clehrich ([info]clehrich) wrote,
@ 2006-03-19 14:07:00
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Entry tags:fantasy, magic, religion

Simulating Cultural Phenomena
I started this blog by asking questions, primarily hoping to spark discussion. So here's another question:

In designing RPG settings, especially "fantasy" worlds (whatever you take that to mean), to what extent, and for what purposes, should one work toward simulation of such cultural phenomena as religion, magic, and arts?


I haven't read nearly as many games as most of you have, but it does seem to me that the "classical" gaming traditions of fantasy (D&D, Runequest, etc.) place considerable emphasis on simulation in certain respects. Physics and biology seem particularly important. We can certainly debate endlessly to what extent any given system or setting is in any sense accurate about the physics of combat, falling, strength, and whatnot, or the ecology and biology of species and so on; on the whole, these things are rarely especially accurate. But a surprising amount of noise gets generated about such "accuracy," with all sorts of homebrew "fixes" imposed upon subsystems seen as insufficiently "accurate" to "real-world" physics and the like. You know what I mean, I'm sure.

But I have rarely seen such claims made particularly strongly about religion, magic, and the arts. There are some exceptions, of course:
Ars Magica at times made some (weak) claims about historical accuracy with respect to "hermetic" magic and medieval European life.

E. Gary Gygax has made all sorts of claims about accuracy in AD&D, though it's worth bearing in mind that in his books Role Playing Mastery and Master Of the Game he also indicates that he thinks the level system is an accurate reflection of how people live and learn.

Some pieces of Runequest material suggest an attempt at accuracy about religion, although this is not (as far as I know) especially strongly stressed.

Nevertheless it seems that the traditional mainstream gamer is, or is perceived to be, more concerned with "real life" and "accuracy" as they reflect limited spheres of the hard sciences, especially physics.

Now presumably an enormous amount of this comes from the comparatively low standard of awareness about things like religion and magic and arts in a comparative, cross-cultural manner; that is, most people -- including gamers -- do take for granted that religion is "obviously" about faith and gods and so on, and that the arts are in some sense "obviously" a possibly interesting but nonessential secondary dimension of culture, and so on. Presumably part of it also comes from the apparently relatively high standard of technical education: computers, math, and so on seem anecdotally associated with "geek" culture, and certainly the large military faction of players would have a good deal of technical training as well.

But I wonder whether that's the whole explanation.

In any event, I'm wondering what you all think about the possibility and value of "accuracy" when it comes to cultural phenomena in fantasy settings. (Obviously this is something I've been thinking about for these very slowly developing chapters on fantasy religions.)

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[info]jholloway
2006-03-20 01:39 am UTC (link)
I think that this goes back to a discussion contracycle and I, among others, had on the Forge waaaaay back in the day, in which it was pointed out that, for the most part, early gaming was focused very much on the -- well, on the "here and now," if you like, in the sense of "us four guys here in this physical, tactical crisis." Religion, culture, arts are just kind of props to provide a colorful context -- weapons, strategy, and maneuver are what the thing is actually about.

Which says nothing, of course, about the possibility or value of "accuracy" when it comes to these things in fantasy settings. The impression I get is that for the most part players who value these kinds of things have traditional gravitated toward games with historical or pseudo-historical settings ... or modern ones, I suppose. Very few fantasy games have bothered with "accuracy" in their religious or cultural systems. Glorantha has a very rich fantasy religious element, but I'm not sure that it's "accurate" in the sense that Gloranthans have the same relationship to their religions as real humans do or did.

The part of me that studies medieval burial practices wants to say "but what's 'realistic' is the question. How can I have a 'realistic' view of how people relate to religion and faith in their daily lives when the question itself is so vexed?"

But at the same time, even bullshitting it, I'd probably include a lot of assumptions that differ from mainstream games, just because of my background.

There, that was unhelpful, wasn't it?

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[info]clehrich
2006-03-20 06:25 am UTC (link)
Why yes! That was unhelpful!

But seriously, I think your points are solid. At the same time, I wonder whether there might be interesting potential in developing a game-world that insists upon a kind of realism in cultural phenomena, whether or not one also bothers with the physics.

