Is "We All Live In America" only for real life settings?

We'll never know if it was "consciously" included or not, outside of Word of God.

That's the problem with relying upon the Ever-Ambiguous "Creator Intent".

Well some stuff is obvious. Gender equality for example. I doubt anyone at Bioware is thinking that's how the middle ages were.

Presentation in the work matters. If male and female characters are doing equal things without anyone commenting, then who could say whether that's a deliberate choice by the writers to make a values statement, an attempt to broaden the appeal of the product to female gamers (or male gamers who enjoy looking at women who aren't slaving in kitchens or cleaning floors), a facet of worldbuilding (in Sorcerania, gender equality is a part of their culture), or none of the above?

Maybe not totally, but these things are more like a checklist than a yes/no switch. There's bound to be a few things, here and there, that they get wrong unconsciously.

Most MMOs, fantasy or otherwise, have male and female PCs be more or less interchangeable; there's no benefit (save for possibly trivial stat differences) or drawback to playing either, and vanishingly few quests or NPCs do more than reference the player's gender through automatic text substitutions.

This does not make them a case of "modern values applied to fantasy environments". After all, if we were to judge by our actual modern values instead of what we idealize ourselves to have, there would still be plenty of sex discrimination going on: women would complain about being paid less and being blamed in rape cases, and men would complain about being "feminized" and denied sex.

This is why I say that there is no deliberate attempt to convince anybody to think that the game intends to depict accurate social conditions, be they of the distant past or the present time. They are entirely fantastic, and as such none of the tropes under discussion apply.

Interestingly, the more 'mature' a game is rated in terms of sexual content, the more likely it is to reflect historically accurate gender roles, up to the point when it stops being exciting to the average horny young male, that is.

edited 8th Jan '15 1:14:43 PM by Fighteer

Say again? I don't quite understand where you stand with that post. It reads more like a train of thought and is thus hard to discern one exact point from it.

I'm saying that the values reflected in most fantasy RPGs are not those of our modern society any more than they are of past societies. They are, rather, idealized and abstracted for the purposes of gameplay and story.

edited 9th Jan '15 8:26:31 AM by Fighteer

Or from a lore/history perspective, the in-game history of most fantasy RP Gs has nothing to do with our own world history, no matter how alike cultures seem to be, and their history/socity should never be assumed to be anything like ours past or present.

Thus my point. I wasn't sure if we had a trope for this (seems that we don't) or if there is another trope for "Fantasy world with vast and complex values and mores that still somehow align with the contemporary values of the source culture", or if it doesn't deserve a trope.

It seems more like an accident than anything else. I don't see how we could construct a useful trope out of the concept.

So we need a Politically Correct Fantasy trope?

That's not a trope. The entire point is that there is no "source culture" to compare a complex fantasy culture to. They've had completely different histories, and with magic added into the mix... who knows what history was like with magic introducing higher-tech ideas eariler then in RL.

edited 9th Jan '15 10:31:28 AM by ObsidianFire

None of that makes it "not a trope". Although, I concede that it's not "tropeable" insofar as Tv Tropes is concerned, "Not tropeable on TV Tropes" is not the same thing as "not a trope".

It absolutely is a trope the same way that Culture Chop Suey is a trope. Whether conscious or unconscious, the mores and ideals of the creator's home culture tends to leak into their works of fiction. I've noticed it in non-Western works as well.

Fighteer has a point, though, that it's extremely difficult to trope because there's no hard line to draw around the concept. One person might see an "obvious" similarity that isn't obvious to someone else. Hell, we had an argument just last page on the concept of "Freedom" and "slavery".

I still maintain that this is a trope, but I can agree that it's useless to the site.