mercury00
Recruit
Alright you misogynists.
First of all: All your conceptions of Historical Accuracy are BOGUS. The common understanding of the medieval world as some homogeneous single-culture place is pathetic. Your "Historical Accuracy" is equivalent to believing that all women were housewives in the 50's, or that before columbus people thought the world was flat.
Second: THIS GAME IS NOT HISTORICAL ACCURACY. Its merely realism, or an attempt at realism. For crying out loud, if it tried to approximate realism, NOBODY would play it because it would be frustrating. People would get infections from small wounds and die. Vitamin deficiencies would also kill many of your troops. Speaking to a noble would be rare indeed. If you want realism, go outside, theres plenty or realism in reality. Most of the time anyway. Games are for fun. Now, this game wants to incorporate certain ELEMENTS of realism. Yes, there will be no lazers (except in your own mod). No healing potions. No dragons. No wizards. Most of the fantasy elements are absent, except of course for the big fat fantasy element staring you in the face, the fact that it's a game, the world never existed.
Third: Its not actually that hard to make the same armor inventory item fit two (or more) different meshes. Look at NWN. Equipping a single armor item (lets say chain) somehow miraculously fits a small elf, human, or half-orc regardless of sex. Why suspend the reality of the impossibility that elf-size armor could ever fit half-orcs? For the convenience and enjoyment of the person who paid actual real life money for the game. Players DON'T like to be inconvenienced. You just have to include a tiny bit more data in your objects (What language was this programmed on again? Hopefully not Python).
Fourth: Putting male armor on a woman DOES make it look different. Women carry their weight differently. I think that some of your need to refresh your anatomy AND your physiology. If you're a woman, you can bend at the waist and touch your toes while standing flat against a wall. A man cannot do this. His center or balance is his chest, not his waist. A male breastplate that fits a woman about the shoulders will be too small about the waist, and if it fits about the waist it will be clunky about the shoulders. This will make it poor armor indeed. (the comment about the weight lifting record being held by a man is not accurate. its it not merely because women will develop muscles differently than a man. it is because the entire skeletal structure of a woman is modeled around a different function. this is why a man 1/2 the weight of a woman can still overpower her, and why a bobcat 1/4 the weight of a man can still knock him flat).
No, actually, its not, because the HISTORY being reffered to in this case, never existed. Not in the way that it is portrayed. This is a fun game, and it's fantasy elements FAR outweigh its historical truths. This is what we call fiction.
According to your logic, the Amazons never existed. There never was, in all the History of Men, a matriarchy. Apparently, Gloria Anzaldua was contrasting a nonexistent world with the patriarchal west.
Not by instinct. By culture. Culture is not Human Nature. Please read some Noam Chomsky. Better yet, check out the wikipedia about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
As a game, most players are going to be male. This is entirely, entirely besides the point.
No, some elements of Calradia are based on some other elements of some Historical Cultures. There is no single whole structure of the game world that matches any single whole structure of any historical culture.
This is incoherent, and shows a inability to discriminate categories. This is a medieval setting, not modern day.
There was no culture that would allow you to do the kinds of things you are allowed to do in this game. That's our culture. Commoners becoming knights and controlling armies, while having no ties to the everyday world of rigid customs and obedience to unspoken laws and practices that dominated a real persons life? Like I said, fantasy elements outweigh the historical ones.
Culture is not based in human nature. Culture defines human nature. We cannot say that it is our nature to be ex. protective of women, when it is merely in our culture to be so. We cannot say that it is in our nature to eat humans when it is simply part of the culture. Nor can we say it is in our nature to hunt and kill those different than us, when it is ingrained in our culture. Safir-Whorf hypothesis = our culture determines the language which we use, and determines the categories in which we decide to see the world, despite the way the world presents itself to us (its a question of the epistimology vs the ontology). ref. Noam Chomsky, Michael Focault, et al.
List of Matriarchal societies
Ah, now you are in my playing field. As a Cognitive Scientist, the brain and behavior is my subject. You will find that as often, the female is the hunter. This is so for many mammals. There will be an alpha male and many females to do the hunting and killing. This is why Rudyard Kipling sang his song, "The Female of the Species".. Kipling was no biologist, but his observations are interesting.
Medieval setting != historical accuracy. All I'm saying is that, everyone running around the boards having a fit about things being 'historically inaccurate' don't have post-docs in medieval history. Their idea of what makes the game 'historically accurate' is bogus. What they all mean to say is that the game doesn't fit their preconcieved favorite ideas about what the world was once like, ideas that conform to the Nibley Gas Law of Learning: any amount of information, no matter how small, will expand to fill a void, no matter how large.
From the other posts, regarding the game content, I pretty much agree with Kissaki. One armor inventory item, different armor meshes in game. Like I said before, thats what was implemented in NWN (and other bioware games, etc).