Seems to me you could build your cultures up from the bedrock of fundamental socio-religious relationships, working from respected anthropological and religious studies sources (as well as good histories, where available), and you'd end up with a world very rich and deep extremely rapidly. But I rather wonder whether it would catch on: I sort of suspect that this is exactly the sort of thing most people who play FRPGs do not want, although I'm not sure exactly how to explain why.

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[info]jholloway
2006-03-20 10:06 am UTC (link)
I know it's risky to compare RPGs to fiction, but certainly most RPGs seem to relate to a certain type of adventure fiction, in which religion exists to give the characters local variants on "Christ!" and "oh my God!" to say. So I don't know about "exactly the sort of thing most gamers don't want," although I think there's some interesting discussion to be had there, but certainly I wouldn't think there's a significant demand.

But I think that elements of setting design are actually less studied than they might well be, with a lot of weird assumptions floating around.

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[info]jholloway
2006-03-20 10:07 am UTC (link)
Mind you, I'd be interested in the process. So "limited demand" is not "no demand."

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[info]robotnik
2006-03-20 03:18 am UTC (link)
You know the old story about the man looking for his lost car keys under a lamp post in the middle of the night: Passerby asks, "are you sure this is where you dropped your keys?" Man says, "no, I have no idea where I lost them, but the light is much better here under the lamp post."

In other words, I figure games traditionally model simple physics and biology (or "falling and drowning," as they call such rule sets at Story Games) rather than religion and culture because "falling and drowning," unlike religion and culture, are things that can be modeled with a few statistics and a handful of dice.

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[info]clehrich
2006-03-20 06:30 am UTC (link)
I agree, but this is based on the fundamental assumption that what is modeled must be modeled statistically and numerically. And I have never entirely seen why this should be. That is, I do not entirely see why it is necessary, granted that a given culture has professional ritual specialists who can be played by PCs, why their profession has to have external, quantifiable "effects" (such as cleric spells and the like). I see that it is convenient to have statistics for how NPCs will respond to such people in whatever circumstances, but on the whole I don't see why you have to have objective results for your rituals in order to make them worth doing.

I suppose it's really a question of thinking through your character. If you buy the Eliade theory that the traditional religious person experiences the sacred as the "really real" and that performing traditional religious obligations is a matter of keeping the whole cosmos afloat, I don't see why you need rules like, "If you fail to do this X number of times, there is a Y% chance that the universe will in fact collapse."

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[info]unrequitedthai
2006-03-20 09:18 am UTC (link)
I don't really think that it is particularly productive to say, "I don't see why you need this..."; this isn't a fruitful route of inquiry at all. It's a path toward butting heads, particularly in the land of roleplaying games, where this is a rule, and we have beaten the "we don't need rules" discussion to death.

Rather, I think it more useful to ask, "What does having this do?"

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[info]clehrich
2006-03-22 02:35 am UTC (link)
I understand where you're coming from, I think, but I suspect you're misreading my question -- in this response to Rob, not the original post, I mean.

I'm not saying, "Why do you need quantifiable rules in the first place?" As you rightly point out, that goes into all those damned pointless discussions (useful in their place and time, i.e. the past mostly) about whether we really need rules and so on. Dead horses aren't the half of it.

No, what I'm saying is that I don't see why simulation = quantification. In a traditional-style RPG, you can monitor level of interest in "simulation accuracy" (in quotes because it's not always simulation in a simple sense and it's not accuracy in a normal sense) by the amount of quantification that goes into it. This is sort of like Mike Holmes's "Rant" at the Forge about things like combat systems, I suppose, but I'm noting the focus on number.

What I'm saying is, let's suppose I construct a game in which simulation (in some sense) really is important, and I like all the stuff that comes with that. But I think simulating religion and cultural constructions is important for my game. My own inclination is emphatically not to seek quantification, for any reason. And what I'm saying is that the traditional connection between simulation and quantification underlies Rob's point: people construct detailed rules-sets and quantifications of things that can be quantified, not those that cannot. I'm saying that while you can quantify basic physics, you don't have to (as we know), and for that matter one can quantify cultural phenomena although it is extremely difficult. I see the use of quantification as an indicator of interest and importance to designers: they devote their efforts to quantifying (which for them, traditionally, was the same as simulating) what really mattered -- physics, not religion.

