Riots Model 2.0

[yellowdaddy]

i was joking!
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i disagree totally about race.
It's not arbitrary, and should certainly not be a taboo.

http://racialreality.shorturl.com/

You might the forum as enlightening as the pages, it's not a kook site, it's genuinely neutral, and well-referenced

for a start I'm talking about the Dawn senario in particular ...
(though assigning races and faces to later EGs is not a problem as the face generater is loads of sets of face parts, specifically designed to simulate mixing, and assigning categories of face parts to the characters of modern nations like Mauritius and Brazil are no problem in that respect).

As for:...

India.
In the Dawn scenario, it doesn't exist.

The Indus civilisation is a Dravidian one, Dravidians being one of the original "Peoples" in the ethnic evolution tree.
In later scenarios characters faces would be contructed from selected elements from the bank of face elements in the Caucasoid and Australasoid banks. I guess for accuracy you might want to assign the Dravidian EGs with more of the Australasoid elements, and the Indo-Iranians with more of some of the Caucasoid elements.
On the Race thing, it would say "mixed Caucasoid-Australasoid or Mixed: A, C".

Basques.
Are Caucasoid, not treated as a separate race but one of the "tribe" branches of the "Iberian" people (not strictly accurate historically, but good enough for this game).

Reunion, Mauritius, Brazil
Being modern nations, they not on the immediate agenda, but, they would clearly in terms of the characters' faces have a wide range of face elements they could be generated from.
In the race box it would say "Mixed Race: N, C, M,"

This is only about accuracy, nothing more.
Whilst I accept your point about race which has been researched into in Brazil. It's neither completely true to say that race is not about colours.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
In the Dawn scenario, it fair to say that most EGs are going to be assignable to what can be called a "race".
I understand it's a loaded term (if you can think of another...) but for me it's primarily relating to the face generator for characters... we want Ethiopian faces for Ethiopian characters, Japanese faces for Japanese characters, and Irish faces for Irish characters, and if they through conquest or immigration mix, then I'm hoping it can be shown by an admixing of the face elements, as posted earlier.

It needs revising, because I found more up to date research which shows there are actually 6 races not 4, which all evolved at different times.

Negroid 120,000 BC
Mesopotamoid 100,000 BC
Australasoid 60,000 BC
Caucasoid 40,000 BC
Mongoloid 80,000 BC
Amerindian 20,000 BC

(I think, it's in a tree in an encyclopaedia downstairs)

[Gary Thomas]

India.
In the Dawn scenario, it doesn't exist.

Neither does Australia or South America. This scenario is set in the Middle East at the time of the development of agriculture. Why on earth should India (or China or New Guinea) be included?

The Indus civilisation is a Dravidian one, Dravidians being one of the original "Peoples" in the ethnic evolution tree.

The term Dravidian is a language tern, not a race one. There has been a assumption that the language group of the Indus valley civilizations is Dravidian, by some authorities, but it is unproven. Many authorities prefer other possibilities.

I have to go from memory, but I believe the earliest settlements in the Indus area date from about 4600 BC. This is around four and a half thousand years after the Dawn scenario. The Indus civilizations reached their peak around 2500 BC. And that is around four and a half thousand years from the present day.

Forget the Indus valley.

There are some pretty good books on the "race" issue that you appear to be obssessed with. I suggest that you read them.

It needs revising, because I found more up to date research which shows there are actually 6 races not 4, which all evolved at different times.

Negroid 120,000 BC
Mesopotamoid 100,000 BC
Australasoid 60,000 BC
Caucasoid 40,000 BC
Mongoloid 80,000 BC
Amerindian 20,000 BC

This goes close to the silliest nonsense I have seen on this forum. It hardly deserves further comment. And has nothing to do with Clash anyway.

I have no particular difficulty in having various physical types available for the purpose of constructing faces - in fact I think it a great idea. But I do believe that they should be based on a somatotype system, with a considerable number of options. Then each area (not civilization) could have assigned a series of somatotypes to construct protraits from.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

In the design of the social model we intentionally, as an explicit design decision, decided not to include race. The thinking at the time was that we could easily get things in the game happening that would have the potential to upset people. YMMV.

Once the search works again (expected to be sometime next week) I invite you to search for "race" to find those old discussions.

[yellowdaddy]

Number One, I don't appreciate the insinuation that this idea is in any way racist - that's absolutely potty.

