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[Boma Airaken]

Hmm... I dunno. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but the main Caldari RP channel for me is the Heiian College.

Also, I haven't been there in a while, but the Caldari also have the Tea House:

Tea House

A massive wooden floor austerely decorated in Caldari fashion, with some heavy concrete vases here and there holding kresh branches. There are some tatamis lying on the floor for the guests to sit on. The feeling of austerity is reinforced by the sound of deep solemn drums played by a hidden sound system. A hanging scroll displays an exquisite calligraphic work that reads: "True tea is made with water drawn from the depths of mind"

Seems very Caldari to me. Quiet reflection, connection to the ancestors.

And besides, it's a good place to give poison tea to people who let down the corp.

Right. Because the Civire are all about passiveness, quiet reflection, intellectualism, seeking enlightenment, and enjoying peace and tranquility.

[Boma Airaken]

And Scagga, please don't get me wrong on this. The lack of outside the box thinking about the anthropology in New Eden drives me crazy, and yes I am being an opinionated selfish little bitch about it. I fully accept that people can RP any way they want, and anthropologize New Eden culture all they want. I am not "angry" at anyone for doing it. I just have higher expectations of this of all gaming communities.

Repeat for great justice: I know that my opinion sucks in the eyes of most. I accept it and own it.

[scagga]

And Scagga, please don't get me wrong on this. The lack of outside the box thinking about the anthropology in New Eden drives me crazy, and yes I am being an opinionated selfish little bitch about it. I fully accept that people can RP any way they want, and anthropologize New Eden culture all they want. I am not "angry" at anyone for doing it. I just have higher expectations of this of all gaming communities.

Repeat for great justice: I know that my opinion sucks in the eyes of most. I accept it and own it.

Thank you for the clarification.

Anthropology is not my background, and I would conjecture that this is a common negative finding.  Are you saying that it is within your expectations that de novo creation/'anthropologising' of EvE cultures occurs, independent of pre-existing terran models to anchor them on? Sounds like the realm of a successful writer, successful enough to most probably not have the time to play EvE in my opinion.

The 'higher expectations' you mentioned intrigued me - why of 'this' community? (I believe it is acutely relevant to the discussion topic)

[Boma Airaken]

Thank you, the book is coming along nicely (no seriously), except I am at a dead end on some of my psychiatric research and need some help that google and wikipedia cannot provide.

As far as the high expectations, even the people I cannot stand ICly in EvE, come accross as  a whole as extremely intelligent, very creative imaginative people. The higher the quality of the members of the community, the higher my expectations are.

[Jozana]

Hmm... I dunno. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but the main Caldari RP channel for me is the Heiian College.

Also, I haven't been there in a while, but the Caldari also have the Tea House:

Tea House

A massive wooden floor austerely decorated in Caldari fashion, with some heavy concrete vases here and there holding kresh branches. There are some tatamis lying on the floor for the guests to sit on. The feeling of austerity is reinforced by the sound of deep solemn drums played by a hidden sound system. A hanging scroll displays an exquisite calligraphic work that reads: "True tea is made with water drawn from the depths of mind"

Seems very Caldari to me. Quiet reflection, connection to the ancestors.

And besides, it's a good place to give poison tea to people who let down the corp.

Do people still come there? I've been there a few times and it was completely dead.... recently.

Edit: Tea House, that is.

[Casiella]

* Casiella blinks, trying to parse out what Scagga wrote.

And Boma, your phrase "forced anthropology" sums up what I tried to say earlier, only much better: EVE cultures aren't RL cultures that have been lifted wholesale into New Eden, with just a find-and-replace job run on the names. The Amarr aren't Catholic (and certainly not Muslim), though one can find significant elements of both within them, any more than the Caldari are Finn-Japanese or the Gallente are French, though again we can clearly see some of those elements within them.

As for the OP: I did try a IC channel for the discussion of scientific and technical topics once in the past, and occasionally consider trying something new. But I fear that it would rapidly get overrun with the FotM discussions about the Sansha invasions, so I've left it alone.

[Ember Vykos]

Hmm... I dunno. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but the main Caldari RP channel for me is the Heiian College.

Also, I haven't been there in a while, but the Caldari also have the Tea House:

Tea House

A massive wooden floor austerely decorated in Caldari fashion, with some heavy concrete vases here and there holding kresh branches. There are some tatamis lying on the floor for the guests to sit on. The feeling of austerity is reinforced by the sound of deep solemn drums played by a hidden sound system. A hanging scroll displays an exquisite calligraphic work that reads: "True tea is made with water drawn from the depths of mind"

Seems very Caldari to me. Quiet reflection, connection to the ancestors.