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[info]unrequitedthai
2006-03-20 09:40 am UTC (link)
What sort of gameplay are you shooting for here? Obviously play determines the feasibility of inclusion of these elements.

The traditional "kill things and take their stuff" form associated with fantasy games is not particularly amenable to depiction of people. For this style, cultural phenomena have next to no value (you can use them as a hook to hang interesting mechanical stuff, but they are per se pointless), and depicting them at all is a doubtful proposition.

I can't speak for other playstyles really.

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[info]clehrich
2006-03-22 02:38 am UTC (link)
I guess I'm saying, to pick up your other question, "What sorts of things would be served, in gameplay terms, by a really serious, principled attempt to design fantasy cultures around integrated religious and other cultural models?" I work backwards from the Forge-style approach, which is essentially, "Tell me what gameplay should be like, and then let's engineer a system to produce it"; I think the other way around. But then, for me it's largely a thought experiment.

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[info]benlehman
2006-03-20 12:53 pm UTC (link)
I think that the way to have realistic fantasy cultures is to center play around the creation of said cultures' ethics, ideals, and stories.

yrs--
--Ben

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[info]clehrich
2006-03-22 02:50 am UTC (link)
Well, that would certainly center attention on these things, but without a sufficient base that links together cohesively, it'll never get off the ground.

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[info]ewilen
2006-03-21 12:08 am UTC (link)
I see a great deal of value in "accuracy" when it comes to cultural phenomena in fantasy settings. For me the obvious value is what I think has been called "benchmarking" in some contexts: for the sake of immersion, the fantasy world must be intelligible and not seem arbitrary. One way to achieve this is to base expectations on real-world models.

Now it might seem at first blush that I'm saying fantasy settings should be constructed so that people who are well-read in history and anthropology will feel comfortable in them, and maybe that's really who would benefit the most. On the other hand, there are many surface details of life in premodern settings that are familiar points of attraction for the general audience--I think. Attempts to reproduce them without an understanding of the underlying causes can produce a distorting and incongruous affect which spoils the whole experience. A great deal of gamer culture (and secondarily, fantasy literature) has absorbed and rationalized the distortions, but they can be powerful turnoffs, or at least points of difficulty, to people who were attracted by the original subject material.

For example, I recently saw a thread on RPG.net where a GM complained that even though the Old World of Warhammer Fantasy RPG gets much of its feel from Early Modern Europe, he couldn't reproduce the 16th-17th century interplay of politics and religion because the game uses the standard fantasy rpg religious tropes.

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[info]clehrich
2006-03-22 02:43 am UTC (link)
Nice point, Elliot (sorry, I don't remember whether you use one L or two, and ditto for T's). I had something like this rumbling around in the back of my own head. I suppose I'm wondering whether, if one were to design a fantasy world full of really rich, plausible (which is to say, horribly complicated) cultures, there would be something mysteriously "familiar" about them to players -- precisely because they work much more like real human cultures and the players are, well, real humans.

Of course, this raises two related questions:

1. If the cultures are so complex and intricate that explaining them clearly takes enormous space (or alternatively must presume considerable sophistication on the part of the readers), could one ever sell such a thing to a potential GM? I mean, I might be able to pull it off for my friends, but could I convince someone else? (I don't mean ME as such, but the designer with such knowledge.)

2. If the cultures are too human, doesn't this raise problems when we start dealing with the abnormal, extra-real elements of fantasy, e.g. intelligent non-human communicators and such?

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[info]ewilen
2006-03-22 07:14 am UTC (link)
Thanks, Chris--you got it right on the first try!

1) I don't know. Runequest developed a large following devoted to rationalizing the world in anthropological terms. Harn has a devoted core of fans, but it's very much a niche within a niche, and an expensive one at that.

