The Rejected Realms Embassy

[Glen-Rhodes]

None of y'all will be saying the OFO purging The Empire was the cause of their next coup/purge when it happens, so this line of arguing is pointless.

[North East Somerset]

None of y'all will be saying the OFO purging The Empire was the cause of their next coup/purge when it happens, so this line of arguing is pointless.

My point was not that this coup was caused by the previous coup, but merely that the people who oppose this one but not that one, are clearly driven by alternative agendas than a deep and profound love for the rule of law, and desire for constitutional fairness which they pretend to be. Also I reject any direct equivalency between Osiris and Lazarus, as they were different contexts.

But I am happy to admit quite openly that my opinion of the coup is founded within the context of the political values of Independence, specifically Realpolitik considerations - but as usual Defenders dress their dishonesty and inconsistency up in grandiose moral gestures and nonsense, in their never-ending quest to trick the ignorant into supporting their self-serving agenda.

Don't obfuscate. Answer the question. Why did the defender world, and their followers, turn a blind eye to the Coup of 2013, but kick up a huge fuss about this. They were both unconstitutional, and the 2013 purge certainly had a major effect on policy. Whether this one will is unclear.

[Glen-Rhodes]

The formation of the PRL did not entail the explicit creation of a pan-GCR empire.

[Venico]

The OFO coup came out of a murky political situation with no laws and no constitution. It came from an oppressed group that felt harassed on a personal level. The Malicious Triumvirate fixed that. We immediately put a constitution on the floor and brought order and fraternity out of Asta's failed sandbox. Also the key is that we stepped back and let the region determine itself after our work was done. It was a very hands off approach. We went to war but when we came back, we allowed people to determine their own path.

[Southern Bellz]

None of y'all will be saying the OFO purging The Empire was the cause of their next coup/purge when it happens, so this line of arguing is pointless.

No, because the Empire has a history of chronically attempting to destabilize GCRs that few others have. I mean, even you seem to think they are major security concerns.

And I actually was critical of the Osiris coup in the beginning, but so far I have been proven wrong.

[Glen-Rhodes]

Oh yes I agree that The Empire should be shown the door in every GCR and I'm supremely disappointed in my own region's response to my and others' attempts to prevent them from taking root in TSP.

What I'm pointing out is the political hypocrisy. None of these people arguing that Laz's purge of imperialists led to this coup would argue that the OFO's purge of Empire members will lead to their next. But they were both purges to remove toxic people who either held a vice grip on the future of the region or manipulated it for their own personal fun.

[Onderkelkia]

What I'm pointing out is the political hypocrisy.

The "political hypocrisy" is that of the defender world, which endorsed an unconstitutional purge and coup in Lazarus when it was directed against imperialists, which as NES pointed out removed 30% of the region's legislature, but now condemn a purge in Lazarus against a group of defenders in an FRA region. Both purges were perpetrated by the NPO for the same purpose of consolidating their control in Lazarus by removing political opponents.

But they were both purges to remove toxic people who either held a vice grip on the future of the region or manipulated it for their own personal fun.

This is where your argument is fundamentally wrong. There is no reasonable equivalence whatsoever between the removal of the Empire in Osiris and the removal of the "imperialists" in Lazarus. The "imperialists" in Lazarus posed no threat to the stability of the region. In the 2013 opponents, the victims were removed at the behest of the NPO, an external power, for the purpose of establishing their controlling influence over the region - plain and simple. The NPO has confirmed why the PRL was created. Defenders liked that because this process meant a neutral democracy becoming a defender dictatorship.

You say the people removed in Lazarus were "toxic people". Tell me, specifically, why was Griffin a toxic person? She had been dedicated to Lazarus since 2008, always stridently supported a policy of neutrality (as opposed to any moves towards raiding or imperialism) and she had multiple terms as Delegate (included the longest period recorded on the in-game history). The only evidence that has ever been specifically cited implicating her is a conversation where she approached Unibot expressing concerns that Feux was about to launch a coup and requesting UDL assistance. That is the extent of it.

Tell me, is asking the UDL for help against an anticipated NPO coup the act of an evil imperialist bent on taking over the region? Considering what Feux did then, what it has been revealed he was saying then and what he has done now, was she unjustified in approaching Unibot as long-serving Lazarus native? She was certainly wrong to approach Unibot - because he revealed by his subsequent disgraceful treatment of her that his commitment to defending natives only goes as far as his political interests permit - but she was acting in good faith and she foolishly believed that he would respond in kind.

Then there was the removal of Apollo - which AMOM's statement in the NPO's Retort justified by claiming he was a UIAF member. In fact, Apollo was never a member of the UIAF and was not, at the time, a citizen in any of the three UIAF regions. He was just removed because the NPO perceived him as a threat. Why was the ejection of Apollo necessary to "to remove toxic people who either held a vice grip on the future of the region"? It patently was not.

