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Sci-Fi Author Timothy Zahn Is Creating a Video Game
An anonymous reader writes "Timothy Zahn, one of the most influential Star Wars Expanded Universe authors (creator of Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade), and writer of 40 novels and 90+ short stories, will be trying his hand as the Creative Director for a new video game, Timothy Zahn's Parallax. From the Kickstarter page: 'The game concept is heavily inspired by the original Master of Orion but, because Timothy Zahn is the co-creator, a major focus is going to be on making sure that each alien race is as fully-realized as possible, and that the interactions with the other aliens are realistic: talking to one alien race will be different than talking to another, and the choices you make in the game will have side effects and the computer players will remember them — and treat you differently because of them.' Other highlights:
'The game will include at least 5 of his non-Star Wars alien races (Modhri, Kalixiri, Zhirrzh, Qanska and Pom); Backers will be active participants in the game creation process; No Digital Rights Management foolishness.' The Kickstarter starts at 6pm MST today."
Pom/Porn
And don't even ask about the hairy palms.
$10 only gets you a star name?
Seeing how they can still sell the game after, I think he could do better on (digital-only) pledges.
A big fan of the Conqueror's trilogy, must have read all 3 books at least half a dozen times. It's a shame I can't stand 4X games! I'd prefer to see someone with a bit more gaming clout trying to take on such a rich universe, as the majority of 4X indies made in the past few years have been sorely lacking anything appealing. Good luck to them, however! I'll probably keep my Zahn funding to buying books rather than games, unless this one manages to turn out amazing.
Can't fathom slapping down $30 on a 4X though. It's a genre with such a narrow cone of interest that the nuances in each individual title mean that a small select group will love it, and everyone else (even fans of other 4X titles) will hate it. Wake me again when it's closer to launch date and we can see what we're getting into.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
They are the best kind of alien in the gaming universe.
$30 for the game?
$10 only gets you a star name?
Seeing how they can still sell the game after, I think he could do better on (digital-only) pledges.
I have been priced off kickstarter (at least for games) which used to be more reasonable about my support, where I could afford to have little expectation, and the possibility of getting a lot for my money. Now I have stopped looking at all.
My money will go to Humble Bundle 9 https://www.humblebundle.com/ which currently includes FTL, Fez and Trine 2 and others(the weekly bundle is Duke Nuken 3D and Shadow Warrior with DLC which is better than the original games). In contrast Humble Bundle has hit $2million already with another 11 days to go.
Granted, the alien species there weren't terribly memorable in any way... the series was built more around the lower-tech methods of the human resistance, which I did find to be an interesting concept.
-- Silhouette
make sure your readers have some way of guessing at the correct proonunciation.
Yeah, I read the Conqueror's Trilogy, and I had to rely on my imagination! Can you believe it?! In a sc-fi novel, no less!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Quoting TFS, "a major focus is going to be on making sure that each alien race is as fully-realized as possible", why don't you focus on making the game not suck ass like MoO3 did first and THEN making sure the aliens are fleshed out (homogenous alien civilizations trope not withstanding).
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I could really care less about the interactions with other races. I mean, how may different noises can they possibly make when I've got my boot on their throat (or throats, aliens ya know) and they're trying to get me to stop genociding their species.
I kinda liked fleet combat in MoO, but I'd rather see a full modernized redo of that vs. something that's going to focus more on diplomacy, which is what I'd have to say this is going to be since they want to spend so much time on how the aliens communicate.
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a major focus is going to be on making sure that each alien race is as fully-realized as possible, and that the interactions with the other aliens are realistic: talking to one alien race will be different than talking to another, and the choices you make in the game will have side effects and the computer players will remember them — and treat you differently because of them.
In concept this sounds great. In practice, it's probably just going to be a series of sliders that influences how likely a race is to trade with or attack you.
Claims like this are almost always underwhelming in the final product. Heck, I challenge anyone to name ONE game that has a decent, realistic morality system. If we can't even get Good/Bad right, what odds does this game have?
and the choices you make in the game will have side effects and the computer players will remember them â" and treat you differently because of them.
Oh great, yet another rep grinding system.
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I would rather see a very good video game based on Larry Niven's Ringworld.
Speaking of which...
