I'm hoping to encourage more questions about cultural world building, but cultural world building suffers greatly from being too broad, primarily opinion-based, and too story-based.
One recent question, eventually worded to be (IMO) an appropriate cultural world building question, began as a question about religion too easily (and legitimately) answered, "because your god says so." Ultimately, the OP really was looking for help with rules and systems, not character actions, circumstances, or plot. It's the avoidance of this kind of problem I'm seeking to adddress.
If "physical world building" objectively asks about the systems and rules governing planets, ecologies, and technology. Cultural world building would objectively ask about the systems and rules governing people (sapient communities, societies, and civilizations) including their politics, economics, philosophy, and social morés.
Unfortunately, while questions asking about the orbital mechanics of planets are fairly straightforward, questions about the psychological dynamics of people frequently aren't. Most physical world building can depend on mathematics or a reflection of the hard sciences to support answers. But this seems not to be true for cultural world building, which seems to depend on the musings of philosophers and observations of poets (so to speak).
Question: What advice can we give to users new and old to help them develop good cultural world building questions?
Guidelines should support the structure and methodologies of Stack Exchange.
Guidelines should either support what's already in the Help Center or should give enough information such that Moderators can consider whether or not improvements to the Help Center are warranted.
References
- "Why would someone X?" questions.
- Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?
- High concept questions.
- Open-ended questions.
- Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum.