a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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OHOL before leaders was closest to anarcho communism since there is no coercive state and workers have personal property, (what we are actively using and carrying), without private property. Anarcho communists also believed an individuals products are ultimately dependent on the generations of labor beforehand, which kinda reflects how bad it feels to see high tech hoarded away when it is ultimately a group achievement.
If anyone feels like looking deeper into this topic Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow or the Netflix adaptation 13th are both informative and eye opening about the racist aspects of mass incarceration
The white people's ability to understand the languages of other families does not "survive" because they possess greater intellectual fortitude. It can't survive, because it never existed. White people don't understand other languages any better than other races, because the other families are not even speaking different languages. It is a chat filter.
WHITE POWER is simply the "ability" to not have that limitation in affect on a high population server. You are overthinking and attributing values that do not exist in OHOL.
Does the actual mechanic matter? In terms of typical gameplay, other races take generations to accomplish what whites have innately. Most players won't know why or how Jason added racist tropes to his game but they exist in his gameplay now. Its not reaching to point out how OHOL, a civilization game, simulates reality in a specific ways which present a message about the world. There is a simple yet detailed representation of how to build a car in the game, but brown people need to be in the jungle to have children? It's not a conspiracy either, Jason just clearly doesn't think critically about race, and doesn't think that getting representations of race right would be an important aspect of the greatest game ever.
Jason may not hold white supremacist beliefs, but hes definitely unintentionally shown bias. Even when race didnt have mechanical aspects, there were still more white character models, enough that gingers could be separated into their own sub class when he implemented race restrictions.
The real telling thing is how uncritically he implemented 'specializations' based on race. Although he described these as specializations, they're just assigned to races as essential attributes. They're not something they work for or gain over time through discovery like they do in the real world.
Before these changes, race in the game was something players could project onto the world based on visual differences, but now race fundamentally means things about your abilities. This is a racist framework, and an easy one for Jason to implement. Even if whites have the 'worst' race power to some people, Jason lazily implemented a racist framework into his game, and then had the nerve to dismiss people's concerns as being political, when he literally added racial politics and stereotypes from the world into the game.
But every time I patch another one of these "holes" for you.... holes that you have the tools and power to patch yourselves.... I feel....
We still need more organizational mechanics and technology to be empowered to do these things. While it is possible for dedicated leaders to organize and have everything properly locked up, time and speech are limited by basic survival, and maintaining a coherent system even in a thriving city is difficult without trust, permanence of law/social rules, way to communicate long term and without speaking directly. We need mechanics that support fast communication of what to do and who to trust, especially during the breakdown in communication when murders and justice happen. Hierarchy and orders are great because they provide additional power to communicate for a mid level city, while posses can organize violence at any level. There needs to be more communication abstractions that represent how much one would know about the happenings in town without speaking, like our ability to know when related babies are born, or a murder has happened off screen.
For communication by leadership and the community:
-creating royal decrees to break nearby gates and fences quickly. This could be restricted to just the birth location (Government enforces the concept of private property)
-Visual identification of anyone labeled as 'sentenced to death', a 'criminal' ('we've all been warned of this enemy of the state skulking about')
-criminals are more easily targeted by posses of the civ they are sentenced to death in
-exiled or criminal players have a slight mechanical disadvantage in leader's territory (speed, hunger, etc 'they are generally not welcome in the community').
-low level leaders can allocate player generated titles or from a list. Or we get a title from marking it from a job board, or based on the tools slots we've used. Metalworker Baroness Hope Diamond starts to get clunky though
Giving leaders more power is ripe for abuse obviously, and most players already will not trust leaders even if our mothers followed them. This is also partly because the hierarchy powers are not powerful enough to make them truly useful. By late game, it should be just so much more efficient to have leaders that it only makes sense to use the system, if only for job hunting and raid alerts, but we are not there yet.
To increase trust:
+1 for blessings as a possible incentive/assurance, and we should know how many blessings our villagers have given to our current leader.
-Anything to be able to see the confidence of your peers in your leader, or the number of allies that have cursed or unfollowed a leader.
-The powers of leaders are not automatically given, and must be voted upon by a number of players when adding or removing powers to a certain level.
-Being ousted as a leader should put you in a dangerous/debuffed position to prevent retribution for ousted leaders and to incentivise being a good leader
-I personally would like to be able to craft a constitution as mid/advanced tech, or some kind of law menu. It could have basic options for types of government, and the privileges leaders get to have. This way the government is generally in the player's hands, and they have proper tools to make a society. Or if we want leaders to potentially be able to act in times of crisis, they can still do all special commands, but all followers are alerted when a monarch uses a command when it is not legal for them.
This could be implemented in many different ways, including just with commands and laws/government type shown in the ui. A craftable object makes government somewhat more permanent, and gives future players a scaffold when the city dies out, creating a possibility for a city culture to develop and last. This is important for trust, because players will usually see a city more than once, and some consistency in governance adds legitimacy to the meta that settles. Still voting should be its own menu just to make community decisions faster and not dependent on who or what object is near you.
Other communication tech solutions that have been proposed before:
-Books, helpful for recording laws if there is no abstract mechanic for law. It would also make teaching more enjoyable, shifting the focus from typing recipes to directing learners where to go in that specific town and tips and etiquette about consumption/citizenship. Once veteran players make a few decent textbooks, schools for newbies can last without immense effort. This is incredibly important because new players' ignorance about certain mechanics like posse, make raids more dangerous, and you need people to know it beforehand to be effective at all.
-Advanced sign-making that is faster, and can hold more text like a way stone.
-For early game camps, a low tech sign that degrades could help show what builders are planning, encouraging help from others if its useful or fun, and quickly establishes a panic room.
-Mark a direction or symbols on a tree with a knife to direct yourself and others, degrades half hour
-Job boards, maybe only leaders can write on, that way leaders can drop a quick order that jobs are up on the board and not spam their citizens, leading to more 'organizer' leadership than tyrant.
Your proposal might have more promise if there were more situations for children such as them being bots (and different types of bots). But, the design of this game is that of a finite unique situation generator, and apparently fewer situations for players is valued over more possible as evidenced by changes or constants such as tool limitations, all servers running the same, forced reproduction mechanics, Rift-like thinking, trying to make as many players as possible helpless from the get-go, a finite and small number of families at a particular time, throwing players into the same context as much as possible (bigserver system, trying to keep everyone close together in general), lack of expansion of technological options, mono-climate living areas with static temperature, one water source per town, players not having the ability to get re-born into the same spot in the large population context as once did happen via Eve-chaining (Eve-chaining on the larger populated servers is a different situation than starting as a baby of some parent), no way to start over ab initio as a matter of choice, and one and only one person working on the code and design of the game.
You're getting quite concise with your sludge of grievances, nice work
Swastika just took the hit because a)Nazi regime is the go to demonic force when anyone and media wants to highlight the worst of human history and b)Nazi regime had a pseudo philosophical support base that some people still believe nowdays.
Your points illustrate why claiming swastikas are a neutral symbol makes no sense: A) The Swastika is connected to a regime that committed horrible atrocities and the media, like most 'western society' believes it is the symbol of the worst of human history B) People STILL believe and promote white supremacist/Nazi ideology, meaning the symbol hasn't lost its meaning as a hate symbol.
Distrust in the media is rational, but avoid crossing into white supremacy territory just because some idea is contrary to the idea of SJWs you have in your head
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