The form of your question is wrong. You keep using the word human nature as though it reffered to something known. Thats the entire point of the argument, the circular epistomolgy. You can't define culture as being based on human nature, when it is not possible to define human nature outside the frame of our culture. (What is a gronk? Its the thing attached to a squip. Whats a squip? Its the thing a gronk attaches to.) This is Chomsky's argument. People's definitions of human nature are dictated to them by their culture.
This is oversimplifying. Cultures are only similiar in a grossly generalized way. We have a phrase in our language for some of the extreme differences encountered in different cultures. Its called culture shock.
No one can deny that biology shares a relationship to culture, this would be like saying that our mouths have nothing to do with speech. That this relationship is a neccesarily causal one is refuted by an examination of the extreme similarity in biology, and the striking differences in culture around the world. This makes is clear that the correlation is necessary, but not sufficient. I'm not going to start a dicussion here about the principles of social and cultural evolution. Thats what anthropologists, sociologists, phychologists, historians, etc go to school for. I'll let them talk about it.
Even in patriarchal and modern societies, there are suprising differences in percieved gender roles. (This is big in psychology as they try to put together the DSM-V). There is a trend to see these differences as variations of the same theme, rather than seeing them as complex interactions from which we group similarites. Anymore, the western (and capatalist) perspective has been so dominant that it is very difficul for most people to understand anything different. Like Paul Simon said, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. La la la." Anyway, your idea here is in reverse. You seem to understand that biology determined what the gender roles were. This is almost teleogenic. The idea of evolution is that there is a feedback loop between behavior, culture, and biology - sexual dimorphism as the result of gender roles and behavior. It had nothing to do with what made sense, otherwise you'd expect men to be pretty, groomed alpha males, as in the rest of the natural world (well, some guys might like to be alpha males). Nobody handed out any responsibilities.
In any case, I don't think that I'm even arguing with you. I think that we both understand that women might want to play this game, and there should be reasonable accomadation for this. Mostly, I'm arguing with rathyr who seems to think that the less women in the game, the better.
Thats basically it. Load the male models, tweak it here and there, save it with a different name. It's not unreasonable, it's just time-consuming. (Its also funny - creating female models from the male models - and here I thought that the y chromosome originally developed from the x)
First of all: All your conceptions of Historical Accuracy are BOGUS. The common understanding of the medieval world as some homogeneous single-culture place is pathetic. Your "Historical Accuracy" is equivalent to believing that all women were housewives in the 50's, or that before columbus people thought the world was flat.
Second: THIS GAME IS NOT HISTORICAL ACCURACY. Its merely realism, or an attempt at realism. For crying out loud, if it tried to approximate realism, NOBODY would play it because it would be frustrating. People would get infections from small wounds and die. Vitamin deficiencies would also kill many of your troops. Speaking to a noble would be rare indeed. If you want realism, go outside, theres plenty or realism in reality. Most of the time anyway. Games are for fun. Now, this game wants to incorporate certain ELEMENTS of realism. Yes, there will be no lazers (except in your own mod). No healing potions. No dragons. No wizards. Most of the fantasy elements are absent, except of course for the big fat fantasy element staring you in the face, the fact that it's a game, the world never existed.
Third: Its not actually that hard to make the same armor inventory item fit two (or more) different meshes. Look at NWN. Equipping a single armor item (lets say chain) somehow miraculously fits a small elf, human, or half-orc regardless of sex. Why suspend the reality of the impossibility that elf-size armor could ever fit half-orcs? For the convenience and enjoyment of the person who paid actual real life money for the game. Players DON'T like to be inconvenienced. You just have to include a tiny bit more data in your objects (What language was this programmed on again? Hopefully not Python).
Fourth: Putting male armor on a woman DOES make it look different. Women carry their weight differently. I think that some of your need to refresh your anatomy AND your physiology. If you're a woman, you can bend at the waist and touch your toes while standing flat against a wall. A man cannot do this. His center or balance is his chest, not his waist. A male breastplate that fits a woman about the shoulders will be too small about the waist, and if it fits about the waist it will be clunky about the shoulders. This will make it poor armor indeed. (the comment about the weight lifting record being held by a man is not accurate. its it not merely because women will develop muscles differently than a man. it is because the entire skeletal structure of a woman is modeled around a different function. this is why a man 1/2 the weight of a woman can still overpower her, and why a bobcat 1/4 the weight of a man can still knock him flat).
Kissaki said:
No, actually, its not, because the HISTORY being reffered to in this case, never existed. Not in the way that it is portrayed. This is a fun game, and it's fantasy elements FAR outweigh its historical truths. This is what we call fiction.
According to your logic, the Amazons never existed. There never was, in all the History of Men, a matriarchy. Apparently, Gloria Anzaldua was contrasting a nonexistent world with the patriarchal west.
Not by instinct. By culture. Culture is not Human Nature. Please read some Noam Chomsky. Better yet, check out the wikipedia about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
As a game, most players are going to be male. This is entirely, entirely besides the point.
No, some elements of Calradia are based on some other elements of some Historical Cultures. There is no single whole structure of the game world that matches any single whole structure of any historical culture.