Neither does Australia or South America. This scenario is set in the Middle East at the time of the development of agriculture. Why on earth should India (or China or New Guinea) be included?

Alright then, let me rephrase that, "I'm talking about a fairly standard Dawn scenario where there's an entire world map as in Civ", which i suspect is what a lot of people are likely to be expecting as one scenario option.
and as I suspect you're well aware, I'm talking about Indian as a recognisable EG (and please try and resist the temptation to go off on one about that, it's a diversion) - surely my meaning was clear enough in the first place anyway?

The term Dravidian is a language tern, not a race one. There has been a assumption that the language group of the Indus valley civilizations is Dravidian, by some authorities, but it is unproven. Many authorities prefer other possibilities

Yes, I know, yes I know, and yes, I know
This is not a competition.
If you reread what I said, you'll see that I didn't refer to Dravidians as a race.

For the purposes of the game I'm talking about the Dravidians being assigned a particular set of face elements. And also for the purposes of the game, as with the Basques, blanks can be filled with plausible theories.
You might happen to believe that the Indus civilisation has no connection with the people I refer to as Dravidian, I'm not especially bothered, but most (as opposed to "many") credible sources regard it as the most plausible possibility and that'll surely do for a computer game.
sources:

http://www.iias.nl/host/himalaya/abstracts/ait.html

http://inic.utexas.edu/asnic/subject/peoplesandlanguages.html

If you've been to that part of India then you'll know that they do have a certain "look" and do not usually resemble Norweigians, Koreans or Tutsi... (no doubt you'll argue with this but I would prefer not to, because it seems really quite counterproductive).

As for the Indus valley, yes in real history that may be what happened, but I'm talking about a scenario where everyone starts off from the same point and changes history, a standard scenario in almost every Civ game there's ever been.
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There are some pretty good books on the "race" issue that you appear to be obssessed with. I suggest that you read them... ...This goes close to the silliest nonsense I have seen on this forum. It hardly deserves further comment. And has nothing to do with Clash anyway.

I think that's an unnecessarily hostile and patronising response. I'm not "obsessed" with anything. I'm talking about some ideas for the game which are relevant to some of the features of the game, and help fill in a plausibility gap that appears to be missing. The data is from a credible not a crackpot source, and is not part of any views I have, and when I find the source I'll post it.
{this isn't it, but these refer to the same stuff

http://www.uchicago.edu/aff/mwc-amacad/biocomplexity/ayala_eve.html

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~mcvean/DTC/Human_diversity.pdf

{Note the Ingman et al. chart from the Oxford site}

http://www.behavior.org/journals_BP/2001/Rushton.pdf

There was a controversial thing by S.J. Gould which also brought up the evolution of races scale i posted before Gary's reply}
(argue with them, not with me!}

I don't know what books you've read, but youd don't seem to be entirely up to date with current thinking on the matter, there's are more than one school of thought, I chose the most prevalent that I could find.

I try and make sure I base what I say on academically supported and credible sources specifically because I don't want to sound like an idiot.
Take the Basque question for instance, I exchanged e-mails with a leading academic at a UK university on the subject to work out how they should be manifest in the game (there's a balance to be struck between historical rigour and simple playability), so I don't just make up rubbish to suit my own tastes.
On the other hand, following SIL.org's list of languages would be a little pedantic, and a certain amount of "rounding up" is, IMO, fine for a game.

And BTW, somatotypes are body shapes in general , the character pictures are portraits, so I don't see how that's supposed to work...
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In the design of the social model we intentionally, as an explicit design decision, decided not to include race. The thinking at the time was that we could easily get things in the game happening that would have the potential to upset people. YMMV.

"Race" probably isn't the right word, but it's tricky to find another word to describe something that we all can see around us every day.
There's a funny taboo over race, the fashion is now to pretend that it doesn't exist, perhaps a legacy of 20th century history, I dunno. My wife's a different race to me, so what?! That's why i posted that site which seeks to inform people using proper academic data and research to show not only that racial differences exist , but what race actually is: of a spectrum of difference, much like language.
Here's some of the dryer sources

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7163193&dopt=Abstract

http://www.modernhumanorigins.com/anth372.html

http://www.racearchives.com/ (amateur but interesting)

http://www.lifesci.utexas.edu/courses/mcmurry/spring98/13/virginia.html

https://<br /> [IMGhttp://www.lifes...g98/13/map.gif[/IMG]

And if those are too wordy, try this one:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/race.html

for both sides of the debate.

none of the sites i've posted as sources have anything to do with revolting white power sites.

