Cultural Protocols: A Broader Discussion

[Reddy]

Scrap.

[Polites]

Yes, a Regional Protocol. The regions should make sense and not be a chaotic mix of language families, ethnic groups, etc. Of course, there should be room for hybridization, but overall, regions should be consistent.

With respect, I very strongly oppose this. This may come as a surprise given my general sympathy for the simulationist point of view. I would certainly favour this proposal if we were starting from scratch, but given that anomalies have arisen in the distribution of cultures as a result of long years of RP and contributions from various members of the Particracy community, I feel that to suddenly require cultural consistency across regions would overturn so much RP and hard work that it would, quite frankly, be a great shame.

I agree with EEL here. I get the feeling that this is mostly about Dovani, and that's also the best example why, with all due respect, this isn't a good idea at all. If we look at Dovani a few IG centuries ago, it was considerably more diverse and interesting than it is now. The reason is very simple: a group of players consistently pushing the view that Dovani is or ought to be Asia on everyone, totally trampling on Dovani's equal status as America. I won't name names, but some people in that group (not Liu, though) have consistently refused to consider the fact that the cultures they prefer would have turned out differently in the face of colonization. Southeast Asia was never colonized, but Dovani was. The total purge of all things Western from Dovani would quite simply be a shame, but it will happen with Regional Protocols. You can say what you want about nations like Hulstria, but they were fully embedded in the continent's history, totally legit and very detailed. What, then, does it matter that there was for the time being an Austria-Japan sharing a border with Socialist Imperial Japan ruled by a line of Empresses?

That brings me to my second point. Do we really want Terra to be a boring pastiche of Earth? Because that's what consistency does. If we had passed Regional Protocols setting down the character of Majatra, would it really have become the eclectic, explosive and unstable mix of the Mediterranean, Middle East, Steppe and Russian elements it is today? I don't quite think so. Still, the fictional history that has developed to justify a mix of cultures that, on the face of it, would have to be discarded as quite ridiculous, is one of the most detailed and interesting in the game. Rather than stimulating creativity, Regional Protocols would turn everything into the perfect copies of RL nations that, let's face it, are rather boring. Instead of whining about consistency, we should realise that the strange mix of cultures we're landed with can also be a force for creativity, if we but abide by the basic rule of RP: accept eachother's premises - which in this case means don't deny the legitimate existence of present and past cultural RP in a nation simply because it doesn't fit in with your personal opinions about what the region should be like. Run with it - some of the best RP in Particracy originated because people simply ran with it. Remember Dranland? The ridiculous mixture of Welshmen, Koreans and Spanish/Filipinos wasn't realistic in the sense that it would ever be happening in the real world, but it did make for some of the best ethnic conflict RP I've seen and also the most active International News topic in the game.

What I'm trying to say is: realism and consistency can only get you so far. The best RP comes out of reconciling unlikely situations with eachother and finding the common or opposed patterns.

I agree that Terra should not be treated as a carbon copy of Earth, and its history should not parallel RL history. I also agree that the combination of unexpected and unlikely cultures has produced much engaging RP while creating unique cultures with no straightforward RL equivalent. But I also think Terran history should be internally consistent and make sense. If two obviously related languages (or, as it often happens, the same language) are found on two opposite sides of Terra, there should be some explanation as to how they got there. If two or more distinct cultures share a nation, it is logical to expect there to be some degree of interaction and acculturation, unless they are described as being strictly endogamous. If a nation with a culture that is very distinct from those of the surrounding nations is found in a region with its distinct flavour, one would still expect the differences to have lessened over time. Maybe a Regional Protocol, describing the overall character of a continent (e.g. Majatra = roughly Middle Eastern) could be useful as a guideline on harmonizing otherwise distinct cultures into their environment. To refer to your Dranland example, a nation defined as a mix of Wales, Korea, and the Philippines would have been an interesting and engaging combination, but the fact is that is not how Dranland was RPd; while one would have expected, for instance, Korean-speaking European-looking Buddhists sharing a nation with Spanish-speaking East Asian-looking Welsh Pagans, Dranland was home to players RPing Wales, Spain, and Korea as if they were separate nations, with their own parties, languages, religions, and cultures, and no attempt at harmonizing them in a way that would have made realistic sense. It is simply easier (and more accessible) to RP the cultural interaction between cultures that have, IRL, interacted at some point or another in history.

Returning to my point on the need for stronger protection for unique cultures, I should emphasize that while original cultural creations should be encouraged, they should be viable. One could define Selucians as being African or Asian rather than Mediterranean in their phenotype, and that would indeed be an interesting cultural mix, but it is damn hard to find images of Africans or Asians dressed in a toga (I tried). It is for this reason that Cildania, a nation based on Phoenician civilization, is not simply "modern-day Carthage" like Selucia is "modern day Rome", because there just aren't nearly as many movies set in ancient Carthage as there is media set in ancient Roman times; instead, defining Cildania as a Phoenician-speaking combination of Lebanon, Israel, Tunisia, and Berber culture allows players to use a large range of images, from Israeli politicians to Malian Tuaregs. A culture that is too unique risks being unusable for everyone.

But the fact remains that unique cultures should be encouraged and protected, and to clarify what I mean by that in response to IdioC's question, it should not be allowed, or at the very least it should be discouraged to replace an underrepresented culture with one that is overrepresented. Right now there are just waaaay too many European nations out there, and you can find a ton of English-, German-, French-, and Spanish-speaking nations on practically every continent. De-emphasizing Western aspects in any nation while promoting underrepresented cultures is, to my mind, a very good thing. There were already (at the time at least) Celtic cultures, particularly Welsh, all over the place, in Dranland, Aloria, Kirlawa, Cildania, Cobura, and even in the colonies, while Korean culture had only 1/3 of a nation for itself. Same goes for every other nation on Dovani that had/has Western elements; to keep with the Americas analogy, the colonization of Dovani should not mirror that of North America (with the drastic decline of the native population and a history of genocide), but rather that of nations like Peru, Bolivia, or Ecuador, where most of the population is ethnically and culturally mixed and the native languages retain relatively wide use and official status (to quote from Wikipedia, Peru is 45% Amerindian, 37% Mestizo, and 15% White). Peru is not a Spain clone or an Inca Empire clone, but instead an altogether new mix of Spanish and Andean ethnic, religious, and linguistic influences. And if Peru were a nation in PT, where there are currently NO Amerindian nations, I would strongly support any RP that would lead to a resurgence of the Quechua and Aymara languages and strongly oppose the suppression of Amerindian cultural and ethnic identity.

[MichaelReilly]

A ban on any 'real religions' being mentioned ingame was bad enough.

However the enforcement of non-English nation names was the straw that broke the camels back for me.

[SelucianCrusader]

Dranland was home to players RPing Wales, Spain, and Korea as if they were separate nations, with their own parties, languages, religions, and cultures, and no attempt at harmonizing them in a way that would have made realistic sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina

I support option one. I haven't had much time for RP in the last year, but it's the life blood of this game - not the random number algorithm. I want there to be more incentives for new players to engage in RP and contribute to the game, not less.

[Doc]

Southeast Asia was never colonized, but Dovani was.

Not sure if this was said before, but Southeast Asia actually was colonized by both the French (Indo China) and the British (Burma). The Vietnam War started as a result of the Viet Minh fighting for independence from France- the US got involved and then France peaced out (as France does) and left the mess to the the Cold War lunatics in the US...

[Doc]

With regard to "regional protocols" I, too would oppose this. I think some people may have an interest in making a region "make sense", but the sense they are referring to is Earth sense. On Terra, why can't a Chinese civilization exist next to a Brazillian one, or a Ukranian civilization exist right next to a Zulu one? The civilizations that have evolved as they have on Earth, with that sort of diffusion that we see today, are an accident of our history- they are more or less what we discovered when we (personally) got here. And so we call that "natural" and say "that makes sense." But Terra is a totally different planet- why shouldn't we assume that a Ukraine based culture can't exist right on the other side of a border from a Zulu based culutre? And for that matter, why can't we also say that Ukraine culture evolved from the Zulu one? In the case of Particracy, that seems just as natural and internally consistent as the Earth one- in that it is what existed when people got here and began observing it. Or it is "natural" as far as anyone else knows... Or put another way- the way things are when we arrive IS the way that things make sense. I imagine that if we were people on Terra, thinking of IRL Earth as a virtual world, putting Ukraininans right next to Russia, right across a lake from Turkey, and a very little ways away from Saudi Arabia wouldn't necessarily "make sense". But it doesn't have to. Not from an Earth standpoint. This is a game, and the history of this game is created by the people who RP it. Therefore, it absolutely makes perfect sense to me for a Welsh and Korean Party to be in the same nation, RPing in their own languages, without concern for whether it makes "realistic sense." If doesn't make realistic sense to someone who wants to apply an Earth schema to the world, but in the virtual world of Terra, why not? I mean- imagine you actually were from this virtual world, and knew absolutely nothing about IRL Earth. Why wouldn't it "make sense"? What is stopping it from making sense?

A regional protocol would force Earth type evolution on a fictional, virtual world, just so that it can "make sense" to some players. I agree that this would crush down the vibrancy that is the cultures of those nations who play them, not to mention, ignoring historical RP, which should, in my opinion, always take precedence to the new innovations that some folks want to introduce into the game (unless, as we stated, there is nobody around to defend those old RPs). Because, after all, the RPed History is what "makes sense" from a Terra standpoint- It is what happened, and pretending that it didn't so you can fit a dozens of different polyhedrons through a single, perfectly square hole is a general negation of the accident of Terran history, what happened before we began observing and attempting to rectify what has happened with what we think should have happened because we happen to live on a different planet.

