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Africa, The MMOG
Via Joystiq, an MTV Games story about a MMOG that attempts to encompass Africa in a game. From the article: "Less reserved, Adam Ghetti, the teenage creative director at Rapid Reality, the company actually creating the game, said he hopes the game will right some wrongs. 'The white American board developers of the large MMO development companies out there right now don't honestly have the right background and knowledge on the continent of Africa and its lore, mythology and rich history, and quite honestly neither did I,' said Ghetti, who is white. 'They just don't teach it over here.' The game is designed, in part, to change that."
2) The designer of the game claims both that it will have state of the art graphics and that it will run on low-end computers. Sorry, but you can't do both at the same time! Also, much of the gameplay that works great when you're on the same Ethernet segment as the server is virtually unplayable when you're on a dial-up on a different continent than the server.
In general, you can't be all things to all people; you need to pick your battles and focus on doing just a few things, but doing them well.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I think *you* are the point of making a game like this.
Africa is a friggin' continent, for god's sake, several times larger than the US, with a lot (!!) more history. I am assuming you are from the US, here, for reasons that should be obvious. If, all over Africa, there were nothing other than millions starving to death or dying of AIDS, if everyone were killing everyone else, it would be a complete wasteland within the decade. And it's not. Mythology might be heavily animal-based, but so it is with American Indians. Not surprising, when you're living among so damn many of them.
As for your jibe concerning LOTR, there's a difference to fantasy in an imaginary world, like LOTR, Krull or Star Wars, and fantasy based on mythology, like American Gods, Chronicles of Narnia or even The Iliad. Fantasy has many levels. If you look at Neil Gaiman's books, they tend to be about our world, with legends and mythology made flesh. Something like that would work well in 'the cradle of humanity'.
The execution of the whole deal would be tricky, though, you're right. It's too easy to fall into triteness, rather than actual interesting cultural exchange.