2) On this point, Harn falls down because it relies almost entirely on 11th-century Britain as an economic and social model, but it then throws in fantastic elements like dwarves, elves, and pseudo-polytheism. (Pseudo-polytheism is the FRPG standard of having multiple cross-cultural gods each of whom heads a distinct "religion" with its own "church".) Glorantha feels less incongruous even though it's more fantastic.

For me personally, I don't think I'd be interested in an expensive, encyclopedic presentation of a single fantasy world. But I'd like it if the hobby as a whole absorbed guidelines for the creation of fantasy worlds that would enable people to go into it with their eyes open. E.g., if things like pseudo-polytheism and magic-as-artillery weren't taken for granted, it'd be refreshing. And I think there would be an audience for such a thing--people who are jaded or who want a critical guide to making their fantasy feel more real.

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[info]ewilen
2006-03-22 07:20 am UTC (link)
Oh and by "more real", I mean "mysteriously familiar" as you wrote.

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(Anonymous)
2006-03-22 05:35 pm UTC (link)
I suppose I'm wondering whether, if one were to design a fantasy world full of really rich, plausible (which is to say, horribly complicated) cultures, there would be something mysteriously "familiar" about them to players -- precisely because they work much more like real human cultures and the players are, well, real humans.


Chris,
By that logic more accurate representation of physics should also increase a perception of "familiarity". Yet, we have space ships rumble among the stars, two dimensional explosions, yadda, yadda. All, we are told, because it helps the audience believe.

And that may actually be quite correct. Hollywood may well be more real (in the sense of verisimilitude, not veracity) than reality itself. For another example of this sort of thing, look at anime movies. Those faces are far from realistic, yet they are actually easier to read than a real face.

Just because we come with built-in reality detectors doesn't mean they can't be fooled.

So...no doubt your hypothetical game setting will have greater veracity than all the other fantasy games out there, but will it have greater verisimilitude? I suspect that the fairly consistent triumph of the standard fantasy setup over historical models in both fiction and games is an indicator the answer may well be "no" for a clear majority of your potential audience.

Rob Carriere

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[info]ewilen
2006-03-23 01:21 am UTC (link)
Rob, this is what my second paragraph up above was all about. Would the "verisimilitude" only be useful to history dweebs? Maybe, maybe not. I think the "open the pod bay doors, Hal" scene in 2001 was awesome because of its understatement and verisimilitude, the way it said something about space. So is my excitement--over seeing an action scene without sound--fetishistic dweebery? The flip side of the coin is, if you're just going to use space or a fantasy world to tell a pulp western story, then what is the background really accomplishing for you?

Hm. That came out a little harsh. I know what it's accomplishing: it's accomplishing what most fantasy worlds, prior to the advent of the naturalistic novel and hard science fiction, did. Including Mallory's Britain and the "wild west" of contemporary dime novels: they gave you an "otherwhen", a world of imagination, where human issues of relevance to the audience could dance and collilde, freed from the distracting complications of the real world.

But when a certain subaudience takes up the material, there's a tendency to work from the surface attractions of fantasy while simultaneously interrogating it from a modern perspective. When this happens, things can go one of two ways. Often the surface elements of fantasy are extrapolated in ways that undermine the initial idea. When this happens in, say, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (or Don Quixote), it's realized as rather witty parody. On the other hand, without a sense of irony, believing that a "magic item store" is the stuff of legend is either kinda dumb or kinda pathetic.

The alternative is an approach to magic, religion, and culture that stands up to interrogation without distorting itself. E.g., instead of starting with the premise that magic exists, therefore it will be exploited, therefore fantasy worlds will have magical economies, therefore magic is demystified and becomes just a substitute for technology--we go back and say: magical economies don't exist, but magic exists, therefore there must be a reason that magic isn't exploited. If a reason can't be found, then design of the world may call for deliberately breaking that point of causation. Which I think will make magic mysterious again. If I'm not mistaken, this is essentially the approach that was taken in early Pendragon and has been restored in the new edition: magic isn't available to PCs. Or in Sorcerer, magic is available to the PCs, but the mechanics of magic make it impossible to integrate into normal society. Either way, the slippery slope to demystified magic-as-technology is headed off.

