Many problems: Unintelligiball

I see several problems with this trope.

First, let's play Guess That Trope. Anyone get it? If not, it's probably because it's a bad pun (and not of the good, groan-worthy bad pun variety) on The Unintelligible, which has nothing to do with this trope. It has very low wicks and inbounds, to boot.

Second, it's a highly subjective audience reaction. What sports are boring and not well understood is going to vary wildly from person to person. Not to mention that "extended" scene is subjective in and of itself. If nothing else gets done, this needs a YMMV banner.

Third, is this even really a trope (or audience reaction)? Many of the examples are questionable or vague like "a lot of anime".

edited 1st Apr '11 10:33:24 AM by ccoa

Needs a cut.

I think "the story uses a game without explaining it's rules" could be an objective core to the trope, with some reworking: for example we should exclude sports that are very mainstream in the intended audience's country, like baseball in the USA and soccer in Europe.

Also, the title isn't a pun on the trope The Unintelligible, it's a pun on the word "unintelligible", which it is related to. Though it has few wicks, so I wouldn't really mind to see it go, but I still don't think that it would help.

Huh, I thought it would be a pun on Idiot Ball. I do think there might be some kind of place for Gratuitous Sports Scene though. It shouldn't matter whether or not the audience understands it.

My first impression was that this was a poor snowclone title with the word "unintelligent" misspelled. I would not have guessed that "Unintelligi" = "Unintelligible".

I'm still not sure even after reading the description why the word "Unintelligible" has letters cut off at the end.

edited 1st Apr '11 11:42:37 AM by SeanMurrayI

If it's just about an unexplained/incomprehensible sport, wouldn't it be Calvinball? Meh, I see how it makes the distinction, but the title is horrible.

edited 1st Apr '11 11:48:13 AM by Fighteer

Because "ball" is pronounced similar to "ble". Unintelligiball.

Gratuitous Sports Scene would be a very different trope from this one, that can be any game not just sports, and doesn't have to be gratuitous.

Whether or not the audience understands something can also imply a form of author intention in a trope, for example the Creator In-Joke trope also relies on most people not getting the references in question.

This one could still be a Viewers Are Geniuses Sister Trope, where the writer does't want to break the narrative with explaining the rules, so they just assume that everyone knows them.

You just pointed out the difference. Unexplained sport is this trope. Incomprehensible sport is Calvinball.

edited 1st Apr '11 12:01:14 PM by EternalSeptember

I agree this can be a trope. This is basically when a show uses a game but doesn't fully explain the rules, right? Leaving the viewers out of the loop.

I think it need a rename, though. Quite hard to figure out what it is and there is very few wicks. The trope is not a new one either (it exist at last since august of last year).

I think it's actually a pretty good trope, and not a terrible name (I actually guessed it was a variation on Calvin Ball.) Could be better, but it's not a snowclone of The Unintelligible so much as a pun on the word "unintelligible."

I also thought it was related to Idiot Ball.

Now, you see, that actually would be a slightly better name; seeing it as two words makes it appear much less like a pun and more like something involving an actual ball.

EDIT:Ignore

edited 1st Apr '11 2:02:24 PM by Ghilz

@Heatth — I think what you are describing is more of an objective trope than what's currently written.

"An extended scene of characters playing a game which the reader might not know well enough to want to read about it. This can get frustrating, especially when the game described is important to the plot."

So it's Complaining About Game Scenes You Dont Like and Complaining About Needing To Read Up To Understand Something. At least as currently defined.

edited 1st Apr '11 10:43:50 PM by Camacan

I'm not sure even this is the workable core of a trope.

Let's say you're an American, and you want to work American football into a work aimed at Americans. You're not going to explain the rules of football, because presumably, the audience will already know the rules of football. (Put another way, you wouldn't have a trope page about American football, because it's People Sit On Chairs.)

However, when non-football fans watch the show, or when the show is exported to anywhere other than North America, people will find the show utterly unintelligible because they don't have a clue what's going on. (This is why we still have a Useful Notes page on American Football.)

At the very least, I don't see a way where this can be made objective enough to avoid YMMV, since it basically amounts to an audience reaction to an attempt to avoid an As You Know moment for (ironically enough) the audience. Yes, "the rules of the game are not explained" is an objective phenomenon, but it takes the sort of value judgment TV Tropes does not truck in to keep it from being People Sit On Chairs.

