The Culture Creator

The Culture Creator was the second activity of the MUNOCC for year 2011-2012. Here is the assignment paper's text.

The Culture Creator
The Culture Creator ("Bunka no kōchiku") is an exercise which stretches over two weeks. It allows delegates to get familiar with cultures, how they evolve and what they are made of. It also allows them to express themselves when exposing their cultures, and allows them to display any talents they may have in the creative arts.

Setting
A team of scientists found a way to send a group of people to planet Rafa Rafa, which was supposedly a planet where life was possible. These people were to check the possibility of human life there. All was well done, except for a slight miscalculation that ended up splitting the two rockets they were on apart. The team was then separated into two subdivisions, which each ended up on an island of Rafa Rafa. The two islands were too far from each other, and so each subdivision went on with life unaware of the survival of the other. This went on for about a thousand years, in which each group mated and gave birth to new generations. Then a great Rafaquake made three islands (the two islands on which the earthlings lived and a third, empty one in the middle) converge and come into view of each other. The descendants of the two subdivisions had made their own cultures, but they had always wondered if there could be other people on the planet- and so when they each saw the other islands come up, they all set to sail on boats they’d made for the occasion and arrived together on the third island, which each of them gave a different name. They had diverged culturally.

Assignment
As one of the teams’ descendant, you need to come up with all the constituents of your own unique culture and expose them to the entire club. Your subdivision has an hour to come up with everything and be sure each of its members know all about it, and a half-hour to expose your culture.

Hints

 * pick a subdivision captain. He’ll be the “chief” of your culture and make sure everything is organized, but he’ll have to participate in creating the culture as well.
 * assign the task of creating any given bit to one or two of the members of your culture, but be careful: when exposing it, anyone from the opposing team or the jury is allowed to ask anyone about any bit of the culture, so let everyone in on everything in your culture.
 * name your culture. It’s easier to refer to it than to say “our culture” every time, and certainly makes it easier to grade for the jury.
 * use the sheets included in the topic to jump-start coming up with your culture, but if possible do not limit yourself to these ideas. Any extras brought up by you are graded better.
 * keep in mind that you will be graded in the following bits:
 * Cultural value (as in, how impressive your culture is)
 * Effort on the personal work (as in, how impressive the bit you gave your culture is)
 * General knowledge on your culture (as in, how much you know about it in general)
 * Expression when given the floor to explain your culture (as in, how relaxed and explicit you are in explaining your bit in your culture).

Assignment dossiers
Here is the assignment dossier in PDF format:
 * The Culture Creator.pdf

Inspiration and art
The activity was inspired by a 22nd World Scout Jamboree activity called Rafa Rafa, which involved creating some traditions to get familiar with cultural interface.

The two videos used to introduce the original exercise use music from a 2011 Nightwish album called Imaginaerum: "Taikatalvi" with new lyrics (called "Creation and Destruction") and "Song Of Myself" (Parts I (From a Dusty Bookshelf) and II (All That Great Heart Lying Still)) as an instrumental. The "Creation and Destruction" video uses material from Sid Meier's Civilization IV computer game cinematics and the "Rafa Rafa" video was entirely created for the purpose of the activity.

 creationanddestruction.flv|Creation and Destruction bunkanokochiku.flv|Bunka no kochiku

Creation and Destruction
Here are the lyrics of this song: In the beginning there was not a lot And God had a say in the making Then was the Earth and the Sun shone above And the clouds and the seas And the lands and the sands And on the Earth there was man With man came war And destruction and fear As Man had his wits fit for killing But just evil was not all that Man could do And beauty came forth from the back of his brain and Culture was his word of peace There had to be some way to reign on man For beauty itself is corrupt Man killed and stole and he rose over man And the Empires came With religion to blame And then Man took the rule of the Earth Man took the Earth as his own - and was proud As Man is a man when his strength shows Then when the Earth was in chaos again Man decided to take over whatever he'd left And the sky was run trough into space

Results
The Culture Creator's work was due for Wednesday 25th of January 2012, and was presented in the Amphithéatre des Secondaires in Champville to president Georges Sacre and guest judges Mark Barbar and Ramy Chamoun. The club was a bit late to get into the theatre, so weren't able to present all of the content they had created. It was later sent to this wiki to be graded and rated. The two subdivisions represented the Tchilkbinian culture and the Hevanian culture. The first could do with a little more fil conducteur - which its opponent has - but the delegates who came up with it gave extreme attention to details, which made the culture very credible. However it goes a little out of the context of the assignment in that which humans become gods and live with them, when the assignment requests the people to be descended from very human scientists. The latter as such lacks the epic-ness and sense of grandeur, mythologically and thematically, that its opponent has, but is extremely well fitted to the assignment and is extremely impressive when it comes down to having a fil conducteur - it is perfectly, thoroughly coherent with itself and the assignment.

Grading the Culture Creator
The judging panel ended up grading the cultures' bits each over five, with additional bits getting an automatic plus two ("Personal Work" grades) then each of them giving each of the cultures a grade over five as to how impressed they were by the culture ("Cultural Value" grade). The Cultural Value grades' average would later be multiplied by the number of delegates in its culture, and this value would be added to the total of Personal Work grades to obtain the final total grade of the culture. Naming the culture (as well as "ethymologizing" and defining the name) was considered a "bit". The following formula gives the Final Total Grade of the Culture:



This grade does not take into account the Public Speaking skills of the delegates as not all of them managed to speak during the oral presentation. It only considers the content sent to this Wiki, plus the musical content and culinary content displayed at the presentation.

First-ever Culture Creator grades
The above formula allowed the following grades:
 * For Hevana: 50 points
 * For Tchilkba: 48.5 points.