OpenGeofiction
Hello everyone hope you had a nice day. So lately I’ve been making some progress on Pasalia but always thought there must be something I’m missing. Turns out I think I’m lacking a general concept for it so far. Now, after some hours of thinking about that, I further realised to have created a small problem (that turned out to help my idea) . Sooo… I first started mapping in german but then changed to english, so i then came up with the idea of making my country bi-lingual (think real life the french speaking part of canada) but here it would be my capital region speaking german and the rest Ingerish. Any of you got any tips or opinions on that? Second and maybe the most interesting thought I had so far. One thing I can tell is that I’m really having some ‘nostalgia’ for 1950s north america (aka the US). Now I was thinking how it would be possible to design a modern day 2016 country that is culturally still somewhat stuck in the 1950s (E.g: obviously having modern day tech but driving 50s-design influenced cars and being a bit living their culture, without all the racism, discrimination and generell weirdness and having modern day buildings but with a bit of ‘‘googie-architecture’, google it if you want to know) So after this oddly long post What are your thoughts on this, admittedly strange, idea? Any thoughts or ideas or critiscm? greetings, kingfries (who still wonders how he came up with this )
Discussion
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 11 April 2016 at 21:21
You say you’ve been lacking a general concept - but you’re off to a good start. Perhaps if you develop your history that will help. Have you worked out where the colonists to Pasalia came from? For both Ingerish and Gaerman speaking there are a few options. And do you have any remnants of pre-colonial culture - some of your names don’t look either of those 2 languages! And why is the capital distric speaking one language and the rest of the country another? There are interesting lines to explore there.
Bi-lingual countries often have places mapped in 2 languages - but not always, and in OSM there isn’t really enough space for that on every label. But if there are different languages dominant in different parts of the country there may not even be a map issue. Have a look at different parts of Luciano’s Ardisphere - that may give you some ideas.
Perhaps the nostalgia is a strange idea - but there are much stranger one’s in OGF! There is no ‘USA’ in OGF, so, as far as I see it, you are free to claim any ideas that were invented in the US - as long as they haven’t already been ‘invented’ somewhere else. So Freedemia, I think, has some similarities to rw California, but there is probably no overlap with your ‘Googie-Architecture’. So you could say that that style was invented in Pasalia, in the 1940s (to keep the tech similarities with the rest of the OGF world, which parallels the rw). You’d need a plausible reason why this style stayed dominant for so long - perhaps, as in Cuba, there was a period when there was little outside influence in Pasalia - for whatever reason (you invent that - related to the rest of your culture). Or if there was outside influence time stood still - a cultural decision? A famous architect whose ideas spread through the country and were widely adopted as the ‘national style’? Just some ideas…
Comment from refried sushi on 11 April 2016 at 21:29
Interesting idea about the post-war nostalgia. I’m not certain how far you would take it - is this more of an aesthetic idea for street imagery and context, or would you intend to try to map your nation as a 1950’s-ish American-ish society? (I would think drive-in movie theaters, suburbs beginning to sprawl, city centers beginning to homogenize and empty, and a strong, general emphasis on car culture.) That is a fun challenge.
The fault for me lies in the fact that you want the art but not the context, and art (in my opinion) is all about context. In other words, you want the look and feel of a time and place on a national scale, but want it transported out of the society that shaped it and into the present day. Googie and futurism in general was a response to a technological boom, the horrors of WWII, a rapidly expanding economy, TV, and a weird mix of boundless of optimism and the very real fear of the Cold War and nuclear Armageddon (and 1000 other things.) Tough to replicate, and if you only go for the “look” with no backstory it becomes shallow. You took the time to ask the question, thus I don’t think you want shallow. You need some contemporary justification for your cultural throwback, in my opinion.
One interesting spin would be an extremely authoritarian state that enforced the way buildings, fashion, cars, and appliances, etc, look. This is probably not what you had in mind, but it would work well for you…
Good luck, I hope you do it.
Comment from kingfries on 11 April 2016 at 21:35
mhhh…. the cuba thing isnt a bad idea…. may have to think about that…. maybe having it had isolated for some time until lets say the 80s or something… thanks for the ideas
Comment from kingfries on 11 April 2016 at 22:16
refried sushi yes thats what I’ve been thinking about. I’m really split here between several options. One would be like udi proposed to develop a background story that includes having at been closed off for some time so it was stuck in time. Another one would be to simply have it have a strong culture where the people just liked that area so much they decided to keep as much of it as possible, plus the most obvious things that you cant ignore like internet and such. Does the videogame series ‘‘Fallout’’ say anything to you? Its basically where society never left that time and all these optimistic things came true but eventually humanity ended with big mushroom clouds.Thats actually one of the reasons I’m currently even more in nostalgia, despite being born decades later. So like I said I gotta use my next weekend to decide the way i take and which of your ideas I’ll use and of course make my own research and make some progress, see if I like it and then come back and let you all know.
Comment from No Way on 13 April 2016 at 01:10
I have somewhat mapped Reagan in a 1950’s US fashion. You can see that in some of the cities that the main highways are beginning to be realigned but there you can see the significant suburban sprawl that is burgeoning. You can also see that there is a significant lack of motorways and roads are under construction.
Comment from Luciano on 13 April 2016 at 02:17
No Way has a very salient point. If you’re going for a 1950s “feel” in your mapping, then there should be almost no motorways. The US interstate program began in 1956, and certainly proliferation of rural and suburban freeways did not begin until 10 or 20 years later.
In the 1950s, motorways were limited to a few oddly-engineered “experimental” stretches of highway, such as some of the old turnpikes (e.g. New Jersey), or New York’s Taconic Expressway or California’s Pasadena Freeway.
From a personal standpoint, I would love to see a country developed WITH NO MOTORWAYS - not because this is realistc, but simply because most users “put the cart before the horse,” making a motorway system into a kind of “skeleton” upon which to build their country, when this is exactly backwards in historical terms.
Comment from _zM on 15 April 2016 at 08:36
Challenge accepted. That could work for a country with an area of only 4000 km^2 and good public transport options.
Comment from Sarepava on 15 April 2016 at 16:54
Having a capital region speak one language and the rest of the country another needs some explanation. If all the political and business classes in the capital use one language, anybody in the regions trying to fit in would also adopt the tongue. But if there is a huge divide between rich and poor, you can have a cosmopolitan elite speaking one language and the peasants another. This was the situation in medieval England (French and Old English), Tsarist Russia (French and Russian) and Finland (Swedish and Finnish).