And finally- with regard to Africans in togas- it is difficult to find because on Earth, there weren't a lot of Africans wearing togas. But why not in Particracy? Do we have to limit our RPs to the range of the media that we can acquire from Earth to represent it? Saying it is as much as showing it. If we must have Africans in togas, why not describe it? We are literate here- we can paint vivid pictures with words. And on the flipside of that- How difficult would it be if we had to find Quecha, or Lakota (for that matter) words for thoroughly foreign concepts like Legislatures? The British didn't even have a word for that, so they took the word from the French. Calling for a rise in marginal (by which I mean, spoken by a tiny localized minority) languages is sort of like needing pictures of Africans in togas- it makes RPs that much harder.

What I would like to see is the rise of synthetic languages in some places. Hell- Tolkien and Mark Okrand invented languages (Elvish and Klingon, respectively). Why can't Particracy players do that too? THAT would be a culture worth protecting.

[Zongxian]

I agree with EEL here. I get the feeling that this is mostly about Dovani, and that's also the best example why, with all due respect, this isn't a good idea at all.

You just don't like it because it threatens your interests...

If we look at Dovani a few IG centuries ago, it was considerably more diverse and interesting than it is now. The reason is very simple: a group of players consistently pushing the view that Dovani is or ought to be Asia on everyone, totally trampling on Dovani's equal status as America.

I've said it before, I'll say it again... Dovani is ONLY an America in the sense that it's Particracy's New World! The amount of Native Americans is limited and overall the continent is an Asia. Most importantly, Particracy's history does not mirror Earth's and the disconnect of Dovani from the Old World is nowhere near as great as was the disconnect of New and Old in RL... Just look at the ancient history of Indrala and the spread of the Mu-Tze in ancient Seleya.

I won't name names, but some people in that group (not Liu, though) have consistently refused to consider the fact that the cultures they prefer would have turned out differently in the face of colonization. Southeast Asia was never colonized, but Dovani was. The total purge of all things Western from Dovani would quite simply be a shame, but it will happen with Regional Protocols.

Colonization of Dovani doesn't have the same characteristics as RL colonization did. And Southeast Asia was never colonized? I think you need to take another look at history.

I have been supportive of a hybrid ethnic group in what has become Mikun-Hulstria, that is a reflection of the Western influence. Dankuk, whether you want to accept it or not, is also reflecting the influences of colonizing through a hybrid group (the Dranianos). And as compared to Indralan ways, Dankuk is pretty damn Western oriented despite the rhetoric, religion, architecture, and cultural quirks (etc).

That brings me to my second point. Do we really want Terra to be a boring pastiche of Earth? Because that's what consistency does. If we had passed Regional Protocols setting down the character of Majatra, would it really have become the eclectic, explosive and unstable mix of the Mediterranean, Middle East, Steppe and Russian elements it is today? I don't quite think so. ... Rather than stimulating creativity, Regional Protocols would turn everything into the perfect copies of RL nations that, let's face it, are rather boring.

As players try to establish histories and build identities for their nations, it is extremely useful to have some kind of basic consistency across regions. This does not mean we have to mirror RL regions. Even Dovani as Asia doesn't actually make sense when you look at the distribution and relationship of the Gao-Showa groups compared against RL equivalents and their relations to each other. A regional protocol wouldn't harm creativity; what it would do is ensure that regions have at least some core relationship. This doesn't mean nations all become RL copies or that we eliminate the character of places like Majatra. To think otherwise goes on an assumption that regional protocols would hold absolutely zero consideration for anything and everything that has ever occurred in this game up to now.

What a regional protocol would do is make it much more possible to explain the histories of nations and peoples and to build upon the content and character of the Particracy World. Returning to the Seleya example, since it is one I'm most familiar: look on the wiki at some of the articles on the ancient empires of the continent. It is incomplete work, but it is very interesting and it is a positive contribution to the game world. If we just allow anarchic mixes of groups with no regard to consistency, this wouldn't be possible. Even on a smaller scale it'd be damn near impossible to explain how and why an ethnic group or culture exists where it does. And to allow just inconsistency opens up players to live in their own little bubble nations, unconcerned with their surroundings and disengaged from regional RP... I won't name names...

[Doc]

As players try to establish histories and build identities for their nations, it is extremely useful to have some kind of basic consistency across regions. (snip)

What a regional protocol would do is make it much more possible to explain the histories of nations and peoples and to build upon the content and character of the Particracy World. Returning to the Seleya example, since it is one I'm most familiar: look on the wiki at some of the articles on the ancient empires of the continent. It is incomplete work, but it is very interesting and it is a positive contribution to the game world. If we just allow anarchic mixes of groups with no regard to consistency, this wouldn't be possible. Even on a smaller scale it'd be damn near impossible to explain how and why an ethnic group or culture exists where it does. And to allow just inconsistency opens up players to live in their own little bubble nations, unconcerned with their surroundings and disengaged from regional RP... I won't name names...

