Quartet is a turn-based role-playing game that has just been released. However, it is attracting the most attention for a grammatical style issue.
You probably didn’t even notice, but Quartet was released a few days ago. Not the well-known card game, Quartet, but a classic JRPG with charming 16-bit graphics that immediately brings back memories of genre pioneers such as Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest.
Quartet seems like a role-playing game with its heart in the right place. But it doesn’t necessarily stand out from the crowd of games. Currently, no more than 160 people play the JRPG simultaneously each day. Nevertheless, the little role-playing game is flying high on Reddit .
And that’s not because of its greatest strengths, the short playing time and the playable hippopotamus. But because of the grammatical style issue that could also have been applied in my last sentence in English. It’s about the good old Oxford comma.
The most unusual game option of the year
One of the relatively few players of Quartet was apparently Reddit user Freddy_Pharkas, who noticed an obscure feature in the Quartet options that he had “never seen in 42 years”: Oxford commas, yes or no?
[OC] Travel durations from Paris by train, minute by minute
by
u/gmilloue in
dataisbeautiful
Among all the typical options for a game of this kind, such as the scroll speed of the text or its display style, you can also decide whether or not this grammatical feature should appear in the text boxes.
Users note in the comments that this option must have “arisen from a dispute among the developers.” This is not unusual, as the Oxford comma has been the subject of heated debate in the English-speaking world for at least a hundred years.
What is an Oxford comma?
The Oxford comma, or serial comma, is not common in the German language, although it could occur here for exactly the same reasons. In the English language, however, there are still valid style guides that encourage the use of the comma. But what kind of punctuation mark is it anyway?
An Oxford comma is a comma that can be placed at the very end of a list before “and” or not. An example:
- Heiko Klinge meets two of his favorite game developers, Gabe Newell and Nicki Minaj, on vacation.
Without the Oxford comma, this sentence is ambiguous. Does it mean that Gabe Newell and Nicki Minaj are Heiko’s favorite game developers? Or did he meet Gabe Newell and Nicki Minaj in addition to his two favorite developers? Another example:
- Fabiano immediately thought of his two best friends, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and a penguin heating pad.
To avoid you thinking that my best friends are The Rock and a hot water bottle, a comma before “and” would actually be very helpful.
However, it has long been a point of contention. While English academics welcome the Oxford comma as a way of clearing up misunderstandings, many other authors consider it cumbersome and unaesthetic, as it hinders the flow of reading.