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(Anonymous)
2006-03-23 04:56 pm UTC (link)
Elloit,
I've read your response and re-read the comment you linked and I think we mostly agree. The only real point of distinction I can find is that you are more hopeful with respect to audience appeal. Which leaves me in the position of hoping that you're right and I'm wrong... :-)

BTW, I didn't think your first paragraph harsh at all. Probably you already know this, but if not, track down a copy of _From Elfland to Poughkeepsie_ by LeGuin. She addresses exactly the point of your question.

However, that point is off slightly from the one I was trying to make. You speak of "an approach [...] that stands up to interrogation", which depends not only on the strength of the approach, but also on the skill of the interrogator. Yet an approach that isn't very interrogation-resistant might still be structurally well-embedded in play, thus passing LeGuin's Poughkeepsie test, but failing your interrogation test for competent interrogators.

Rob Carriere

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[info]ewilen
2006-03-23 10:05 pm UTC (link)
Rob. I'll have to check that essay out. Yes, I agree that if audience appeal is a concern, then the big money probably isn't in "culturally realistic" fantasy worlds. Although it is interesting how fantasy gaming has dealt with "interrogation" as compared with other modern media. If we break down the options as

a) Don't interrogate
b) Interrogate, leading to a satirical stance relative to the form
c) Interrogate, leading to a sort of model that integrates fantasy and real-world culture
d) Interrogate, leading to a demystification of fantasy and a distortion of culture

Then for movies I see a greater emphasis on (a)-(c), and not so much (d). Examples: (a) Excalibur, (b) Harry Potter, The Princess Bride, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, (c) Lord of the Rings, The 13th Warrior.

Whereas in gaming I see a great deal of (d), although that could be because I'm an old fogey who did a lot of gaming and talking about gaming back in the 80's. But I should point out that Chris's list of games that attempt cultural accuracy isn't complete, and in some ways the marketplace may have been better for that sort of interest in the 80's, what with Chivalry & Sorcery and Land of the Rising Sun, not to mention the later publication of various GURPS worldbooks.

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(Anonymous)
2006-03-24 09:53 am UTC (link)
Elliot,
I agree with your analysis of the difference between movies and games with respect to your a--d. Can't help you with the perspective problem, since mine is very similar. :-)

Now the interesting thing about this is that the guy who got me gaming back in late 79 used phrases like "being inside a fantasy story" and indeed most of the people I talked with back then were interested in that aspect of play. The terminology is hopelessly vague of course (we didn't have the vocabulary to be more precise), but the various demystification aspects of AD&D, such as the precise, quantified (in both meanings of that word, no less) spell list and the 'contract' between a cleric and his deity were the items most complained about.

In that context it's also interesting that in AD&D1, officially the contents of the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Guide are secret for the character players. I've always interpreted that as a (rather naive) attempt to preserve some of the mystique by hiding a significant portion of the precision and quantification behind the DM screen.

So I do think that a shift from d to towards one or more of a--c would be a move that would have an audience. My doubts are more on the depth of interrogation that would be sustainable.

Rob Carriere

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[info]jiituomas
2006-03-21 08:50 am UTC (link)
I've noticed that the needed level of accuracy depends heavily on how finished a product one needs. As a rule of thumb, a tabletop game needs less than a larp needs less than a piece of fiction. In other words, how much adiegetic leeway for development is available determines how finished the culture has to be. (In tabletop, you can easily negotiate and invent more, but in a larp the facts have to be straight if one wants to avoid game breaks.)

As I saw Chris' initial post, I went through a lot of the old rpg /setting/ books on my shelf, and noticed that a lot of them touch on issues of religion and culture, but rarely make any consistent effort to create something holistic. ICE's Shadow World is an excellent example: on some points, they have thoroughly thought about cultural ramifications, on others, it's just another list of fantasy-versions-of-the-graeco-roman-pantheon.

