressing atmosphere that did not really change from dungeon to dungeon. How you "feel" playing a game is relatively subjective, but I "felt" that Twilight Princess lacked atmosphere and heart almost entirely--it was monotonous, dull, and a chore to plod through. Contrast this with Ocarina, which went from bright to dark and back repeatedly, but maintained a strong and heavily populated storyline. By far, Ocarina's was superior.

Yeah, OoT was a lot "brighter", I'll grant you that. Modern-day games have an infatuation with the "realistic" colours of grey and brown. I don't agree that TP had no atmosphere, but I do understood that a lot of people prefer more bright and cartoony graphics.

As for the gameplay, I think I can be brief here. The game lasts 80 hours. I thoroughly explored the entire field between dungeons and discovered that it was a whole lot of nothing. While the same case could be made against The Wind Waker, at least its many islands held secrets and provided incentive to sail around between dungeons. Conversely, mini-dungeons, as good as they occasionally were in Twilight Princess, were sparse. Compare the desert in Twilight Princess to Ocarina's--there is virtually nothing to do. Improvements to such areas as Lake Hylia just aren't that significant. Rewards for long and tedious quests (an armor that eats rupees? Are you kidding me?) are awful. The main quest is strictly linear, as opposed to virtually every other Zelda game.

The main quest is linear in OoT too. To get to a dungeon, you need to defeat the previous dungeon and get the item from that dungeon, with maybe a couple of mixups. Even MM's main story is pretty much linear (the selling point of MM is that you can ignore the main story if you want because there's so much more to do.) I'm not really sure what you mean by other Zelda games not having a linear main quest.

So what we have in the end is just more of nothing. And sidequests? Contrary to the passable Gold Skulltula quest, in which you were given enemies that were simple to collect in principle but sometimes hard to reach (so you'd need to come back with a better item), the Poes were tedious to collect, and the rewards for them and the bugs were, once again, sparse and uninspiring. I had virtually no incentive to do any of the sidequests.

Neither OoT or TP were so good in the sidequests department - that's MM's territory and to some extent WW's.

Nostalgia might play a role in making Ocarina my favorite game, but I'm nostalgic about it because it was amazing. Remember, I had reason to be even more nostalgic about Sonic 2, Super Mario Bros., and any number of other games when Ocarina came out...it was good enough to knock them all out of the ballpark. I'm nostalgic about a lot of games, but they're not all my "greatest game of all time," and there are some games (such as Shenmue II, Phantasy Star, Morrowind, etc.) which I've played in the last 5 years and still love almost as much. That's why I think the argument is absurd.

These other games had nowhere near the huge level of worship that marks such games as OoT and FFVII. Being told continually for ten years that OoT is Videogame Jesus leaves people expecting more and more out of potential successors until the wall of expectation is literally impossible for any game to climb. The intense scrutiny that TP went through is probably similar to what the children of Obama are going through right now at school. Expected to be perfect students and class presidents and leaders and to make important changes, and pressured to always do everything perfectly while being thrust into the spotlight.

I think a major problem with how TP was received was the mindset that people had when they deicded to play the game. The mindset that most OoT fans went into the game with seemed to not be "let's have fun playing a new unrelated Zelda game" but "let's see if this game has what it takes to be considered the successor to OoT", and was scrutinized and "stripsearched" so hard that people couldn't help but find flaw with it. MM didn't get hit by the spotlight because it was considered more of a sidestory than a proper sequel, and WW's graphics made a flat-out statement of "screw you, I'm my own game", but TP looked like an attempt at an "OoT 2.0" and was treated as such.

People who played TP and then OoT for the most part have trouble understanding why so many people think OoT is better, while the majority of TP-haters appear to be those who loved OoT. You said yourself that a lot of the problem you had with the game was something you couldn't really even put into words, just a "bad atmosphere" or general dislike of the game, and I think that the "live up to your famous father's expectations" syndrome made a large subconscious difference in the enjoyment of the game for many people.

(Also on a semi-related note, this thread reminded me of a funny rant about nostalgia from Yahtzee in one of his old game reviews.)

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Ok, I'm just trying to get up to speed here. I've never heard of the term before, and I'm trying to make sense of it.

So, a "straw man fallacy" would be an argument where PartyA claims: 'OoT is the best game ever'; while PartyB refutes: 'OoT is only great to you because you view it with nostalgia'.

This would mean PartyB has encurred a "straw man fallacy" because they attacked a previously unproclaimed statement that may or may not be PartyA's view?

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position in order to be able to knock it down.

For example: "Senator Jones says that we should not fund the attack submarine program. I disagree entirely. I can't understand why he wants to leave us defenseless like that."

This person is substituting Senator Jones' argument that we shouldn't fund the attack submarine program for an exaggerated and silly argument about how he wants us to have no defense at all, and then knocking down this "straw man argument" that he constructed himself and proclaiming himself the victor of the argument.

You see it a lot in political and religious debates. For example, you might see someone in a religious debate thread saying "I don't believe in evolution because the idea of dogs giving birth to cats is stupid." This person has exaggerated the evolutionist's argument into something inaccurate that looks completely ridiculous, in order to discredit it. If the evolutionist is feeling feisty they may respond with a straw man argument of their own about the religious guy believing in "magical undead sky wizards". A straw man argument can't be properly defended against, since it's not something that anyone on either side actually believes.

If you're looking for an example inside this thread, there's plenty.

My viewpoint: "I loved OoT as a child, but I think that it gets overhyped a lot when it gets compared to today's games because people remember it so nostalgically"

Responses: "You claim that the only reason people like OoT is because of nostalgia, and that's dumb"

My argument has been warped into one a lot harder to defend, because my argument that it tends to get glorified a lot due to fond childhood memories has suddenly been warped into an argument that OoT has no redeeming qualities, which is so obviously wrong that it makes me look stupid. It's a good tactic for discrediting the opponent, but not so much of a good tactic if you want to find the actual truth behind the matter.






Oops. This got way too long.