I think it's objective enough. For this (and a lot of other tropes), I think you just need to apply something like an entertainment version of the "reasonable person standard."

Or in other words, "Would the average person from the work's primary intended audience know what's going on?" In most cases, if a movie is really about a sport widely known in its native culture, you'd expect most of the audience to be familiar with it. A "baseball movie" where an important scene doesn't make sense unless you know what, say, a suicide squeeze is, that's relatively unremarkable.

But this trope would come into play if you had, oh, a romantic comedy with one scene at a baseball game, and if you don't know what a suicide squeeze is, you won't understand why the heroine angrily leaves her old boyfriend. Because understanding the rules of baseball isn't normally a prerequisite for following the plot of a romantic comedy.

edited 2nd Apr '11 7:36:47 AM by suedenim

For every case like you describe, though, there are a multitude of borderline cases. Sure, you might not expect a Romantic Comedy buff to know what a suicide squeeze is, but what about less obscure rules or plays in baseball? How "obscure" does it have to be before it qualifies? There's a lot of subjectivity there.

Although "scene that requires knowledge of the rules/plays of a game that are not explained in-work in order to be understood and is important to the plot", possibly with the addition of "and may not be understood by the (target) audience" is more of a trope than what we have now.

Exactly how camp a gay must be to be called Camp Gay? How strange a girl must be to be called a Strange Girl? Having borderline cases doesn't make a turn YMMV on it's own.

Again, for the millionth time, here we are, overthinking the idea of YMMV, just because some examples could be arguable, if we would intentionally try to look for arguments.

But normally, this one sounds like any other trope, we have no reason to assume that it would cause problems by people trying to disagree with entries.

So, aside a possible rename we should also consider a rewrite, right? If only to make the trope more clear.

Also, 'target audience' is hard to pin down. The article mention Americans watching a cricked scene in a British show. Should this count for this trope? And if we think in the opposite, a Holiwood movie that uses Baseball. Holiwood movies are watched all over the world, but Baseball is not played all over the world. Does it count, considering an average US American is likely to know the rules (and they are the primary audience)?

edited 2nd Apr '11 10:50:30 AM by Heatth

^^Only both Camp Gay and Strange Girl are typically determined by a character's role, function, and attitude in a narrative.

This concept, however, is dependent entirely on a viewer perception of something in a work whereas the other tropes you bring up are not.

edited 2nd Apr '11 10:59:43 AM by SeanMurrayI

The name only really irks me because I'm conditioned to associated "X Ball" with the Idiot Ball snowclone. But meh.

^ I still see the fact that most sports ending in "-ball" are usually a single word as a second strike against the name as is.

Football, basketball, baseball, dodgeball, handball, kickball... even Calvinball is written as one word in the page image, even though the trope is sometimes seen written as two words. At the very least, any instances of Unintelligiball typed up as two words should be fixed.

edited 2nd Apr '11 12:49:06 PM by SeanMurrayI

Yeah. But I assumed it was a mistake from the author of the thread. At no point of the article "Unintelligiball" is used, so we can't see if it is supposed to be one or two words.

Btw, I just changed this thread to link to the trope as a single word.

edited 2nd Apr '11 12:53:04 PM by Heatth

I actually did guess the trope pretty closely by the name alone. I do think the definition needs work, and may require a small tweak or cleanup to Calvinball as well.

The way I see it, going by titles/trope namers alone, Calvinball is where you're making the rules up as you go along. In a game of Unintelligiball, the rules are fixed but extremely convoluted and hard to follow. In a fictional game, to explain all the rules to the reader would take too much running time, so we may not know them, but whatever they are they're set in stone. By that token, Unintelligiball could be expanded to be more broad and anything from Calvinball that better fits Unintelligiball should be moved over.

According to our Google search, the name for the trope page is Unintelligi Ball - two words. Not a mistake.

EDIT: Oh, look, someone used the custom title to force it to be one word no matter what.

edited 2nd Apr '11 3:12:24 PM by ccoa

Then the mistake was from who created the trope. Making it two words is just dumb.