There's of course one exception to the rule: whenever any game presents an evil culture worshiping a demon or somesuch, the religion gets a broad (if often shallow) description so that their evil antics can be suitably presented in play.

One of the things I loved about WW's Trinity rpg was that it had a lot of significantly well-thought-of, internally consistent cultural material. It made the whole game seem more "real", more logical.

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[info]clehrich
2006-03-22 02:49 am UTC (link)
The remark about tabletop and larp (and fiction) is striking to me, because in some respects I see it quite in reverse. I see what you mean about the ability to wing it, of course, but it seems to me that we're talking about the difference between breadth and depth, or even extension and intension. The tabletop designer needs enormous coverage, because he has no control whatever over where things will go; on the other hand, given a shallow picture he can wing it into the depths at need. By contrast, as I read you, a larp requires considerable depth because "fudging" can break the game; on the other hand, a larp is much more constrained in extension, since there is usually some sort of relatively determinate situation, story, moment, space, or the like. Does that work? (You know I'm on thin ice with larps....)

I like your remark about WW. I can't stand WW games, so I rarely think about them much, but your point is well taken. Perhaps this is part of what was attractive about them? They had a kind of extreme detail (of a limited sort) about the cultural phenomena of vampires and whatever, which made it fun (I gather) to delve into minutiae; on the other hand, they mostly didn't bother detailing other things, because this was after all more or less the modern world. The same point strikes me about what games like UA and Nephilim were getting at: they're trying to create the "feel" of a culture (a subculture, really), and by setting that in the middle of the modern world they neatly solve a number of structural and presentation problems.

So can that be done in a pure fantasy, I wonder? Tolkien did it -- but then, he was crazy, and spent far, far too long at it.

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[info]ewilen
2006-03-22 06:49 am UTC (link)
As much I like Tolklien, I don't think he quite did it. I mean, he managed not to be silly, but in the LotR he really did something very weird: he created a living, naturalistically-presented premodern world without "religion". By which I mean, very little if any ritual, no priests, little if any holy days, very little emphasis on faith--or a very modern approach to faith, and little if any cultural variation in religious belief in spite of presenting a multicultural world.

The Silmarillion was similar, but it was more true to a myth-like narrative, so it didn't need religion. There's one exception that proves the rule: the account of the downfall of Numenor (in the book but technically a different story than the Silmarillion proper) which depicts religion in a semi-realistic fashion. That is when Sauron bewitches the king and persuades him to allow the establishment of a false religion and temple with sacrifices to Melkor.

It may not be a fair comparison, but as far as depicting religion in a fantasy world, I think Homer did a better job than Tolkien: the heroes sacrifice to the gods and respect (or don't) their priests and altars; the overall setting contains anachronisms but is convincingly poised between myth and semihistorical late bronze age/early iron age life; and the gods are very real, often having personal relationships with the heroes and intervening directly on the battlefield.

I don't remember exactly how Runequest II cult magic works, but I do recall thinking that it captured the feel of Homer quite nicely.

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[info]jiituomas
2006-03-22 10:29 am UTC (link)
Chris, your view on the larp/ttrpg split in this case is, in my opinion, very accurate. I just didn't have the time to write the whole thing open. Essentially, the bare minimum required for functional play is much higher in larps, but larps, in turn - because of the specific, short-term situation - rarely need the kind of in-depth material a ttrpg campaign would benefit from. (Exceptions exist, of course.)

As for WW, at the moment they're on a very interesting level, in a cultural sense. For example, V:tR has two exactly opposite sourcebooks available: Invictus, which is very clever and very, very consistent internally, and Lancea Sanctum, which is absolutely ridiculous in the way it attempts to create functional dogma. But both of them do make a serious effort at emphasizing socio/religio/cultural aspects of the organizations, instead of game mechanics.

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[info]silmenume
2006-03-23 03:51 pm UTC (link)
It appears that I am late to the party – again - as usual! To what extent and for what purposes should one work toward simulation of such cultural phenomena as religion, magic and the arts I have no response other than to say it’s a matter of local taste. As to why this hasn’t happened much and, when it has happened, why it hasn’t been very effective I have a couple of thoughts.