The idea that the 2013 purge of Lazarus had honourable intentions was a complete fabrication. It was as "fake" as Feux has confirmed the PRLwas.

You deceive yourself and others by accepting it.

None of these people arguing that Laz's purge of imperialists led to this coup would argue that the OFO's purge of Empire members will lead to their next.

Apart from the fact that NES has already expressly clarified that he is not suggesting "that Laz's purge of imperialists led to this coup", the two contexts in Osiris and Lazarus are utterly different. The 2013 purge and this purge are clearly related by the fact that they are being performed by the same group of people - the NPO - as part of the same project of establishing their control over Lazarus against factions in the region - first the imperialists, now the defenders. I highly doubt any future coup in Osiris would be related in the same way to the purge of the Empire members that ocurred there.

[Glen-Rhodes]

I'm sure the same polemic could be written about those who oppose The Empire, Onder. In fact, several in TSP have been in the process of delivering one for the past several weeks.

[Onderkelkia]

I'm sure the same polemic could be written about The Empire, Onder. In fact, several in TSP have been in the process of delivering one for the past several weeks.

Making the observation that anyone can write an argument for or against a particular proposition (as indeed anyone can) does not constitute a proper rebuttal to an argument on a different topic, otherwise it would be impossible for anyone to ever specifically discuss the merits of any topic.

Within Osiris, the "Empire" had flagged units in the region undermining the control of the legitimate Delegate and had a record of involvement in previous coups there, notably in December 2012. I'm not saying that all "Empire" members should be thrown out of every GCR they step in. I'm saying the establishment of the OFO occurred in a completely different context to the NPO's takeover of Lazarus - which began with the 2013 purge.

You are deliberately ignoring the substance of the issues involved in the 2013 Lazarus purge in order to blindly assert that it was somehow appropriate when it was patently an attempt to seize power by the New Pacific Order - from which the present coup is an extension. Osiris is irrelevant to it.

[Glen-Rhodes]

Naw, what I think is that an imperialist would never think that other imperialists in Lazarus were trouble. So your position isn't all that surprising to me, and I know that whatever evidence is provided (and we just look through old threads for that), tribalism pretty much guarantees that you'll always see the PRL's purge as a victimization of imperialists.

The bottom line is the justification for the rise of the PRL and the OFO are basically the same thing. Which one you support and which one you oppose boils down to which tribe you belong to, because people don't listen to evidence of their tribe doing anything wrong.

[Onderkelkia]

Naw, what I think is that an imperialist would never think that other imperialists in Lazarus were trouble. So your position isn't all that surprising to me,

I have given detailed and specific reasons regarding why the 2013 purge was about increasing the NPO's power, not the supposed "imperialist" threat.

Rejecting those reasons simply because I am an imperialist, without engaging in the slightest discussion of the substance, is a pure ad hominem argument.

In particular, I have highlighted that not the slightest specific suggestion of wrongdoing (beyond approaching the UDL to request assistance given the risk of a coup by Feux, which was clearly in fact justifiable) has been made against Griffin and the sole basis for banning Apollo was the idea he was a UIAF member (an incorrect idea as it happens). You haven denounced those removed as "toxic people". Why are these people toxic? On what grounds exactly?

There are no actual grounds, so you deflect with these ridiculous responses pretending that there is equivalence - when the facts simply don't support it.

and I know that whatever evidence is provided (and we just look through old threads for that), tribalism pretty much guarantees that you'll always see the PRL's purge as a victimization of imperialists.

No, the tribalism on display here is that of the defender world in having wholeheartedly endorsed the NPO's purge in 2013, when it involved removing the defenders' and NPO's mutual political opponents, while erupting in outrage with the NPO's latest purge and coup, when it involves targeting defenders.

Even now after Feux, the Delegate responsible for the 2013 puge, has admitted the PRL was a mirage created for the NPO's purposes, you still are desperate to cast it in terms of an attempt to shut down external interference by imperialists - when the stark truth is that the interference was by the NPO.

You talk about the evidence that has already been provided in previous threads. I have referred to the evidence provided in the previous threads in relation to Griffin and Apollo. You have failed to respond in relation to it. There is no evidence in relation to Cerebella (so one can assume their case against him amounted to his TNI links). Regarding NES, I have debated that evidence in those threads (and it is in any case far less damning than what existed at the time in relation to Feux, so those who concluded that evidence was a proper basis for his removal should have been arguing for Feux to eject himself).

The bottom line is the justification for the rise of the PRL and the OFO are basically the same thing.

You keep mindlessly asserting this while completely ignoring the substantive arguments about why they are different.

Which one you support and which one you oppose boils down to which tribe you belong to, because people don't listen to evidence of their tribe doing anything wrong.