As a hobbyist conlanger, I can say with some certainty that very nearly all sf and fantasy authors outsource alien names to infants. The only rule is "if their language consists of nothing but noises humans can't pronounce, just bash your head on the keyboard."
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I've always regarded Zahn as a bit of a hack.
He writes what I call sausage machine books; he turns the handle and out they come, one after the other. His books are inoffensive but unmemorable, the kind of thing you pick up in a bus or airline terminal when there's nothing better to do while you're waiting for your ride to show up.
Oh well, I suppose it pays his bills, but I'm not expecting to see Zahn's name on any of the Hugo or Nebula Awards' lists anytime soon.
Honestly, I hope he can pull it off, because to me it sounds just like every ideas-man wanna be game designer who's never made a game before. Not trying to be harsh, but seriously, it does sound like the crap newbs spout about their first game when they haven't even completed a tetris or mario clone, let alone a branching world where everything has consequences. It's easier said than done, just ask Peter Molyneux. He's not really a liar, he wanted to do all the stuff he spouted off about, but it wasn't feasible given the technological limitations of this decade...
Game Engines Are Free. My advice is the same for everyone else: No prototype? No backing. If you can't scrape together even a simple prototype first, even with just colored boxes moving around, then I can't put any money down. I don't care if you're John Carmack. No prototype, no money. Ideas are a dime a dozen, really, they are. It's the execution that matters. Many game developers go through tens or hundreds of iterations trying out different stuff, finding a novel core mechanic that works, and is fun.
Here we're being asked to throw half a million dollars in on a project that no one even has an inkling as to if it'll be fun or not... Hell, maybe if there were concept art some battle scenarios and a few races, you don't have to go all in, just get something in an engine. Contracted out graphics, contracted out engine, contracted out game-play, ideas man who's got no experience in the driver's seat... $500,000.00 and we'll build a race car, we've never done it before, but how hard can it be? Maybe his status will attract some actual gamedev talent? I mean, face it, that's what he's asking for: "I'm an ideas man with a lot of reputation, and you're giving me money due to the reputation..."
Personally, I'd tell him to go work on one of the many 4x indie-games, he could lend his skills to a team who can at least make pixels move. I fear this will not end well.
wow! finally something great is going on.
If he's "one of the most influential Star Wars Expanded Universe authors", how many others are there? On whom did he have influence?
Personally, I'm known as one of the most influential three-toed green bunny with superpowers short-novel authors (creator of Pukey the Mighty Bunny and Horrible Emperor Zfnjor) . Not THE most influential of course, but one of the top 500 for sure. However among the four-toed green bunny with superpowers short-novel authors, I'm considered little more than a hack.
You can get my books on Amazon for $2.99. I tried to put them up for $1.99, but I guess people expect be paid more than $1.99 to read a short novel about a three-toed green bunny with superpowers. For some reason, the four-toed green bunny with superpowers short novels sell like hotcakes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Timothy Zahn was kidnapped, held a gun-point, and forced to record that video by gaming terrorists!
- Modular ships and technology that can make a difference. Both in tactical combat and civilization/empire building.
- Species traits that really matter during the entire course of the game. Same goes for leaders.
- A simple interface that didn't require you to go back to the main screen for every single action, select a submenu, then another one, then choose an option...
- Build queues that worked and didn't require scrolling.
Also, everything that you could build was always on a single screen, available by a single click but it was separated so you didn't have to scroll through your buildings looking for ships and vice versa.
And you could sort your colonies by how fast they will build stuff - i.e. by production.
- Pretty graphics. Planetscapes were simple yet beautiful. Elerians were hot AND a very powerful race.
- But most importantly, HUMANOID SPECIES. Even Silicoids looked somewhat bipedal.
Which is very important if you're supposed to empathize with the species you're playing.
Among other things MOO3 managed to fuck up was the look of the game - most species now looked like bad modern art.
Practically all of them could be considered "repulsive".
Really alien looking species are a nice touch from time to time on an episodic show like Star Trek but there is no appeal for a weekly show whose main characters resemble puddles of mud.
We want to see humanoid aliens with humanoid expressions on their humanoid faces.
Which is why I'm having a bad feeling about this whole "as fully-realized as possible" thing.
Smells a lot like MOO3.11 for workgroups.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Every time I see contrived names from Sci-Fi stories, I can't help but think of a quote from an O.S. Card book.