I do believe some of the fault lies in the bias of the gaming culture being skewed towards the engineering end of the spectrum. I also believe that institutional inertia has also played a role in that role-playing still carries some of the baggage from which it originally arose. I think that the mania for quantization is both a historical artifact as well as a “cultural” predilection of the hobby’s constituents.

On a number of occasions, Chris, you have mentioned to me that ultimately myth is grounded in or rests upon the physical world. To some extent the mechanics as physics and biology attempt to fill in that role. Historically mechanics have been regarded as fixed and players have been loath, on the aggregate, to tinker with them wholesale and on a regular basis. At least, there seems to be this zeitgeist that mechanics ought not to be messed with. I think that part of the reason for this feeling lies in the role mechanics take as representations of the tangible though fictional world.

This proposed rational for the need for quantization does not address the issues of why it seems that players do not want a world with very rich and deep cultures. On the one hand it is vastly easier to render down “physics and biology” to a manageable level than it is model the “horrible” complexity of human culture. Conversely part of the reason I think lies in that “falling and drowning” are ultimately external to the human psyche. I mean external in contrast to the “internalness” of human culture. We don’t have to get inside physics in order to make it a useful construct of game play. Culture, however, is so intimately bound up to reality maps that to simulate it to any reasonable degree of granularity would start to challenge that reality map at a very deep level. Given the vast complexity of any human culture, to really get in there and make the culture rich, full and vibrant would basically require the players to surrender their current reality map for that of the fictional culture. I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but that is a daunting proposition.

I also believe that players may avoid such play is simply due to laziness. I believe that the difficulty of creating and maintaining the oodles and oodles of all those cultural bits and the relationship among them extremely taxing. It would require a greater commitment from the players to come up to speed than say some of the more finely tuned indie-games out there. Whereas players of such well wrought games can be up to speed on the important concepts within a couple of sessions, players of a game which emphasizes the (absurd level of) complexity of culture would just be barely scratching the surface. Even though a fictional culture would probably be less complex than an existing “real world” culture, it would still require the players to engage in what is normally an extremely difficult process of acclimating to a new culture. I’m not saying this wouldn’t be fun or interesting, but rather that there is this notion that role-playing is just a “game” which implies a certain levity as far as a commitment to the process. Games are supposed to be fun, not engrossing. That’s what “real” hobbies are for and even then one who is that committed to a hobby is frequently regarded as something of an eccentric.

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[info]silmenume
2006-03-23 03:51 pm UTC (link)
continued -

Finally I believe that such play requires a certain level of mastery of a skill that is largely alien to western culture – bricolage. Not only is it largely absent but it is a very difficult concept to explain. How likely is it that a game would have been designed around a process that is chiefly unknown or at least unrecognized?

I do not believe that quantification is an just indicator an indicator what is important to the designers, I think it also represents a lack of awareness of the necessary tolls combined with current contemporary sensibilities that frequently equate a cultural point of view with bigotry.

None of which implies that such a game should not be done.

My uninformed ramblings…

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(Anonymous)
2006-04-23 01:37 am UTC (link)
I have to say that I don't see much point in accurate simulation of religion and magic without correspondingly accurate simulation of the real-world environmental factors most likely to strongly contribute to those cultural phenomena. I'm talking, in particular, about disease (in all its forms including infection, malnutrition, genetic disorders, childbirth complications, and mental illness). As by far the greatest hazard to life and limb in just about every real-world culture in history (even under extreme circumstances such as war or migration), and one whose causality is largely unfathomable to nontechnological peoples, disease becomes the likeliest motivator and focus of magic.

Thing is, I'm not really interested in realistic representation of disease in fantasy role playing settings. If I'm imagining a setting in which the greatest hazard to life and limb is something else with far more overt causality -- warfare, perhaps, or monsters -- then I really have to imagine the corresponding magic, religion, and mythology to match. The real-world principles and examples wouldn't seem to be a very useful guide. Especially if I'm also imagining that the magic actually works. Realism with respect to the real world would be simply wrong in the fantasy setting and so is pretty much out of the question; the only question is whether whatever I invent in its stead should be "realistically" abstruse.

