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Complete Suggestion for Culture as a Skill/Trait
So after seeing that different ethnicities and cultures were confirmed for Paralives I was very excited, but I realized that while the Sims 4 has something similar, it is also missing a really big factor that actually adds impact to these differences. It is especially pronounced in the City Living expansion. Everyone celebrates every culture and as a result no one really celebrates any one culture. That may sound good in theory, but it actually greatly devalues some of the cultural diversity of our planet and makes it harder to role play the discovery, difficulties, and joys of cultural differences.
So here is my suggestion: Have Parafolk pick one or two cultures in the character creator, then have the ability to discover, learn, and improve their knowledge of other cultures like one would skills during the development of the normal game.
So for example: Maybe your Parafolk family picks the East Asian culture trait in the character creator. As a result they by default get the ability to eat with chopsticks, bow when greeting, and the starter cooking recipes are all stock Asian food like Ramen (JP), Kimchi (KR), Dumplings (CH), and Banh Mi (VI). If the family only knows this culture they will only be able to eat with chopsticks, only be able to greet with bowing, and only be able to cook Asian dishes.
But if little Suzuki Taro makes friends who have the American culture trait, reads books about American Culture, or Researches American Culture on the internet. He can gradually start to build up a skill in American Culture. With this skill he will start to have a random percentage chance to shake hands with people who have the American Culture trait (Which may give a small boost to the initial relationship progress), will start to eat American style food with a knife and fork (Which may improve the speed at which they can eat), and may unlock the ability to cook American dishes (that were previously locked). Children who grow up with parents of two cultures may start out with two cultures natively.
If this is all the culture mechanic is, this would still be an amazing improvement over the Sims. I don’t think it would require a huge amount of extra work either, especially if you only include a couple blob cultures like American, Latin, European, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and African.
But of course you could do much more, you could include a language mechanic that makes it where it is harder to communicate with those that don’t have the same culture type. You don’t need a separate language skill, you could just make it where the higher Culture skill they have of that specific culture, the more normally communication occurs. Perhaps there is like a 25% chance of misunderstanding when conversing between two differently cultured sims that results in a negative moodlet and small decrease in relationship, but the higher your culture skill the less of a chance there is of this occurring. This is not a requirement though, just an extra feature that would appeal to the many of those who have dealt with language barriers and cross cultural relationships.
If this idea sounds interesting to people please let me know! 🙂
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9 Replies
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My opinion with anything related to “culture” is still one of hesitance. My first main issue is that inevitably, people will be upset if their own culture is excluded. Even if you use vague terms like “Asian” or “American” culture, there’s no way to represent everyone included in that bubble, and those that aren’t included are likely to be upset.
Second, I feel it’s risky to list things under a specific culture umbrella. American culture, what is that. North? South? Central? All? Each of those places are totally different. So if a Para has an ‘American’ culture trait, which countries/cultures is it based around? Trying to expand to as many customs and cultures of the Americas and putting it all under one ‘American culture trait’, would not only be a lot of work, but also come across as a bit messy. Similarly, in your example, you mentioned East Asia, which (according to my quick Google search :p) is said to include China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. Putting all of those very different countries under one term just seems odd.
Personally, I wish Paralives would avoid using real world cultures as much as possible. I think they could create their own fictional cultures which could be slightly based on reality, but still have their own identity and let the players decide what their customs could be.
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I like the idea of paras having different cultures and traditions but I don’t think they should be “real world”. They should be specific to Paralives worlds even if they are loosely based on “real world” (hope that makes sense). If we can create our own worlds, then we can choose each world’s traditions and culture.
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I agree with everything Bailey is saying. My concern is that I don’t think a game could ever represent a real-life culture well enough to be satisfactory to someone of that culture. An attempt to do this would inevitably lead to stereotyping; even if the devs had the best intentions, the realities of a culture might not have been communicated well enough to them due to language, distance, or innocently made assumptions. I can’t help but see a major danger zone here. Also, I must stress this point, though made already, “East Asia” is not a single culture. It’s not even a single nation. Condensing down an entire region into a category is not a healthy way to think about culture. Personally, I think Paralives should keep it vague, not define their cultures in real world terms, and leave the storytelling to us.
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i think that the Parafolk should have between 5-10 traits because making it realistic people are born with personality so they should be born with a personality and then they automatically get a trait from they way they were treated that age but you have the ability to change that trait because i think unlike the sims 4 the traits will actually affect things instead of just having them be sad and everything is normal and they can do most things like if it was realistic they would want to just take a nap or play some games with their family/friends not just oh there sad but it not affecting things. another thing with trait is they should affect the way they see their significant other like for example if they are a para who thinks that they should get married and there in a good relationship then they might start thinking later in the relationship they they might be their future spouse but the other person could be thinking about breaking up. and then if they do break up there should be an option like talk to friend about ex or something like that not just Sad. like the person who thought about marriage would be like heartbroken and it wouldn’t take like 30 mins for them to get over it.
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Having these Umbrella terms is VERY controversial and also kind of ethically wrong. one culture can’t represent a whole geographical region with hundreds of different cultures. having “American” or “European” would just be very tiring and annoying been as that’s literally all we’ve had in the past. ignoring the large amount of people who don’t follow those cultures. Also, making an “Asian” or “middle eastern” culture is not a good idea, since these cultures end up what the West thinks of those cultures as and people from those cultures are rarely consulted with at all. In General, Real-world cultures are not the way to go. It’ll just bring unwelcomed drama to the game and the developers and having made up cultures is probably the way to go. I understand you want to have an up on the sims, but we need to remember this game is it’s own game!
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I feel like if they did want to add cultures, it would probably be a lot safer if they went with unique in-game cultures and nothing based on real life.
Although that in itself would require a huge amount of world building for it to work out well. Although I do think it would be really neat if we had an entirely new paraworld mapped out for us right from day one. imagine being able to choose one of the made up countries for our neighborhood to be situated in and then be able to set the country of each paras birth.
Though that seems like something that would be too much work.
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I do agree with people saying it might be controversial. But wouldn’t it be also controversial to have different elements of one culture and name of that culture would be made up? Personally I think that cultures should be either customizable or be actually present – we won’t most likely have all ethinicities, how can you solve that?
The main problem would be umbrella terms and such, but honestly I think that the developers can really take time with this and would actually do research and maybe discussed this with people of particular culture. And also, there are always update that can add culture by culture. -
I personally am not a fan of Culture being a skill or a trait. It doesn’t take skill to be a part of a culture. However, being “Cultured” as a trait. or being “interested in different cultures” as a trait, and maybe also having one where the Para isn’t “Cultured” and they have a difficulty mingling with people from different cultures would be nice.
