Let me ask you both a question (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Sunday, July 20, 2014, 12:09 (3790 days ago) @ Kermit
edited by General Vagueness, Sunday, July 20, 2014, 12:14

I'll answer. I explained this a long time ago, but I'll apply my thinking to this new context. These are cards, which implies a degree of portability. The object could exist in the game and in real life, much like Halsey's Journal actually does appear in the game and in real life. The cards' existence inside the game is believable.

A machine you can use to watch or download video is hardly unbelievable.

What makes 343's so-called terminals "retarded" is that they are episodic cutscenes masquerading as found objects in the game world. Who in the game world made them? Why would they exist in the game world? To quote myself, "They’re easter eggs that break immersion while trying to deepen it. They’re terminals found in the game world, but they take you out of it."

Well then you'd have to apply that to the text terminals in Halo 3, no? and the audio logs in ODST, and the other video terminals in Halo Anniversary, and these cards-- what's the in-universe rationale for each of them? The audio logs and the pictures that go with them are obviously from the city's surveillance system. The Halo 3 terminals would be for data access, and so would the Halo Anniversary and Halo 4 terminals-- maybe in Halo 3 it seemed more like they were for data access because of the numbers and abbreviations in the left panel, but do you really think all these terminals-- including the ones with the audio logs-- wouldn't be capable of mostly all the same things in-universe? The only thing unrealistic about the Halo 4 terminals is the way the little spheres turn to ash after you download their data.

Why would you open a terminal except to view it in the moment?

Why does that not apply to cards?

And why would a terminal in the game world present an omniscient perspective?

It's fairly clear it's because they were made by the Forerunners and/or their machinery. It says when you get them they're tied to the Domain, which is supposed to be this nearly omnipresent, highly capable, possibly intelligent data network, although from what I remember the game never actually tells you what it is or what it's like.
Also, why would they have cards with this information? A database, a book, heck even a scroll I might buy, but now that you got me to think about it, using cards seems unrealistic, they don't even have holes where you could bind them loose-leaf.
Back to the first point, it looks like you get Grimoire cards for killing things and completing objectives and missions, and I haven't heard of anyone just finding them, which brings up the question of why that is the way it is, in-universe, and moreover you don't even see the cards in the game except as a little icon. So yes, they could exist in the game world and the real world, but as it stands they don't, in the game world they exist in name only.

Conversely, it seems more realistic to me that a character in a game might read Grimoire cards in a moment of leisure and not in a hostile environment.

Conversely to that, I feel confident in saying watching a video (actually watching it, not just looking in its general direction and listening) takes more attention than reading something, and can make it harder to hear other things, so someone in a combat situation would be more likely to wait to watch a video than to read something (though to be fair I would think they'd wait to watch or read anything that isn't very important to their survival).

That's why I think I agree with Xenos and TTL Demog0gue. Reading the cards you get to, in a sense, inhabit your character outside the game world, and get a flavor of the world without playing the game. When you return to the game world, you have a richer understanding of it.

This a good point, maybe a really good point, for the existence of the cards and for them being basically the way they are, and I agree with it. What it's not is a reason they shouldn't also be available in the game for people who don't want to load up something completely separate just to read a few paragraphs. You had a point about a hostile environment, but then why not let us read them in the area that's specifically not hostile, the Tower?

343's "terminals" would be fine if they weren't called terminals and they didn't use the game's mechanic of "accessing terminals" to unlock them.

This is a good point too, except the first time you access one Cortana says she's downloading the data for later review, and, again, there's no good reason to require the cards to be accessed separately from the game.