That in turn depends on whether the player characters are currently situatied in their own characters' cultures, or experiencing a culture alien to them. (While it might make little sense for player characters to come from a "simple" culture, it makes even less sense for the player-characters to be having difficulty understanding their own culture, which is what is likely to happen if we make it complex.)

- Walt Freitag

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Radical Religions
(Anonymous)
2006-05-15 04:39 pm UTC (link)
I'm just a beginner in RPG theory but it seems that, as stated earlier, the creation of culture and religion is deemed unnecessary to many roleplayers if there is not a physical effect, adverse or beneficial.

E.G. a D&D cleric chooses their deities not based on how the PC's background but rather on the benefits created by said deity choice. Players then attempt to justify their choice by altering their PC's background.

The idea of an accurate religion or culture in an RPG seems to also be unusual in the fact, as stated earlier, that any religion or culture is built off of contemporary religious ideals. To truly create accuracy in religion or culture, it seems that one must radically push away from the basic fantasy archetypes e.g. the evil demon-worshipping horde or the blue-eyed blonde-haired valiant paladins, and to create a religion or culture as radically different from the player's society as the setting of the RPG is. By destroying these archetypes, players are then able to truly expand their roleplaying abilities and create true cultures and religions in their games.

By bringing in "radical religions" or other complex cultural aspects without physical benefits, the player is then, if not forced, subtly coerced into shedding the need for physical benefits in culture and sheds their true selves and begins to truly roleplay.

But like I said, I'm just a beginner in theory and all of this is probably ignorant and unorganized

Genaro Silva
silva@mexicansrule.com

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A couple of thoughts on music, art and accuracy
(Anonymous)
2006-08-23 02:23 am UTC (link)
"and that the arts are in some sense "obviously" a possibly interesting but nonessential secondary dimension of culture"

As it happens I was just reading Plato's "The Laws" in reference to another discussion on RPG-Create (Yahoo Group) where he talks about the topic of the importance of music. It is not only important, but, Plato argues that from art and music the Civilization either ascends to the heights of virtue, or the depths of depravity. So I thought that was interesting. It's a bit of a bear to read but if you're interested you can read about it here:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.2.ii.html

As for the question of "accuracy", I'm not so sure that "accuracy" is as important as "effectiveness". Some designers I think want to have accuracy in their games because they feel it will lend realism. To some degree they would be right if they could but do it. The problem is that reality is too difficult to model into a form that can be played by humans easily, and so in lue of that we fudge things, which creates simulations. The simulations we create are never really accurate, only roughly so. To attempt "accuracy" or claim it is not exactly what I think of as useful because it can not be truly achieved, and if it were achieved in some sort of game rules it would be in all likelihood unplayable because the calculations would be odious in the extreme. And that's for physical things. When you come to the question of art and religion the problem is compounded infinitely because these things can not really be measured, nor has history been sufficiently recorded (which would be impossible) to get "accuracy". Instead we get opinions and impressions and thoughts and feelings. But not accuracy. So to call what we fathom about religion in terms of historical views accurate is, well, inaccurate. At best we can say, This is my impression, or This is what I believe. That, in my opinion, however, is perfectly acceptable for game design, and in fact desirable. I would not wish to create an "accurate" game as it would take far too long and be a failure in the end at the goal. I prefer to create games that are Effective, which is different. By Effective I mean simply that it achieves the goal of my game, which is to cause the players to feel immersed in the World I am weaving for them, and for them to have fun in the process. That goal can be achieved, but not via an effort toward accuracy. It is achieved in the same way that Tolkien achieved it, or Homer, or any of the great film makers or story tellers. Not accuracy, but effectiveness. That's my take on it, for what its worth. Thanks for the question! Interesting.

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Loh123
(Anonymous)
2007-02-21 09:30 pm UTC (link)
NSU - 4efer, 5210 - rulez
[url=http://bk-magazin.com][/url]

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