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Where do the plastic boxes for screw containers come from?

This is a game lore question - asking if devs mentioned explanation for the presence of plastic bags for screws, long before plastic is developed by the player.

Wrigglenite first closed it a couple hours ago as a question belonging to GameDev.SE (Why?!), then after a couple reopen votes (including mine, alongside with my comment what it is and why it should be reopened), it was reopened by Wipqozn, who also wiped the comments. And now it's closed again, by 5 non-moderator users again coming to a consensus this lore question is somehow a game development question.

Can we get this resolved?

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    Seems like simply removing the last line should clear out any confusion. There's really no need for the question to speculate where an answer should come from anyway.
    – Batophobia
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 15:54
  • @Batophobia The problem with that though is that it attracts low-quality unsourced, speculative answers that go along the lines of "industry practice" and "common graphics design" without even trying to explore the actual lore.
    – SF.
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 16:08
  • When a question is closed as "belongs on GameDev.SE", that is often because it has been interpreted as a "developer intent" question (i.e. "why did the developers do this"). I'm guessing that's the reason people closed this question in that way. I also understand why: that question essentially boils down to "please justify this particular instance of ludonarrative dissonance".
    – murgatroid99
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 16:48
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    @murgatroid99 This reason makes sense when asking about game mechanics choices - devs found this is fun, this works, this is balanced, or whatever hundred reasons for making a mechanics work one way or another. But I disagree about that in case of game lore questions. This is not asking "Why are the screws in plastic bags" The answer to that would be easy, because developers made it so. This is asking "Is there a word-of-god on lore of this design choice?" which is most likely to yield a disappointing "no", but there were some big surprises in this class of questions when allowed to live.
    – SF.
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 17:03
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    Asking for "word-of-god" answers is just asking for developer intent by proxy. The problem with developer intent questions is that they can only be correctly answered by the people who developed the game, and that applies to both narrative and mechanics questions. There's no real difference between "I want the devs to answer this question" and "I want the devs to have answered this question in a different place so that the answer can be copied here".
    – murgatroid99
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 17:09
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    @murgatroid99 The difference is that devs answer questions in hundreds of places, press articles, AMA sessions, tweets, code comments, lore books, gaming conference panels, developer blogs and so on. Many eyes of the site's users make it possible to find an answer at an obscure location. Sometimes someone has a "hotline" to the developers to ask directly. Sometimes a developer subscribes to a tag on their game to see what problems users face. I really don't see the harm in letting the question be, and I see a very thin line between this and a blanket ban on all lore questions.
    – SF.
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 17:20
  • What I'm describing is official site policy. I'm just trying to explain it. The on topic help section says that we prohibit questions about "developer intent on mechanics and narrative". Many lore questions are answered within the game or other official materials. That's the difference.
    – murgatroid99
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 17:28
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    Related meta posts: When is it appropriate to close a lore question as “not addressed directly through in-universe sources”? | Is “This question requires developer only knowledge” the same thing as developer intent? | Do we close plot-explanation questions if the answer is 'there is no explanation'?
    – galacticninja
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 18:43
  • This is not a lore question in the first place.
    – Wrigglenite
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 19:40
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    @Wrigglenite What makes you think so? What makes it different from, say, Why do clams drop cleansing stones?
    – SF.
    Commented May 12, 2021 at 23:13
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    @Wrigglenite love the absoluteness of your comment without any real explanation as to why
    – nightsurfer
    Commented May 13, 2021 at 1:03
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    @Batophobia I agree with you, removed the last line from the question in question.
    – One 2 Many
    Commented May 13, 2021 at 3:16
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    The close voters didn't really clarify why it was closed as "developer intent." I'm assuming that it's because it seems to be a "poke the plot hole" question. In the past (before the meta posts I've linked above), some in the community will close (and downvote) those types of questions. Currently, that's not a valid reason to close a question as per community consensus in the meta posts I've linked. "... answerability is a horrible metric for whether or not a question should be considered on-topic or not."
    – galacticninja
    Commented May 13, 2021 at 4:54
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    Never mind I've seen Wrigglenite close expert-level questions because he lacks the expert knowledge to understand them (never mind answer) - despite them already having an accepted expert-level answer! Closing a question because you lack the knowledge to answer it is a HORRIBLE reason to VTC - and are you an expert enough to authoritatively state there is no answer, or is this just your hunch?
    – SF.
    Commented May 13, 2021 at 5:40
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    @SF Before Wrigglenite it was Frank who would commonly close expert-level questions because he lacked the expert knowledge to understand them (let alone answer). Seems like a common trend amongst moderators for Arqade, oddly enough
    – childe
    Commented May 22, 2021 at 7:08

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