Just to reiterate, for me, it's about continuity, and wanting to make the characters look like they're supposed to, and also to include a factor which is part of history, like it or not - namely the discrimination factor.
Apart from that the little things that I've heard non-white players of these kind of games complain about - most of the human units don't match their Civ. I'm thinking of the Zulus in Civ as a for instance.

If you're making a game which is about humanity, which you appear to be, and have all these models with the aim of some degree of plausible accuracy, then to pretend that any East Asian is no different to any West European or vice versa just to satisfy a PC prejudice, for instance, is ridiculous!?
Moreover I think rather than appeasing non-white players, you'll just end up having the opposite effect on them because they are likely to want to play as a civ which they can identify with.

Not having a fair and accurate depiction of the world and all it's diversity.
That's what's likely to upset people.

I hope i am not being misunderstood.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
Number One, I don't appreciate the insinuation that this idea is in any way racist - that's absolutely potty.

I'm not sure who this is in response to. If it is me, I never meant in any way to imply that. There are perfectly reasonable things one can put in a game that yet have the potential to be misinterpreted or abused. We thought, in those previous discussions that race was one of them. Just filling you in on where discussion and decisions in the past had left us. . .

-Mark

[yellowdaddy]

No Mark, it wasn't directed at you really, I'm probably being oversensitive. Scratch that remark everyone.
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I'm not intensely bothered about including race in the discrimination model (though I think it's a bit of a continuity gap to not do that) or as an overt factor in the EG definitions, and I agree that it can be slightly tenuous or meaningless, but for the most part it's a defining characteristic isn't it. I think anthropologists use teh term "racial traits" now to describe how you don't get tallish blonde blueeyed milk-skinned freckly individuals among the pygmy tribes of the Congo.

for the face generator it seems to be pretty much essential to assign a set of "racial traits" from the bank of face elements to different EGs, otherwise players of all races will be unimpressed if their civ's people don't look they way they expect.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Neither does Australia or South America. This scenario is set in the Middle East at the time of the development of agriculture. Why on earth should India (or China or New Guinea) be included?

Because their is signifigant that Chinese civilization developed before the mesopatamian ones...at the very least at the same time and before those outside mesopatamian valley.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well for descrimination purposes we were suppose to use EG and religion mostly and mabe nationality/regionality.

Race could be a makeup in EG, but shouldn't be the most important...mostly aide from the 2 distict things i listed the former pragraph that define EGs are daily way of life, customs and beliefs and history. Language is in there, but near the bottom. Race is in there and in the past hs been semi-important and still is in many areas, but this might be be represented by nationality/regionality also.

For a face generator, again much of what you want can be shown with geographical referances...ie regionality...the clothing would be nationality or EG based. So you could achieve the same result of having racially distinct peoples without terming them as differnt races...

The question becomes would it be better to use race or not for whatever purpose...for me its better represented as used with people being of a geographical region and different "races" there being different EG within them

[yellowdaddy]

Language is in there, but near the bottom.

It's certainly not near the bottom (how long is you list anyway?).
Although this is the riots thread, I'm fascinated to hear how you could place it at the bottom.
I'd put it near the top, it's one of the main three: religion, language, race.

eg. Arabs. Not all arabs are muslim, or share exactly the same racial traits (Yemenis, and Lebanese), but they are still Arabs. Why? because their language is Arabic, and so there's still a cultural bond there.

"wayoflife, customs beliefs and history seem adequately covered by the term 'religion' IMO"
I accept that race in discrimination is probably not so important in early periods, hence i'm less bothered. Though I may not be alone in suggesting it should be a feature in more modern scenarios.

(I suppose this is still relevent, as we're discussing what kind of things people can riot about in the game)

its better represented as used with people being of a geographical region and different "races" there being different EG within them

this is correct, BUT, (to use the racial spectrum analogy) the five or six main colours of the racial spectrum, all come into existence before civilisation starts.

If we're using real human ethnic groups (based on the language tree and racial spectrum) you have to assign each people with it's appropriate attributes.

You could have a game scenario whereby all the names of peoples and languages are random, then assign racial traits to geographical starting points, but that seems like more input than output so to speak - i.e not worth the effort.