That being said, even if we applied this rule consistently, wouldn't we still have to come up with strange, seemingly unpronounceable names for aliens? We've no real word in English to describe some alien from Betelgeuse Seven, though we might opt to say Betelgeusian. Calling them Betelgeusian might seem satisfactory, but in many sci-fi contexts it would be like, just to pick a random example, applying our name for people from the subcontinent to people from a newly found continent on the opposite side of the planet because we wanted to get a grant proposal accepted by the Spanish royal family. So one must, in some situations, try to use a truly alien name to describe an alien people.
But this always carries a touch of the absurd. Our orthography, indeed our alphabet, was developed for our lips, throat, larynx, etc. Attempts to transcribe the sounds of other species from our own planet always look a little silly (I've never in my life heard a sheep say "baa" or a cow "moo", though like everyone else I accept these things without a thought by force of convention). For that matter, trying to transcribe sounds made by body parts accurately for which there isn't a fixed convention (like the sounds of diarrhea or sex which, on account of sensitivities, lack a fixed convention in contrast to something like chewing, munch munch, or another onomatopoetic standard like "burp" or "sniff") always takes the reader away from absorption in the text to think, at least briefly, "Wow, those are weird letters on the page."
I fear, therefore, that the illusion must always be broken when new words are introduced and the more alien the words are--even if the context demands something very alien--the more we cannot suspend disbelief. Perhaps it's just a limitation of the human mind, and therefore of sci-fi which is conditioned by its imaginative source, that cannot be overcome. Perhaps alien words some made up must always look like someone just made them up.
Nuff' said.
I mean not only he is a sci-fi writer just like Ron Hubbard, but he is a Star Wars writer. He could easily either be pope of the already existing Jedi church or create the Sith church. What a wasted opportunity...
I had a somewhat longer post prepared originally, which was essentially a complaint about how no one ever seems to go the imperialist route for naming and call things Betelgeusian (notable exceptions: Martians and Terrans.)
The natural thing for two cultures in contact, at least up until the later half of the 20th century, was for words to be assimilated more fully. The silly letters get massaged into something more legible, and sometimes even calqued or translated. Hence for hundreds of years we had "Canton" instead of "Guangdong" for a certain Chinese province. Still unfamiliar, but not rawly alien.
In my opinion it would make more sense if we saw more of these compromises, particularly for far-future settings where lots of contact would've been standard. Eventually new words, no matter how alien, get assimilated.
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There's already a great replacement, StarDrive...
I have been addicted to Starbase Orion lately, which is currently the best Master of Orion inspired game on iOS. As soon as I have time to read the whole kickstarter page, I'll think about contributing, but I'd like to know how they plan on implimenting their multi-platform pass with iOS. I don't think that will work.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Ouch.
..........
:D
I've actually been developing software for 15 years, and have made a game before (XNA on Windows Phone, and Xamarin to port it to Android, ported from an original 3D WPF version that looked great but ran like crap on a phone/ tablet and had too small a playable area there) - there are screen shots on the Kickstarter page. And you can't tell from the screen shots, but the pixels do move.
That is, of course, the least of what I've done - I specialize in highly-complex modular systems that push around and transform data on the server tier, as well as UI/ UX presentation of that data in the simplest way possible (lots of complex third-order-effect stuff going on behind the scenes, pretty colors for the user). I got an MCSD way back when it meant something. I've redesigned $60,000 per-seat systems and saved multi-million dollar projects... I'm not the idea man - I'm the architect that the idea men go to when they want something to actually get built.
But for this... none of that really matters. Yeah, I'm going to move pixels around on a screen and create a dynamic shell driven by XML-based files that loads the content on the fly, but the content generation itself is the long pole. I had photoshopped screen shots that were serviceable but, since I decided to let the backers help generate all those reams of content, I stopped working on them. The community management and organization is going to be critical, and my main job is going to be to mentally juggle hundreds of different ideas all at once and make them fit together - and then listen to the backers and fix it when they tell me I messed up. as for the novel core mechanic, I'm stealing it from MOO[1], cherry-picking cool features from other games, and fixing the stuff that tends to annoy me.
But the cool part is that you don't have to believe me, and you win either way: either I fail miserably and you're right, or I succeed reasonably well and you get a fun game to play.
