CivCulture IV???

[Steve Clark]

In my quick glance, I didn't see this here yet. Civfanatics mentioned an article from a cultural anthropologist in which one of the quote is "I was concerned that the practical necessities of game design would win out over an earnest effort at representing the depth, complexity and heterogeneity inherent to the word culture. "

I'm sorry I didn't have to time to read the context, but my first reaction was that cultural depth, complexity and heterogeneity would be a game just by itself, esp. in the context of the global scale. If you are wanting to design a civ-like game that has this level of cultural depth, than you better not include combat or terrain improvements otherwise the gamer would be bogged down in having to do way too many things each and every turn. I believe this is one more example of wanting to make the trees more complex but forgetting about the forest. Just some an initial reaction.

[Spiffor]

I think the author thught about implementing culture like it is implemented in Starcraft (if we can say that between the Zerg and the Terrans, the difference is cultural) : different ways to manage ppl, different buildings, different units, different tech trees etc.
Someone reacted to the argument saying it would be impossible to make it in an historical outlook, because it would lead to a fantasy of what-things-could-have-been like (we don't know what would be the current Aztec tech tree if they had repelled the Spanish for example).
As for I, I'm against because all the games who have clearly separated tech trees for each faction have short ones. We have barely 80 techs in Civ3 (and it is unprobable any Civ game will have more than 100), that would currently be 5 advances per tribe, 16 advances per group.

But the author says other things definately worth reading :

http://www.joystick101.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/1/12/222013/422