[Milawe]

I very much like exploring this idea of "cultural knowledge" for certain items since cultural could be geographically based, racially based, or even religion based. This wouldn't be that hard to code and adds only a little bit of extra description. Ultimately, though, it still brings us back to "Starry Night" vs. "an swirled oil painting depicting a night sky", or are you saying that certain cultures/level of learning would allow a person to identify it as "Starry Night".

That's why it's so often hard to decide how to convey things to a player that a character would know that a player didn't have to learn completely him/herself. While the discovery can be extremely thrilling and immersive, I think I'm a firm believer that a player has choices when a character sometimes doesn't have a choice. For example, if there were a character on my roleplay enforced mud who had designed his character to be an art expert but absolutely was not one, I would want him to be able to identify "Starry Night", a painting on sight. He'd have to examine it closer to find out if it were a forgery or a reprint, but he could look glance at the picture and know it's "Starry Night" even if the player had no clue that it was a famous painting by van Gogh. At the same time, I would expect a player who was playing an uneducated brute from the northlands to ignore the name "Starry Night", a painting and say "Wow. That's an ugly picture of a bunch of colored circles." or whatever is appropriate.

OOC will always impact games in some way. I guess it's a matter of deciding how much knowledge to impart on a player and how much "discovery" the actual player should have to do.