At least he didn't go full-retard and inject a few random bits of punctuation... Modhri could have been Mod'hr@i.
But yeah, he fails rule #1 of how people use language. Foreign words collide with a language and they get modified to suit the convention of the language.
Modhri? ... probably everyone calls them Mods or Moths. Kalixiri -> clackers. Zhirrzh -> Zeroes. Quanska? Quacks or Quanks. Pom? yeh... that gets to stay Pom.
$250 for the privilege of beta testing the game? seriously? This guy majorly overvalues a lot of the rewards.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
So it doesn't seem so harsh, I believe OP was referring to Zahn, since he presents the video. :)
>"I'm an ideas man with a lot of reputation, and you're giving me money due to the reputation..."
So don't take it personally.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
There is already a classic vintage game called Parallax.
It has lasting fame for having given name to the video game technique Parallax scrolling.
The game's soundtrack by Martin Galway is also a classic, with many covers/remixes made by video game music enthusiasts.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
It doesn't seem harsh - criticism is worth a hell of a lot more than praise, because you can do something productive with criticism. Hence the multitude of smileys...
:D
And Tim's not the idea man, he's the guy who's got 130+ published works of fiction in the past 30 years or so, so he's going to be focused on helping to make the content engaging and interesting. Which - despite opinions to the contrary - I think he's proven himself capable of.
Did you understand the word despite the typo? I suspect you did... language is resilient that way. It can handle being typed by someone whose right arm is currently immobilised after being in an accident on a level crossing.
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As ceresabraciator says further down, this type of word
always takes the reader away from absorption in the text to think, at least briefly, "Wow, those are weird letters on the page."
Imagination is key to all reading, but the text should connect as directly as possible to the reader's imagination -- understanding should be passive with as little effort as possible.
Consider Dai swung his bwyell and chopped the neidr in half. You cannot "hear" that sentence when you read it... unless you speak Welsh, because that's where I nicked all the nouns from. Presumably I'd have described the bwyell as some kind of axe, and the neidr as a serpent-like creature previously... because bwyell is axe, and neidr is snake.
Call a spade a spade, or at worst a Venusian spade.
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Even someone who takes time over their names and languages can still fall into the pronunciation trap, though. The Lord of the Rings films didn't strictly follow Tolkien's own pronunciation guide, because most readers pronounced the names differently from Tolkien's intention. It's commercially more sensible to please the fans than the author....
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That being said, even if we applied this rule consistently, wouldn't we still have to come up with strange, seemingly unpronounceable names for aliens? We've no real word in English to describe some alien from Betelgeuse Seven, though we might opt to say Betelgeusian. Calling them Betelgeusian might seem satisfactory, but in many sci-fi contexts it would be like, just to pick a random example, applying our name for people from the subcontinent to people from a newly found continent on the opposite side of the planet because we wanted to get a grant proposal accepted by the Spanish royal family. So one must, in some situations, try to use a truly alien name to describe an alien people.
It's often surprisingly how many names for people or places originated as exonyms, ie names given by an outside group. "Wales" and "Wallonia" (the French-speaking part of Belgium) both come from a Low Germanic root meaning "foreigner". Germany calls itself Deutschland, while the French call it Allemagne and although the Italians call it Germania, they call the people tedeschi.
I don't think humanity would have a problem coming up with exonyms for alien races.
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I'm a huge Timothy Zahn fan. He's a GREAT sci-fi writer. I hope he pulls this off!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
My problem with this project is the problem I have with almost all software projects that I've seen on Kickstarter: The biggest cost is programmer time.
So what? you might ask, it is a programming project after all.
Well, I see programmer after programmer eliminating all personal risk by writing themselves a nice middle-class paycheck at the backers' expense, but at the end of the project, the developer's the one that's going to be getting royalties on future sales. This seems like a bit of a cheat to me; having your cake and eating it.
Yes, it's great to have a guaranteed income, and that's why many content creators work for hire -- the trade off is that we're not gambling our time against future profit, but selling it for immediate recompense. Thousands of projects have been cancelled by the likes of EA, but their salaried programmers are safe, because it's not a gamble.
So why should I or anyone else pay you or Zahn for something that you both could do off your own bat? You sound like you're well enough off to survive for a year without starving, and Zahn's got plenty of money coming in in royalties.
Now it may be that you aren't actually taking any money yourself from this, but I see nothing to say that. Like the investors in Dragon's Den/Shark Tank, I don't like putting money up for someone who hasn't already invested a lot in terms of their own time and/or money...
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Good strategy game AIs are very difficult. The market for turn based space strategy games is quite small. Master of Orion 2 is almost 20 years old, and it is still played.
This is kickstarter, so he only needs to convince some naive people to get the money.
What if the bwyell and neidr are not an axe and snake, but a weapon specific to that culture and an animal specific to that realm of fiction? Now you've got "Dai swung his large bladed weapon and chopped the furry serpentine creature in half." I'd argue that's easily a step down in IQ and writing down is a bad thing (in my opinion).
What you're essentially saying is that an author should never develop a language or race with it's own language's name. I heartily disagree and you wouldn't care for my fiction either.
Depends on just who your target audience is.
Indeed I think this more plausible than using names intended to look alien. Sure, if aliens have a physiology similar to ours and call themselves Vulcan, we'll likely do so as well. Though they be as culturally sensitive as a Starfleet cadet in TNG, humans will always find something else to call a people whose name can only be transcribed as Hxach'caaskhh'aik'ak'a. We might just call them Gelfs. If they're tall and hairy, they'll have to get used to being called Wookies.
One note on Allemagne: at its roots it wasn't really an exonym. The term was an endonym referring to a confederation of tribes called the Allemanni (all the men, i.e. the tribes taken together). These tribes lived in what is today Alsace and Switzerland and gave Marcus Aurelius endless grief. They were at last defeated by Clovis and thus their name would be applied to Germany more broadly by the Franks. It's kind of like a synecdoche. This fact leaves me wondering about the roots of the term Germani, given its like ending. The OED has the roots of Germani as an exonym, borrowing from the Celts (gair=neighbor). I personally suspect that the term applied to a single tribe engaged in trade and warfare with Celts and Latins and that it was subsequently projected onto the whole. By the time it came into literature, its roots must have been lost.
I think you're right. Someone above characterizes OP as being unwilling to use his imagination and I think this quite unfair. When we're reading sci-fi, we want to believe what we're reading and we want to be absorbed in it. We want to achieve that suspension of disbelief. But the more confused looking a name is, the more we're broken out of the experience. I can use my imagination to figure out how to pronounce Xchryxchub. But the effort in doing this will break the spell of the fiction. And as you point out, humans would really just say Krikoob anyway. The less 'realistic' a word look, the more realistic it feels.
That's more a product of an inappropriate choice of orthography. I'd be willing to bet his non-English readership was somewhat better at getting the names right, as would those with a Classics education (and given the age of his writings, much of his initial fanbase would've had such.) When a real constructed language is used, the problem of conveying the correct pronunciation becomes hilariously complex, since the orthography has to be internally consistent more than it has to be transparent to the reader.
Still, there are ways authors can provide cues—have characters mispronounce the name ("Leg-o-laz?" asked Frodo. "No, it's more like Le-go-lass," said Gimli. "I wish I could actually hear you saying that instead of just having to read it on the page," whined Pippin. "This example isn't really going where it was supposed to," said Gandalf.) or use an alternative orthography when English speakers use the name in an English context.
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I think the criticism is actually fair; it's stupid to always quote humans saying "Xchryxchub" when they're actually saying "Krikoob," as that implies they're better at pronouncing the weird alien name than they really are. Going to the trouble of inventing an orthography for their weird alien language in our alphabet, and then disregarding it, is part of the superfluous exotica complaint that Orson Scott Card levelled (and in the fantasy department, I believe Diana Wynne Jones has said something similar.) For that matter, maybe "Krikoob" should be spelled "Crickube"—a completely natural English spelling, but nothing disappointingly baby-ish.
There's an exception, of course: eventually the weird orthography would become legitimate if the two cultures remained in contact long enough and the aliens were thoroughly studied by our linguists. The onus is then on the author, like any explorer describing a newly-discovered civilization, to document and explain the correct pronunciation as best he or she can. (And if that gets tedious, perhaps a civilization with thirty different velar plosives isn't really appropriate for writing stories about. Much like diarrhea, comparative shopping, and trying to get ketchup stains out of a casual shirt, not everything makes good reading material.)
