Culture in World Design

To begin with, culture is a vast and vaguely defined description of what a group of individuals more or less share as a set of values, beliefs, and behaviours. In practice, trying to actually describe culture is akin to attempting to nailgun jello to a wall.

Fortunately, there are some consistent features, so these will be discussed in some detail for the remainder of this text.

First and foremost, before anything else, a culture has a fairly consistent set of values to be upheld. While there are individual exceptions and even subgroups within the main culture may be opposed to such, the majority of individuals can at least agree upon some basic, fundamental values.

For an ideal example of this, most everyone in the United States can agree that murder is a bad thing, and taking someone's life without good cause is worthy of punishment. What everyone in the United States can't agree upon, however, is what the definition of a "good cause" is, or what "murder" is.

War, self defense, protection of one's home and family, doctor assisted suicide, abortion, killing someone accused of domestic violence and abuse even if they're asleep, and so on, are all rather major grey areas when it comes to what constitutes a good reason to kill someone. One individual can insist that the death penalty is a horrible thing, while at the same time condoning the terrorist bombing of an abortion clinic, showcasing that even the basic concepts of what a culture values can be largely fragmented as soon as one delves into the specific details of such.

To complicate matters further, each and every individual within a culture will feel that they are correct in their beliefs upon these grey areas, and so long as an individual feels strongly enough about their convictions and values, they can justify nearly any action imaginable.

This also means that for any world which is created, no culture will have unanimous support of absolutely all values it holds. In fact, it's excessively unlikely that even the most basic and fundamental of concepts can be agreed upon, and as such, any given culture which is designed will be ripe for conflict, misunderstandings, and various splinter factions to emerge with little to no effort upon the designer if they take these factors into account.

In addition to such, any culture created will invariably have a multitude of subcultures within the greater whole, each of which will tend to be largely similar to the predominant cultural views, with a variety of differing opinions upon various details.

Due to the above issues, no one feels they are "evil", and any well-written conflict will have at least two different factions, each of which will believe they are on the side of "good" and their opponents upon the side of "evil". This is a highly important aspect of world design to consider when cultivating the cultural landscape and preparing factions for conflict, which can be readily used as a backdrop or plot point within a story.

To be perfectly blunt, writing a story is much like propaganda when it comes to conflict: if the writer wants a particular faction to seem abhorrent and evil beyond all hope of redemption, the method employed is largely the same as in propaganda in real life - dehumanization.

By showcasing the terrible acts and atrocities committed by a given faction, the author is able to turn the readers against said faction, especially if the reasoning behind why the faction performed such an act is ignored.

Individual character designs rely upon the same concept, such as Darth Vader having a mask to prevent facial expression thereby rendering him as inhuman and difficult to relate to. On the larger scale, uniforms for Stormtroopers have an identical choice behind their design, though taken to a higher level of disposability due to having no truly human characteristics, no differentiation between individuals, and such a high level of conformity that it doesn't feel like it matters if one dies or not. This was true even before the Star Wars prequels which cast the entirety of the Stormtroopers as being clones, which only further emphasized the disposable nature of such.

As values are inherent to the individual, but are subject to emotional rationalization, value systems which become commonplace invariably form an ideological framework. Sometimes this takes the form of a religion such as Buddhism, and sometimes it takes the form of a communal, secular belief system such as Feminism, wherein the basic belief of "treating women nicely is good" is something almost everyone can get behind, though the specific details on what "good" means, or even what "women" are defined as can be points of contention.

Without getting too into detail on the nuances of how such an ideology can break down into a wealth of subcultures, the point to be made is simply that any value system which is felt strongly enough about is destined to be formatted as an ideology, and these ideologies, due to the inherent strength of conviction behind the values which they're founded upon, will result in conflict, be it external conflict with other ideologies, such as the Moslems and Christianity during the crusades, or via internal conflict such as the many splinter factions within the LGBTQ's loosely defined community where even the various groups involved are often at each others throats on a regular basis.

