realistic responses

In the game I'm working on for work, we attempt to simulate a real social network in a real company. There are a number of characters, several of them canadian, several of them not canadian (this is important, because it's a game about how immigrants are different from canadians in various important ways).

There are a number of challenges therein, some of which I had a hand in helping to solve, some of which I did not. One of the biggest challenges was making these characters in the game feel like real people, rather than just props - which they ultimately are. Backgrounds for the characters were crafted, resumes written, and personal photographs created, but what really gets the player involved with the characters is the conversations with them.

There are two types of conversations that exist in the game, chats and emails. Chats give you insight to the character's lives, allowing you access to their thoughts, feelings, and backgrounds. It also helps you build trust with them, which opens up more conversational opportunities, which allows you to learn more about them and so on. Depending on where you chat with them, how quickly and how deeply, determines your untimate success in the entire game, because later-game decisions need to be based on information you uncovered in these early chats with your in-game coworkers.

Emails are more work-centric. They involve your projects, the different teams, who's in charge, and wind up affecting how effectively the characters work - which is also important when you're attempting to be their manager. Good decisions in the emails leads to good results, and bad decisions leads ultimately to poor results, just like the real world.

But the point of making this game so realistic isn't to amuse people, unfortunately. It's to show people how different people are in canada than people from elsewhere in the world. Asians are very group-centric - and it reflects in everything they do - while americans are self-centric, looking for personal rewards and praise, unlike most immigrants who would prefer the team be rewarded even if much of it was their own effort.

Which do you prefer?