Atriarch Online Culture Piece

The crew at camp Atriarch Stratics cajoled a member of the team from the MMORPG Atriarch Online into collecting questions about culture. In the developer profile you’ll find incriminating information about the man who calls himself Satyric, lead culture writer for the game, as well as a healthy component about the culture found within Atriarch Online. A sliver:

Q: How do you plan on making it very possible for the casual gamer to recognize distinct signs of culture without even looking for it? Will a player need to check atriarch.com to find out that the Lokai dislike a certain behavior?

A: Casual gamers will of course miss some things that people more immersed will notice. But nobody will be able to avoid distinct signs of different cultures — everything from your clothing to your government to your professional options will be different from those of other species.

What I’d love to have happen is for a large number of the initial group of players to really learn about their species before and as the game starts, and enjoy playing them. Look at how completely ignored the heavily-enforced racial hatreds are in EQ. Rather than having to read that something’s encouraged or frowned upon on a web site, I’d much rather have a young character trying something actually BE encouraged or frowned at by more experienced members of his species. Societal pressure is the best, most effective, and arguably the only realistic way to promote behaviors that we don’t want to encourage or force through the game engine. After all, it’s the reason you don’t wear your shoes on your hands or eat other people. 🙂

A lot of people will of course ignore all that, and play the game for just the aspects they enjoy, or only for what is forced by the engine. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you can have fun pushing the pieces around on a game board without following the rules of the game, just because they’re there and you want to, then you’re still having fun. We’re creating a pretty interesting board and pieces, after all. Those players who want to explore some of the less tangible aspects of the world will just have a whole extra level of fun and involvement available to them.

My goal is to help make the cultures so interesting, involving, and fun that it’s a pleasure to find out about, play, and create more aspects of them.

Nice analogy with the board.