[crossfire] Love and marriage, love and marriage...

[Brendan Lally]

On 10/19/05, Sebastian Andersson
<
     bofh-lists-crossfire-dev at diegeekdie.com
     > wrote:
>
      In fact, there are many societies that don't value "pretty" as something
     >
      possitive (goes nicely together with many religions' art of self-denial)
     
That is what should happen, unfortunatly there are enough greedy
people around that it doesn't actually occur that way.

>
      and if they were to live alone gold would have a lower value as it
     >
      wouldn't be wasted on vanity items.
     
That's a nice theory, but it didn't actually happen. Gold was highly
valued throughout the ancient world, and was one of the first things
that was traded for in the new world, often in the form of jewelery
and ornamentation (which demonstrates that it was valued and worked
there too).

I suspect that if you were to find a society that had no gold reserves
accesible, then you would find one which didn't value gold, but that
would be the only one.

>
      I'm usualy surprised how much is the same in crossfire and other human
     >
      societies. If magic was so easily obtainable as it is in crossfire, I
     >
      think few people would buy a flint & stone.
     
Most NPCs don't cast magic. The idea of introducing reagents
(mentioned elsewhere) is an attempt to balance this.

>
      > > but if one is interested, wikipedia has
     >
      > > an article about it:
     >
      > > 
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#History_of_same-sex_unions
      
     >
      >
     >
      > None of these are marriage, but are instead more like that of the
     >
      > relationship between a mentor and appretice, some of them taken to a
     >
      > sexual level.
     >
     
     >
      >From the article:
     >
      "In China, especially in the southern province of Fujian where male love
     >
      was especially cultivated, men would marry youths in elaborate
     >
      ceremonies."
     
do you what to include the next line too?
'The marriages would last a number of years, at the end of which the
elder partner would help the younger find a (female) wife and settle
down to raise a family.'

quite clearly then /not/ a (semi-)permenent relationship, and /not/
one that was considered to create a unique family in its own right (as
marriage is)

To call this 'marriage' is to use the word in a non-standard way, and
therefore is unhelpful to clarity of thought and expression on this
topic.

>
      That in turn seems to come from the book:
     >
      Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition
     >
      in China, p. 132
     
I don't know this book or this author. nor is it explicitly referenced
in the article (an omission on the part of the creators of the
article?)

>
      Other parts of the article speaks of "unions", which in my opinion is
     >
      another word for marriage.
     
In my opinion it isn't. I suspect most trades unions would hold the same view.

marriage is a specific type of union, one that has members of two
families leave and form a new family. Other types of unions, such as
those between apprentice and mentor, do not fulfil the same
description, indeed to the host family, such a union is more similar
to a birth in terms of the change in family structure.

>
      Considering how diverse societies there have been, I don't think one can
     >
      assume anything about a crossfire society by looking at ours'.
     
Not ours, but all human societies. There are always certain constants,
things like status determined by dress and ornamentation - in the
aztec empire, to wear clothing marking a status above your own was
punishable by death.

Today in England impersonating a police officer is considered to be a
very serious crime.

I can't think of any society (certainly not any large and successful
one) where clothing or jewelery was not reserved in such a way as a
means to show status. To not have such a thing in crossfire would seem
odd, and likely ring false.

>
      Heck,
     >
      would people in a crossfire world even need to grow food, the beginning
     >
      of most human societies? In crossfire I would rather think that
     >
      societies would start up around priests, casting restoration on their
     >
      friends or around mages casting "create food".
     
But these are high level spells, most of the NPCs don't cast spells,
nor have access to them.

And production isn't at a high enough rate to feed everyone.

Nonetheless, this is yet another reason for spell reagents

>
      > > sex has to be introduced first (and better text handling).
     >
      >
     >
      > I'm not quite sure how those two follow on from each other... are you
     >
      > thinking of new attack messages?
     >
     
     >
      I was thinking about sex as in gender, not the verb. But I should have
     >
      used the word gender of course to avoid such confusion.
     >
      Better text handling would be needed to let people know about sex by
     >
      using her/his, she/he etc.
     
I suspect that the effort to do that would be about the same as that
required to i18n the server (but not the archs or maps). If it is
going to be done, switching to gettext at the same time may be
worthwhile.

>
      But as has already been mentioned on the list, make things generic and
     >
      let the people in the game role-play such things.
     
Yeah, and it doesn't involve playing with .po files.