And besides, it's a good place to give poison tea to people who let down the corp.

Do people still come there? I've been there a few times and it was completely dead.... recently.

Edit: Tea House, that is.

Yeah the Tea house is fairly dead. I really need to work on publicizing that place a bit more sometime. My CEO created it and a backrooom to it as well. From what he says it used to be pretty busy, but I guess it died off. Heiian College is full most of the time, but no one really says much. Discussion pics up at times, but moslty its just people saying hi then they shut up.

[Vikarion]

The Caldari are not Japanese, or Finnish - they certainly aren't portrayed that way in any of the PF. At least, not if anyone knows something about Japanese culture.

What are the Caldari closest to? From the racial descriptions, PF, Epic Arc missions, and so forth, they're a lot like conservative America with a few curve-balls thrown in.

- They're more morally conservative than the other empires.
- Xenophobic/culturally insular, but not racist.
- Socially conservative, economically libertarian.

Dex Nederland once described them as being similar to a 1800's railroad town (for you europeans, small towns that sprang up around railroad operations/construction). I feel this is very close to the truth.

Whatever else, they are very focused on working hard - note how their primary leader (Heth) is himself a worker. They are populist, in a sense, distrusting elites who don't come up through the ranks (note how well the story of Otro Garuishi, a popular hero, conforms to the American story of going from hardship to success through hard work, a bit of cleverness, and the overcoming of a corrupt elitist establishment). They are also the premier sports fans of the cluster, the biggest gamblers, the ones who play hardest. The Guristas aren't known as a biker-gang-writ-large for no reason.

What a lot of people don't seem to get (from my point of view, granted) is that the fight between the Caldari and the Federation isn't "America and Western Europe versus Japan", its "America and Western Europe versus itself". It's economic freedom and social authoritarianism versus economic authoritarianism and social liberalism. And this is why both nations have so many expatriates from the other: some people want freedom in regards to who they are, others want to have the maximum amount of economic mobility.

And thus, we can see where much of the malice in both societies come from. To the Gallente, the Caldari are barbarians: restricting individual freedoms and thereby eliminating individuality. To the Caldari, the Gallente are tyrants who seek to make elitist control available only to those who know the right people - the in group, as it were. And for a culture that, due to environmental reasons, lagged behind the Federation for so long, they were not and are not in that group. The Caldari can be said to have an inferiority complex, the Gallente have a narcissistic and elitist one.


 

Now, you may not agree with the above view, and that's fine.

[Kaleigh Doyle]

Firstly, I just want to say that I have no formal education in the field of sociology or anthropology, but I find these kinds of discussions incredibly fascinating when relating to our own mindset when role-playing a character.

I think before one can even touch upon the notion of whether a person's effectiveness in representing a culture/society is accurate, the actor and the audience both must have a general understanding of these defining characteristics in mind before rendering judgement. If we inject real world interpretations of what a society is (a body of people living in a system), versus its culture (defining characteristics of a body of people), we can appreciate that a culture can permeate through many societies. I think this clarification is useful when trying to approach similar discussions had recently about the Nature of the Angel Cartel and whether they are simply a 'society' or are a society with a unique culture (ie., are they noted for having a unique method of thought, a defining language, or is it all borrowed from other cultures?)

If we take this into consideration, what are the dominant cultures of New Eden? And more importantly, what defines these cultures?

The Gallente Federation, for instance, is a society of people united under a common legal and economic standard across several cultures. The dominant cultures that we are aware of are the Gallentean culture, the Intaki Culture, and the Jin-Mei culture. These are, by no means equal in influence, but I believe they all make an impact on society as a whole.

People have often said that the Gallenteans have no real distinct culture, but I believe that its similarities to RL western society are abundant to the point that we almost can't make the distinction. Just a quick glance at the description of the Federation from the new character intros, we see:

♦ Only true democracy in New Eden
♦ welcomes outsiders
♦ Financially Prosperous
♦ accepting of other cultures and races
♦ Pioneers of artificial intelligence
♦ manned by bravest men in New Eden (especially known in the universe for their bravery)
♦ intolerant of closed societies (Caldari State, Amarr Empire)
♦ Fierce defenders of personal and social liberties

It's pretty obvious here which qualities are similar to ours in the Western world, but the real question is whether these values infect the mindset of characters/players trying to roleplay cultures largely foreign from ours?