See- again, I disagree. Because we are thinking of consistency in Earth terms. It is a paradigm that we would do well to get away from. In order to establish this sort of consistency in Patricracy, you would need a full reset. Otherwise, you more or less retcon 2000 years of Particracy History right out of existence.

But you can name Kalistan if you like- We pride ourselves on being separate from regional RPs. First of all, few ever seek Kalistan's support in regional RPs, but for the most part, the regional RPs I have seen are wars, and Kalistan prides itself on neutrality and trade with our neighbors. If we get involved in all the little collective security pacts everyone around us has, which drags them into conflicts over matters which would never concern Kalistan anyway, we wouldn't be able to justify those regional RPs in light of our longstanding position against wars.

Perhaps if our regional RPs were a bit more creative, Kalistan would be more interested in participating in them. But the result is, Kalistan sets itself apart from regional politics, and regional culture for that matter, and becomes a home for pirates, merchants and displaced people from everyone else's wars. We pretty much keep to ourself, and the evolution of our culture away from that of our neighbors who are all oriented away from Kalistan has made our culture unique, and quite separate from the heritage we came from. This is why the Culturally protected status didn't make sense in Kalistan- The culture of Kalistan is only Kalistani, and that is a hybrid of a bunch of other cultures from across the globe. We had a hard time describing that in our CP, and ultimately, lobbied for open status, because there is no real world equivalent.

[Martinulus]

If the name you don't name is your pet hate Kazulia, then perhaps you ought to reflect on your own role in all this. Kazulia made perfect sense before Dovani was forcibly converted into "an Asia". One can even say that the presence of the Kazuls can't just be explained by the way things were in Dovani (the presence of the Draddwyr among the natives makes it slightly less unfeasible that there would be Vikings in that place), it can actually also explain why certain things happened the way they did in pre-game history. Remember how the Kyo were never really annexed by medieval Gao-Soto? That could very well be explained by them not sharing a land border with the Empire, as the fearsome Kazulian warriors in the mountains kept repelling the Empire's forces and never submitted.

I would be perfectly willing to open up to international RP if I were given the chance, like when I played in H&GS, to engage in regional politics with full acceptance. But frankly, it's rather off-putting if certain players are both OOCly and ICly that the nation you're playing in should not legitimately exist within the game world. So get off it, Ryouta. Either you accept that Dovani is never going to be Asia or you can keep playing with your Korean toy soldiers on your own.

And yes, I just called them Korean toy soldiers because frankly, if I'm not allowed to complain that your Draniano names are tokenistic, then you should not have complained about the attempts I made to represent the Kunihito in Hulstrian and Gao-Showan politics as "Western-centric". If my criticism of Dankuk as being monoculturally Korean is illegitimate, then so is your constant criticism of Septembrist Hulstria and Gao-Soto as not really being multicultural at all.

End of rant.

[Martinulus]

Okay, that was discourteous. Still, you have really only confirmed my point. You may not be refusing to solve the inconsistencies, but you are refusing to engage them. "Regional consistency" is really simply using the cultural makeup of regions on Earth to colour in Terra. I think that's the easy way out and that's the wrong way out. Why can't there have been Vikings in a very Northern country, simply because they're next to Koreans? Players have put considerable (though a bit dated) effort into Kazulian history. Even though those players are long gone (like, coincidentally, Philip and Bean for Hulstria), it is incredibly discourteous to them to discard all their work as a nonsense, especially not since you can be far more creative by trying to resolve the inconsistencies.

And I don't think I could ever be accused of not doing that. For example, I never ignored Gao-Soto as an inconvenient accessory to what I remembered largely as Hulstria ("United States history + Austrian aristocratic culture"). The result was RP (ie, the September Revolution and the emancipation of the Gao-Showan population) that, like it or not (and I don't, not in the current way), still colours RP on the continent IG centuries later. If I had wanted that nation to be consistent, I'd never have tried to reconcile that, I'd simply have argued that the population would have been assimilated and become monoculturally Hulstrian.

I think that what's lacking with some players is the necessary respect for the premises underlying the RP of other players, especially those in other nations. If Kalistan wants to be what it has been RPed to be, then quite frankly they should be allowed to. The same goes for the players currently in Kazulia, or in Ibutho (Africa in the middle of the old world). The burden is on you to reconcile what you develop with the perspectives of others. That's part of the cooperative creative process that RP is. If you don't do that, it simply amounts to using the rules and mechanics to adjudicate competitive world-building, and I'm not sure that's what Particracy should be.