For a face generator, again much of what you want can be shown with geographical referances...ie regionality...the clothing would be nationality or EG based. So you could achieve the same result of having racially distinct peoples without terming them as differnt races...

Did you see the faces I posted last year?
Clothing's a cultural thing. The only cultural aspect EGs seem to have at the moment is religion, and maybe regime? It's mainly a mugshot, so i dunno what people want to do about clothes, i did mention it ages back.
I can see the sense in not overtly saying this tribe is Capoid-Negroid, that one Mongoloid-Caucasoid - who cares! but in the nuts and bolts behind the GUI there should be a bit of that.

Regionality... those new "ality" words make me cringe, and i find them unsatisfactorily vague, but if it means something akin to an assigned mixture of "colours" (i.e. elements) from a "racial spectrum" to an EG then ok.

If you're trying to say that region x tends produce people with racial traits a,c,d, and f; well then I don't think it works quite like that.

Northern Chinese are very distinct from southern Chinese. The Southern Chinese share an awful lot of racial traits with Vietnamese, and in fact they are largely assimilated people, as China expanded from its more northerly heartland.
some Northeast Chinese bear a lot of similarity with peoples of Siberia, as the Yuan and Qing dynasties led to a lot more commingling.
The Japanese, Burmese, Indonesians and Thais have similarly unsimple stories.
I currently beieve they all have one thing in common, that there was an orignal set of racial traits for each language-defined people.
Like a spectrum of groups from Altaic to Mon-Khmer, but which mixed and shifted around post 9000BC

[Gary Thomas]

Because their is signifigant that Chinese civilization developed before the mesopatamian ones...at the very least at the same time and before those outside mesopatamian valley.

The Chinese civilization developed over a thousand years later than the Mesopotamian one. Anyway, how can we fit China into a middle eastern scenario?

Number One, I don't appreciate the insinuation that this idea is in any way racist - that's absolutely potty.

I did not accuse anyone of racism. The general comments in your posts in fact tend to suggest the opposite. An obsession with including race in the game has nothing to do with racism.

As Mark has said, there was a specific decision to exclude race as a factor in Clash. This decision would have to be reversed to change that.

The valid argument for having race as a factor relates to pictorial representation of characters in the game. This is eye-candy. We have a game that is struggling to get the very basics operating. Eye-candy can come later. Particularly as, in this case, there are no immediate plans to have characters in the game. I will be amazed if they are included in the next five years. As usual, the bottleneck is coding. And finally, discussion of facial types does not fit into a riots thread.

Another factor is that, at the present level of development, the game is resticted to what we would describe as the classical ancient world, in which the bulk of populations are relatively similar.

[Lord God Jinnai]

It's certainly not near the bottom (how long is you list anyway?).
Although this is the riots thread, I'm fascinated to hear how you could place it at the bottom.
I'd put it near the top, it's one of the main three: religion, language, race.

To me its near the bottom because language is a by-product of localized ethnic groups.

The most important to me are: Customs/Tradtions, Daily way of life, Religion/Beliefs. Race/geography might go right below that.

And most of that isn't covereved by religion...espcially in the east where plurality in religion is the rule, not signulatity. It is true though that they do intermingle, but not always...i mean, is the fact that you say "Hello" when you answer the phone a tradition based on religion? Is the belief that being in a city is better than a rural area based on religion? Is the hisotry of the Swiss neutrality tied to religion (as their neutrality sets them apart)? While in many cases religion and belief/custom sturcture were closely tied, as more and more religions and beliefs spread they slowly became divorsed. Today, yes they still are in places closely linked, but even there its not 100%.

Ultimatly language is among thw worst tools to use...we had a big discussion on the Europa Univeralsi 2 forum about this. Langauage while imporant in developing nationality was of little consiquence because local practices would bind or seperate people togehter much more than language barriers (or lack thereof) would and that language always followed a split, never preceded it.

The Chinese civilization developed over a thousand years later than the Mesopotamian one. Anyway, how can we fit China into a middle eastern scenario?

What????? Where do you get your sources from???? That is a load of bull...it was defitaly way before even egypt had a civilization...i can cite stuff probably tomorrow or wednesday as i'm getting ready to sleep and i got a busy day tomorrow, but I know that what you claim is a old information that has long been discredited.

[yellowdaddy]

1. yes, none of this is in the right thread.

2. missing out race as a factor is a continuity gap.

3. yes, faces are eye-candy, but i thought there may be coding implications in where you put the people at the start of the game.