Let's take the Amarr Empire under the same circumstances, information gleaned from the introduction and video for their society:

♦ largest and oldest of the four empires
♦ Ruled by a god-empress
♦ theocratic society (<--society, not culture)
♦ committed great evil and selfless acts in the name of their God
♦ society is supported by slave labor (<--cultural descriptor)
♦ Amarrian citizens are often highly educated and fervent individuals
♦ view slavery as a path of spiritual enlightenment
♦ Most stable and powerful nation in New Eden, despite recent setbacks in history

Now, just a brief examination of both of these societies and cultures displays clearly defined characteristics that differentiate the two, which is where we glean our stereotypes from, but there is more to a culture than just these key points. A culture could be defined by language, history, learning style, art, architecture, and most of this is largely based on individual interpretive thinking.

Do we really know (outside of reading some books or chrons) how the Amarrian culture enjoys to laugh? What are their outlooks on life and what are some general ideas about their taste in music? These things may never be answered, but we as "immersioneers" find ourselves asking the question and ultimately taking a plunge in defining what's useful/interesting to us.

So I suppose the question is: What about each of the cultures do you feel is 'westernized' from how it should really be and how true is our style to that of the tiny bits of canon that we're fed?

[Boma Airaken]

I would like to thank Casiella, Vikarion, and Kaleigh for their most recent posts in this thread. It is a perfect example for Scagga of why I expect so much from the EvE community when it comes to roleplay.

Also, Vikarion, your description of the Caldari is gorgeous and as close to my own ideas about them as I have ever seen.

[Benjamin Shepherd]

Why don't we try to combine different elements to reflect the EVE Online setting? Surely we cannot be purists, so mixing and matching seems to work fine.

[Alain Colcer]

uhm nothing much that i can add that has already been discussed, but to me, regardless of similarities with western cultures or not, a "gathering" place within gallente society has at least one or several of the following aspects:

-It is meant for indulgence of one self
-It is meant to display freedom of choice, therefore it must have a large variety of whatever you can ask for
-It is meant to provide high-stake excitments, often in competition against other visitors
-It is meant to invite or harbor the gods/goddesses related to enjoyment, luck, friends, liquour and fortune.

To me that sounds either like a bar, or a casino, either of which adorned with very specific details.

If it has all that, it's good for me, and i am a gallente RPer 

[Boma Airaken]

After a bit more thought on the OP, the bar thing is basically the same as in RL. People from *ALL* walks of life and locales tend to mix together in them and they are literally everywhere, so I def wouldn't say there is anything inherently gallente about the ingame bar mentality/setting.

[Vikarion]

One of the things we need to avoid doing is thinking of "alien people". Most cultures, especially technologically advanced ones, have many points of similarity. This is a necessity, not only because of specialization, but also because similar technologies require similar habits. In a society where educated processor-chip manufacturers are needed, its unlikely that one can simply shoe-horn badly-treated slaves into the job.

Instead - as is pointed out in one Chronicle - most Caldari and Gallente live fairly similar lives: they go to work, buy their goods, and relax at home. The differences are in their organizations, and how they think of them. Whereas (this is an example) a Gallentean might think of all corporations as potentially evil, with the government as an ally of the average man, the average Caldari Lai Dai employee probably thinks of his own corporation as pretty good, looks down a bit on its smaller subsidiaries, and looks on Ishukone as naively dangerous competitors. It doesn't cross his mind to want a central government to protect him from his corporation any more than it would cross the mind of the average Gallente to appeal to Creodron for protection from the Federal Navy.

Of course, this isn't uniformly true. There are dissenters in all societies, as well as off-beat elements, quiet and public minorities, and so forth. But the reality is that you need a majority of the people happily living their lives if you don't want to expend the massive effort of creating a police state, and from PF, we know that none of the empires is that (although the Empire can come close). When one tries to exercise perfect control over all elements of society, you end up falling behind technologically.

(Sansha's Nation tries to get around this by "Hey! Cybernetics!", but it seems less than likely that future societies will be able to avoid the "economic freedom = innovation" equation. Note that you can certainly build upon the works of others with a police state - this is precisely how both the Soviet Union and Communist China operated for some time. Note also that Communist China is now an oxymoron and the Soviet Union is no longer with us.)

These sources (PF and observed socio-cultural phenomena in our own world) are why I argue that the State must, by necessity, be free and capitalistically rewarding from an economic standpoint. They are the most technologically advanced empire, and also the most likely to engage in research. Those who would paint it as a corporate police state are ignoring the fact that it doesn't act like one: those who are afraid of the consequences for failure do not take the risks necessary for success.

[Lillith Blackheart]

I think I do not understand what the original complaint was, because imo I see molehills, and people talking about mountains.