For those caught within such a conflict, there will be many who simply want the differences cast aside and to focus upon the similarities shared amongst the groups in question, yet the very nature of an ideology ensures that the smallest of disagreements will eventually turn to almost anything short of an all-out war if a larger threat does not manifest to draw attention away from petty squabbles which would otherwise be blown vastly out of proportion.

As there are always groups who disagree on a more fundamental level of values, there can always be a target with which to attack. For the writer, this is an excellent source of conflict with which to progress a storyline forward, or to create situations in which characters must face adversity, and a world designer is capable of providing a limitless source of new issues to address, new conflicts to enact, and new factions to interact with.

However, while conflict is useful for character development, and arguably the only path towards character development, this is not the only value that a culture can provide for the world designer, and more specifically, the end goal of entertaining the audience and deepening the immersion value of the medium.

For example, let's take the concept of a spacefaring group of humans. Set it something as simple as one hundred years into the future, with no alien contact and no magic, no psionics, nothing special, just space.

Under zero-g environments, certain aspects of this lifestyle will lead towards cultural traits, quirks and even secular rituals. Something as simple as always quadruple checking the airlock is sealed fully closed is a rather important thing to do, as it ensures the safety of those present. What may first begin as an operating procedure over a safety concern can soon be forgotten for the origins of why it was created, or bleed over into other areas of life as well.

What started as a simple quad-check of the airlock's seal soon turns to performing actions in fours, checklists being repeated four times, tapping one's foot four times to test the magnetic grip of a boot is activated properly, and soon these kinds of actions become commonplace throughout the cultural identity of those present.

Even if a spacefaring race were to gain artificial gravity, they would likely still perform drills daily as to what to do if gravity becomes disabled, and as such, those within the culture become vastly more adept at working within a zero-g environment than others who don't follow the same practices. If an invading force attempts to board their ship, they can simply turn off the gravity, and have a significant advantage in combat for example.

Yet, as stated, even things which begin with a clear purpose or value to such can quickly develop a memetic life of their own. Given zero-g test drills may be commonplace, soon children may develop games which can be only played under such conditions. Little rituals such as ensuring all drinks have a lid "just in case" are a good thing and may enter normal life, to the point that such is maintained even if the culture finds a planet to settle down upon. Centuries later, the individuals within that colony may still always insist upon never having a drink without a lid attached, despite that the reason for why such was done has long since become a moot point, as the planet is not randomly going to lose gravity at any given moment.

These traditions, started so long ago, become an everyday part of life, even if they interfere with daily activities, and often a culture will become quite adverse, and even downright hostile towards changing their traditional methods of doing something, even when a vastly more efficient or effective method becomes available.

So, too, comes the tradition of "taboo", or things which a culture defines something as needing to be avoided. In North America, one of the most easily recognizable of such is the issue of sexual intercourse, wherein even atheists will often strictly adhere to a Christian-based notion of not speaking of the matter, and holding it up as though it were some great evil and sin not to be even mentioned to children, despite the individual long having abandoned the original reason for the belief.

Just as rituals in the daily lives of a society can be used to enhance the realism and immersion value of the world that has been designed around such, the lack of such ritual, or the outright exclusion of a concept, can also be employed to a similar effect. By picking a logically reasonable topic to mark as taboo, a culture can be greatly enhanced to feel more "real".

For the example of the airlock, it may be taboo within the culture to even discuss what might happen if someone doesn't perform the action of checking the seal four times in a row. Many children may grow up following the action mindlessly, and as children are wont to do, will come up with explanations for such. Soon tales will be woven of monsters sneaking in through the cracks as the concepts of explosive decompression and asphyxiation are unknown to fill in the place of the mythology.