4. i thought there was some development going into the idea of a whole world generator, as opposed to purely restricting it to a particular area. In this scenario, I still think there's as good a reason for having race as there is for other things with or without a pic, but more for simulating human population movements, than discrimination per se, but I'm not entirely sure whether it doesn't exist.

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society.

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7737.html

here's a book for you...
amateur link:

http://www.geocities.com/ru00ru00/racismhistory/earlyhistory.html

academic link:

http://www.howard.edu/library/Snowden/Blacks.htm

5. LGJ, I studied ancient oriental history and language at university (a lot of Chinese history - yawn!), and I have to concede that while it's probably a safe bet that there were ancient chinese round the Huang He at 9000BC, there's no conclusive evidence (according to my lecturers). I'm similarly unmoved by your thoughts on language. If you need argue with either, I think it ought to go on another thread. Read this if you like, if you're interested in China:

http://www.authorama.com/ancient-china-simplified-32.html

But let's all try and maintain the integrity of the threads.

6. apologies for my oversensitivity, and for veering off topic.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I'm similarly unmoved by your thoughts on language.

And i am similarly unconvinced that language is. I concede that race is imporant enough, but definatly not language and probably nothing you can say here will change my mind as like i said we went over this in EU2 forum.

[Gary Thomas]

What????? Where do you get your sources from???? That is a load of bull...it was defitaly way before even egypt had a civilization...i can cite stuff probably tomorrow or wednesday as i'm getting ready to sleep and i got a busy day tomorrow, but I know that what you claim is a old information that has long been discredited.

Here are some of my sources (I have many more). Where are yours?

Egypt was about contemporaneous with China, but the Middle East was considerably earlier.

Large empires:

From the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History (published 2000):

Middle east: Sargon, 2350 BC
China: Shang Dynasty, 1766 BC

Farming:

Here is some information from “The Emergence of Agriculture” by Bruce D. Smith (1994), published by the Scientific American Library. Dates have been converted from BP, the carbon dating date to normal BC dates.

Fertile crescent:
Early settlement: at Abu Hureya, 9000 BC (p69)
First cultivation or domestication of:
Wheat: emmer wheat: 8700 BC (p69), einkorn wheat: 8600 BC (p69)
Barley: 8600 BC (p71)
Sheep: 7250 BC (p56)
Goats: 8000 BC (p61)
Pigs: 7000BC (p63)
Cattle: 6000 BC (p66-67)

China:
Farming settlements:
in North China: 5500 BC (p116)
in the Yangtze area: 6500 BC (p116)
First cultivation or domestication of:
Rice: 7400 BC (p130) the site was only discovered in 1988, previously the earliest was 2000 years later
Millet: between 8000 and 6300 BC, but towards the later end. (p136)
Pigs: about 6200 BC (138)

Writing:

http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html

Jia-gu wen, or Oracle Bone. This is the earliest form of Chinese writing, used probably from the Middle to the Late Shang dynasty (approximately 1500 BC ?? to 1000 BC). Most of the time, this script was etched onto turtle shells and animals bones, which were then used for divination in the royal court. Consequently, scholars have been using oracle bones as historical documents to look at the reigns of later Shang monarchs.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/sumerian.html

Subsequently, the ancient Mesopotamians stopped using clay tokens altogether, and simply impressed the symbol of the clay tokens on wet clay surfaces. In addition to symbols derived from clay tokens, they also added other symbols that were more pictographic in nature, i.e. they resemble the natural object they represent. Moreover, instead of repeating the same picture over and over again to represent multiple objects of the same type, they used diferent kinds of small marks to "count" the number of objects, thus adding a system for enumerating objects to their incipient system of symbols. Examples of this early system represents some of the earliest texts found in the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr around 3300 BCE.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Xia Dynasty 2183-1769 BCE (There is archeological evidence to support this since 1959)....This sites are too numerous to list, but suffice it to say, they've found several tombs dating to this period.

Hsia Dynasty: circa 2100 - 1800 BCE

Yams and Root plants: circa 8000 BCE (This is contreversial) http://www.bartleby.com/67/39.html
Rice: 15 000 - 12 000 BCE http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3207552.stm

circa 9500 BCE Permenant fishing cities established in Japan (Jomon culture) (i mention this because japanese culture has been traditionally more fishing based than agriculture based)

I have some offline resources but that'll take some time to site.