GalCivII: Appeal to Tradition

I hope you did not think I was done talking about GalCiv II.  Because I am not.  See?  Yeah.

I have gotten back to modding GalCiv II; I started with Tolmekian's TechTree Fixes and have systematically gone through and edited the thousands of lines of text to remove the corn from the poorly executed science fiction flavor.

It has not been pretty.  As I have already spoken about, Twilight of Arnor the was a rushed game, and the text of the game has never been particularly inspiring.  Apart from typographic and spelling errors, much of it is simply bad writing, and usually very conversational in tone.

You cannot blame them, of course: with no designated professional writer and what was clearly a habitually rushed and under-funded operation had no time for editorial duties.  Plus, the game still plays well.

What I wanted to get into today is the world-building traps that are easy to get oneself into when writing about fictional cultures.

Here is the text from a United Planets Council question:

"In a galaxy filled with different kinds of beings, it can be a challenge to get our civilians to see eye-to-eye. While many ideas have been brought to the table, the most obvious way to bring our people together is through a Galactic Olympiad. Next year, all attending races will come together to compete in different events. As the hosting race will see a 20 bc per week economic increase during the competition, we must vote on a venue."

The thing to notice here is the statement that an Olympiad is somehow the most self evident way to bring together a coalition of space fairing alien species in mutual respect and admiration.  And that is simply monumentally misinformed and ethnocentric.

Like much of GalCiv's flavor and fluff, it operates under the assumption that at the end of the day all the galactic species are basically humans: two legs, two arms, a head, bilateral symmetry, a sense of the individual and its accomplishments, and all of them no more than six to seven feet tall.  This would be acceptable if they had not already taken pains to subvert that trope.  The Arcean are twelve feet tall, and the Drath are ten feet tall.  The only entertainment mentioned of Drengin practice are blood sports.  Tori are implied to be semi-amphibious, and the Yor are a collective consciousness of robotic beings.

Even if they all do have a cultural tradition of sports, there is little hope that any particular species will have much skill in any sports that another species plays.  Disregarding physical attributes, species simply have different specializations.  The Korx are deceitful tradesmen; their sports might include mock UN style trade negotiations.  Drengin engineer their laborers, and would be completely within their rights to simply engineer the perfect players for every sport on the docket.  And let us not forget that the Thalan are from the future and are on a mission to save the universe; the very idea that they would waste time to foster interstellar dialogue is laughable.