Employing such a concept into the framework of world design ensures that the audience has a way to feel like they truly are part of a different world than their own. The audience will clearly know that the vacuum of space is dangerous, though for reasons other than the children aboard a spacecraft may believe. The little details such as children telling horror stories of someone leaving the airlock unsealed and a monster sneaking into the ship and eating everyone are the things that truly tell the audience that they really are on another world.

In world design, it's not the big things that matter so much, but the finesse by which the little details are carefully managed. When it comes to instilling a true sense of culture in the world, the key is to ensure that there is a logical explanation for why something is done, or at least why it used to be done, and to then extrapolate what that would look like decades or centuries after the fact.

When a religion is formed, the core beliefs of the religion have to be taken into account, obviously, but so, too, must the little things as well. Tiny rituals such as turning one's head to face a certain direction when saying prayers, religious icons that have historical significance to the religion, traditions which began thousands of years ago and their reasoning as to why lost to the annals of time are all part of what truly makes a fictional religion feel as though it's actually something believable, like something that could truly happen under certain circumstances.

Even the basic methods by which individuals provide worship can be used to describe an entire lifestyle and culture. For example, upon the world of Nocturne, of my own design, one of the species has the belief that there is only one goddess in the universe, and she is one who controls and manipulates fate and luck by means of quantum probability. This belief leads to followers of the faith to worship her primarily by playing games of chance, with the belief that such appeases their goddess, and she will reward them in kind for taking large leaps of faith in her name. As such, casinos are elaborate, beautifully constructed buildings which double as churches, and the idea of a church's bingo hall has been expanded to extreme values. In the faith, it makes perfect sense, as there will always be individuals who win big now and then, and these are cited as miracles, proof of the favour of their goddess. So, too, does cheating become an abhorrent behaviour, because it involves taking chance into one's own hands, which is forbidden for mortals. One can enhance one's chances, but never could one weight their dice or program a mechanical slot machine to unfairly award individuals.

This would also mean that for such devout followers, that they would carry with them a set of personalized dice, of pristine craftsmanship and weighted as perfectly as possible, as these would represent the very nature of their faith.

When it comes to selling a world as being "real" to the audience, however, it's the little, fine details such as this which make the world not stand out, but specifically fail to stand out. Specifically, when designing a world, the whole purpose is for it not to stand out. Ideally, the audience will not even think of it as being fictional at all, believing the world to be practically real for all intents and purposes. Verily, it's only when something doesn't add up, when it stands out as making no sense, such as if in the above example were I to make the cross a standard religious symbol instead of dice, that it would suddenly feel fake. So long as the system is internally-consistent, it doesn't matter what the system even is, just that it always makes sense within the rules of its own reality.

And so, culture is both difficult and quite easy to work with. Much like virtually everything in world design, starting at a fundamental level and branching out naturally provides a wealth of material with ease of creation and a realistic feel to the world being built. Starting too close to the end result desired, however, will almost always lead to a tacky, limited, unintuitive world where excuses have to be made up on the spot to fill in plot holes and to prop up a narrative.

If properly built from a lower level, however, well-designed world can provide an immensely immersive and interesting backdrop for the writer of an IP to work with, as well as a near-limitless source of new material on demand with little time and effort required.

For a final mention, while culture may be comprised of people, the individual does not act the same as the group. A drop of rain can be unpredictable as to where it'll land, yet the flow of a river is easy to determine the course it will follow in most situations. As such, culture is less about the individual droplet, and more about guiding the river's path by digging a channel to where you want it to go. Trying to begin with the final product is akin to the water just magically appearing at the end destination, with no source and no path, and the farther up the riverbed one travels, the greater the understanding one will have of not only where the end result will be, but of all the little paths followed to reach the destination.

Or, to just drop the metaphor, if anyone tries to build an IP starting from the end point of where they want it to be, it's going to consume more time, more resources, and result in vastly inferior quality than if the individual had just took a few steps back and began earlier on by building it up in layers.

Culture's a great tool for the world designer, but like any other tool, this applies only if utilized properly.