AldUK said:
I had made a mental note not to further comment on this thread in order to prevent escalation of emotions resulting in warnings being handed out. But your post actually ticked me off. What you're saying here is that you know more than anyone else on this subject why? Because you've been to a certain part of the world a few times?
I did not claim to know more than anyone else on this subject, I claimed that I have more experience of The Middle East/North Africa/The Arabian Peninsula and their peoples than anyone else posting in this thread. It is indeed because I've been to those parts of the world. I don't know why you think that's somehow not a good argument.
You would trust an anthropologist or a diplomat who had lived there for years, wouldn't you? Why not afford me some of that trust? Sure, I've not lived in any of those places for more than a couple of months, but let me tell you: a week in a country is all you need to smash prejudices you didn't even know you had, and make you realise how little you really know about life and the people there.
And make you realise how shitty and distorted a representation of the place you get in your home country.
How about you tell us about your experiences there and provide actual reasoning behind your statement? As to the site I linked, it's the result of a google search, I knew that those passages existed, I simply needed to find a website quoting those passages to provide proof to my statement, something which you haven't done.
You don't realise what you're doing, and that's what so frustrating for me.
You are objectifying [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectification] and attempting to essentualise [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#In_historiography] a massive complicated mess of individuals, cultures, societies, histories, geographies, ethnicities, languages, and so on and asking me to "prove" that your reductive [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism] argument- so called as it is only based on the Qu'ran- is wrong. Do you really think it's as simple as: 'All x think y; T/F' and here's the stat to back it up?
Let me put it this way. Over 3/4s of the world believe something along the lines of "Americans are fat, stupid, selfish, arrogant, consumerist, materialist, know-it-all Christian whackjobs. We should be resisting their international domineering."
Now I ask you to prove them wrong.
See how nonsensical it is?
Reacting with "Prove it" is child's play, and you strike me as more adult than that.
My point is, don't simply wade into a discussion to belittle somebody based on a rhetoric which you can't back up with facts and information.
What do you want me to do? I can't remember most of the day-to-day occurrences- what you call facts and information- only the conclusions I drew from the trip. Should I re-type my personal diaries for you? Construct a
MASSIVE ethnography on the whole of the region? There is no way to
prove stuff like this. It's too big, and I'm not going to even make a tenth of the effort it would take to explain this to you on an internet forum where in all likelihood you'll ignore me anyway.
Imagine the book- it would be hundreds of volumes containing all the minutiae of life in that area. Great tomes on the history, culture, economy, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy of the region would be required, and even then you'd be committing some ethically dubious academics. And you're asking me to condense my taste of that into a forum post.
Hell, if I could write that book, I sure as hell would not give it out for free on the internet. It would be groundbreaking.
The only way you'll be able to understand my paradigm is to experience what I've experienced, and that would involve living in the region and having connections to it and so on, (which I'm assuming you do not have at the moment in any meaningful way).
I'm sorry that you found my claim to superior experience belittling, but I do have to wonder why.
There's as much truth in "You'll understand when you're older," as, "You'll understand when you're there." As anyone who as aged can tell you, the first is true. As anyone who has travelled properly can tell you, the second is true.
VikingKing said:
This would essentially be a game about looking at the modern Middle East and letting you do so from the point of a silent protagonist with no voice, personality, or name. Because that way it then becomes *you* exploring the world.
That's essentially what anthropologists do.
Of course, they can't become invisible flies-on-walls. Instead, they try to integrate fully into the culture they're studying so as to no longer be regarded as an outsider by the inhabitants. They become socially unremarkable, like a chameleon. They then participate and observe in the culture, take notes as they go along, and bind it all up in an ethnography at the end.
A great deal of understanding comes from the participation, not just the observation. For example: it's very hard for a Westerner to understand the importance family connections and social status play in the Middle East (and, actually, most of the rest of the world), until they find themselves living in that social context where it is right to make claims on family, and for your family to make claims on you.
The West seems to me to be relatively disconnected. For example: where do you go when you want money? Not your family or friends, but a cold, mechanical bank. Or a cold, mechanical corporation to exchange your time and skills for money. What seems so common-sense to us is not in fact so.
Hell the Japanese are so connected to lineage that they used to kill themselves because they had dishonoured their families. A Japanese CEO recently killed himself because he had to lay off so many of his employees. Westerners just can't *get* that. Such social connections form some of the core of the justification for honour killings.
As much as I'd love an Anthropology game, I think that gameplay would be rather boring for most people. Although it would be interesting for the rest, as it would essentially be living abroad without leaving your house.
Plus, y'know, how would it work? You'd essentially be simulating whole regions of the world and dropping the player in them. Nevermind the arguments I made above about the inherent problems of objectifying things so complex, I have a more practical problem in mind: Would the NPCs speak English or their Native dialects? If it's English, are you committing some form of cultural imperialism? How much is lost in translation (It's a lot more than you'd think)? If it's Arabic, how the hell will anyone outside of the Arab-speaking world know what's going on? So much of culture is language you'd be conducting a grave misrepresentation if you excluded it.
An example I read recently was of how the British and (IIRC) the Thai describe the phenomenon of rain. English-speakers say, "It is raining." They say, "There is rain." And that subtle difference says a whole lot about the differing worldviews.