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We've no real word in English to describe some alien from Betelgeuse Seven, though we might opt to say Betelgeusian.
We'd say that until we figured out how to talk to them, and once we did, we'd ask them what they want to be called and then use that.
Or do what a lot of authors do, and put the weird words and their pronunciation in an appendix, with a hotlink if it's an eBook. Hell, if it's an ebook, you could have a spoken pronunciation. I'd rather the weird words than the verbose expansion - that feels too dumbed down for my liking.
proonunciation - a way of regularly pronouncing things correctly.
Thanks man good post about game see this post how to make a flash game http://slashdot.org/submission/2965805/how-to-make-flash-game-
And in a similar vein, I watched the Kickstarter video where Zahn says the alien names. When he says "Zhirrzh", I hear no justification for the double R, and his pronunciation of Kalixiri would be pretty unambiguous if rendered as "Calixeeri". Which surely looks alien enough as it is?
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Germany calls itself Deutschland...
Even more weird, Germans don't make use of the J sound--their G is always a hard g like in go, their J is pronounced like a Y--so we've invented a name for them they would never pick for themselves. They'll fudge it with a CH sound as in "chermany."
Likewise with Spain/Spanish, where it's unnatural for them to start a word with the letter S, it always starts with an "es" sound as in "Espania."
Then there's the really badly translated stuff, like say everything from China or India. (Nobody could tell the difference between Peking and Beijing? Or Bombay and Mumbai? Really?) And don't get me started on why Feng Shui isn't spelled "fung schway".
I've often wondered why the English were so particularly obtuse about picking unpronounceable or horribly inaccurate things to call other people and places.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Yeah, that was definitely more like "Zheerzh." If anything the inclusion of the second "r" in the spelling is outright misleading, and makes the "i" seem like it should be short. Sadly, the secret to getting published in fiction is to know the minimum amount of information necessary to fool your publisher, as this guy proved, with relatively few exceptions. The more background detail you're aware of, the less saleable you generally are. People born before 1945 are generally accepted from this rule because they were published before this kind of crap became ubiquitous.
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We'd say that until we figured out how to talk to them, and once we did, we'd ask them what they want to be called and then use that.
What, like we call Deutsch people "German", and Nederlanders "Dutch"? Like we call people from Ni-hong "Japanese" and people from Zhongguo "Chinese"?
If we look further back we'll see that names are more likely to transfer from outside the group to in, rather than the other way round. The Gaelic for Scotland ("Alba") came via Ireland's old word for the island of Great Britain ("Alban") from the Latin for England (or at least part of it), whence also "Albion". "Scotland" itself comes from Latin, and has known Celtic antecedent. And the words "Gael" and "Gaelic" are thought to bear their origins in Welsh, possible meaning "forest-dweller", but it came to English via Scottish Gaelic and Irish, where they are used as the main terms for the languange and ethnicity (but not nationality).
And as for those Deutsch people I mentioned, the word derives from the Latin Teutones, which may have derived from one Germanic tribe's name, but was certainly not the name all of them used -- hell, they didn't even consider themselves one thing. This of course has parallels in the modern Inuit/Eskimo problem. The Inuits didn't want to be called "Eskimos", so we started calling all Eskimos "Inuit", which the non-Inuit Eskimo tribes in turn objected to.
Also, while we may have stopped talking about "Red Indians", the term "native Americans" has no native American derivation -- it's pure outsider. The Canadian equivalent "First Nations" is entirely composed of generic descriptive words.
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Most of those are ancient, and not representative of modern behaviour. And nobody involved wants to change them, so it's a moot point anyway.
And "native Americans" is not a name for any one specific group, so of course it is generic and artificial. Much more relevantly, we say "Inuit" rather than "eskimo".
Much more relevantly, we say "Inuit" rather than "eskimo".
The Inuit are only one tribe of the group referred to as Eskimos. Calling all Eskimos "Inuit" is like calling all Native Americans "Cherokee", or calling all white people "French, all black people Tutsies or all Arabs "Yemeni". Or indeed the "ancient, and not representative of modern behaviour" example of naming all Germans "Teutones"... or even "Germans" (also a name for one or the tribes).
Human nature never changes.
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