Ilex said:
This is incoherent, and shows a inability to discriminate categories. This is a medieval setting, not modern day.
Kissaki said:
There was no culture that would allow you to do the kinds of things you are allowed to do in this game. That's our culture. Commoners becoming knights and controlling armies, while having no ties to the everyday world of rigid customs and obedience to unspoken laws and practices that dominated a real persons life? Like I said, fantasy elements outweigh the historical ones.
Culture is not based in human nature. Culture defines human nature. We cannot say that it is our nature to be ex. protective of women, when it is merely in our culture to be so. We cannot say that it is in our nature to eat humans when it is simply part of the culture. Nor can we say it is in our nature to hunt and kill those different than us, when it is ingrained in our culture. Safir-Whorf hypothesis = our culture determines the language which we use, and determines the categories in which we decide to see the world, despite the way the world presents itself to us (its a question of the epistimology vs the ontology). ref. Noam Chomsky, Michael Focault, et al.
List of Matriarchal societies
Ah, now you are in my playing field. As a Cognitive Scientist, the brain and behavior is my subject. You will find that as often, the female is the hunter. This is so for many mammals. There will be an alpha male and many females to do the hunting and killing. This is why Rudyard Kipling sang his song, "The Female of the Species".. Kipling was no biologist, but his observations are interesting.
Medieval setting != historical accuracy. All I'm saying is that, everyone running around the boards having a fit about things being 'historically inaccurate' don't have post-docs in medieval history. Their idea of what makes the game 'historically accurate' is bogus. What they all mean to say is that the game doesn't fit their preconcieved favorite ideas about what the world was once like, ideas that conform to the Nibley Gas Law of Learning: any amount of information, no matter how small, will expand to fill a void, no matter how large.
From the other posts, regarding the game content, I pretty much agree with Kissaki. One armor inventory item, different armor meshes in game. Like I said before, thats what was implemented in NWN (and other bioware games, etc).
Yes they did, but this is not the way that it happened. What happens in the game is a vague kind of generalization across several different centuries. Upward mobility in medieval times had a particular sort of process, and wasn't handed out to any thug who came walking in promising to join their side. What's done in the game is for the gamer, not for the sake of historical accuracy. This game does not attempt to portray the realities of world history. It attempts to be a fun fighting game in a medieval setting. The fantasy elements still outweigh the historical ones. I do not mean high fantasy. I mean fiction, daydream, make-believe.Kissaki said:
The form of your question is wrong. You keep using the word human nature as though it reffered to something known. Thats the entire point of the argument, the circular epistomolgy. You can't define culture as being based on human nature, when it is not possible to define human nature outside the frame of our culture. (What is a gronk? Its the thing attached to a squip. Whats a squip? Its the thing a gronk attaches to.) This is Chomsky's argument. People's definitions of human nature are dictated to them by their culture.
This is oversimplifying. Cultures are only similiar in a grossly generalized way. We have a phrase in our language for some of the extreme differences encountered in different cultures. Its called culture shock.
No one can deny that biology shares a relationship to culture, this would be like saying that our mouths have nothing to do with speech. That this relationship is a neccesarily causal one is refuted by an examination of the extreme similarity in biology, and the striking differences in culture around the world. This makes is clear that the correlation is necessary, but not sufficient. I'm not going to start a dicussion here about the principles of social and cultural evolution. Thats what anthropologists, sociologists, phychologists, historians, etc go to school for. I'll let them talk about it.
Even in patriarchal and modern societies, there are suprising differences in percieved gender roles. (This is big in psychology as they try to put together the DSM-V). There is a trend to see these differences as variations of the same theme, rather than seeing them as complex interactions from which we group similarites. Anymore, the western (and capatalist) perspective has been so dominant that it is very difficul for most people to understand anything different. Like Paul Simon said, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. La la la." Anyway, your idea here is in reverse. You seem to understand that biology determined what the gender roles were. This is almost teleogenic. The idea of evolution is that there is a feedback loop between behavior, culture, and biology - sexual dimorphism as the result of gender roles and behavior. It had nothing to do with what made sense, otherwise you'd expect men to be pretty, groomed alpha males, as in the rest of the natural world (well, some guys might like to be alpha males). Nobody handed out any responsibilities.
In any case, I don't think that I'm even arguing with you. I think that we both understand that women might want to play this game, and there should be reasonable accomadation for this. Mostly, I'm arguing with rathyr who seems to think that the less women in the game, the better.
Never did play NWN, but Morrowind might have done the same, I don't really remember. In any case, I don't think making two models for every armour is all that tedious, as the female armour is going to be a slightly "touched up" version of male armour. Of course, I'm no modeller and really have no idea what I'm talking about here
Thats basically it. Load the male models, tweak it here and there, save it with a different name. It's not unreasonable, it's just time-consuming. (Its also funny - creating female models from the male models - and here I thought that the y chromosome originally developed from the x)