We all have inherent biases, but that is not a justification for abandoning all use of reason. You are basically saying that because I am an imperialist, any defence I might offer in relation to the actions of other imperialists can therefore be treated as incorrect. That is precisely the same as calling you a defender and therefore ignoring all criticisms you make of any arguments I advance against defenders. That is an absurd and immature way of arguing.

[Libetarian Republics]

Liberation of Lazarus

I would like to personally congratulate the community of Lazarus on their liberation from the deliberate foreign occupation by the NPO. As promised, we will continue to support the native community, especially in the transition to return to normalcy and peace. The Rejected Realms, as an old friend of Lazarus, is glad to see this conflict resolved. I also commend those that were heavily involved in the fighting for their homeland until resolution was reached.


On behalf of the Rejected Realms and Delegate Unibot, we send our support and congratulations to our dear friend.

Sincerely,
Libetarian Republics
Officer of Foreign Affairs

[Kazmr]

Thank you for your support

[Unibot III]

JOURNAL OF REJECTED STUDIES - MAY 23, 2015

The following lectures were composed as apart of the April Lecture Series, hosted in the Rejected Realms in our Library of Spurned Knowledge. We were extremely thrilled to have such an incredible list of contributors to the April Lecture Series to discuss the future of NationStates, both socially and technologically, in addition to the nature of community life - along the way, we found common themes with several of the lecturers who debated what it means to be a community...

'Regional Identity Politics' by Christian Democrats.
'A New Generation of NationStates: Where Are We Going?' by The Church of Satan.
'The Rules Of The Game: A Comparative Study Of Two NS Communities' by Gruenberg.
'Gameplay Alignment Test and the LEO test Compared or How is LEO filtered through the NS game mechanic?' by Nasania.
'Predicting the Effects of Issues' by Starrie.
'A Society of Rejects: Individualism, Liberalism and the Nature of Democracy in the Rejected Realms' by Unibot.
'National Self Determinism and Regional Politics' by Warzone Codger.

---

Regional Identity Politics
The Mass Region Model and the Ideological Region Model
By Christian Democrats

From the first day that a person plays NationStates to the last, the need constantly arises for him to make judgments about regions and their quality. "Is this a region that I should join?" and "Is this a region with which my region should seek an alliance?" are questions that players often ask. Whether one is browsing the world census or looking up a specific region that somebody has mentioned on a message board or an offsite forum, the standard view among newcomers and veterans alike tends to be a subjectivist one: "The quality of a region -- that is, its success or lack of success -- is ultimately something that is in the eye of the beholder." As intuitive as this subjectivism might seem, however, the common view, being so arbitrary, actually has very little practical value when one is trying to justify in concrete terms to himself or to others why he is making certain choices in the game, why he is advocating or selecting one course of action instead of another. To compare regions and to rank some above others, it is necessary for a person to adhere to standards or criteria, especially in the contexts of regional and interregional politics. In writing this short essay, I set out to sketch a new conceptual framework for rendering objective judgments about the quality of regions, judgments that individuals reasonably can defend in their own minds and that they can argue before players whom they are attempting to persuade to their positions. I contend here that every region can be judged in an impartial way when one holds it up to one of two ideals, which I label the Mass Region and the Ideological Region.

To start with, a region has its foundation in its identity, or the way that it conceives itself and holds itself out to others. Regional identity, be it gameplayer or roleplayer, defender or invader, conservative or liberal, is, in turn, grounded in one of two basic models: the Mass Region Model or the Ideological Region Model. These models, which I shall soon define, represent two poles toward which regions gravitate or away from which they drift throughout their histories. The Mass Region lies on one side of the NationStates world, and the Ideological Region lies on the other. Neither of these ideals is intrinsically better than the other; the Mass Region and the Ideological Region, though opposites in their orientations, are equals ontologically. In judging a region, whether it is one's own community or the community of another, a player must locate its position between the Mass Regional and Ideological Regional poles: Is this region, in the lowercase, a mass region or an ideological region? In other words, is the region before me aiming to achieve, in the uppercase, the Mass Region ideal or the Ideological Region ideal? Where is the region now, and where is it going?

At the pole of the Mass Region, identity is activity. The ultimate goal of the Mass Region is to raise activity as high as possible. The best mass region is the mass region that has the greatest activity: the most nations, the most World Assembly members, the most citizens, the most posts on the regional message board, the most posts on the offsite forums, the most posts in the chat room, and so on. Aiming to maximize activity, the Mass Region has several distinguishing characteristics. First, it is inclusive. It attempts to bring in players from widely diverse backgrounds. Unless somebody poses a threat to regional security, he is automatically accepted into the Mass Region simply because he wishes to join. There are laws protecting a wide range of liberties for members; and discrimination against individuals, including formal and informal suppression of opinions, is strongly discouraged. Second, the Mass Region is practical in its politics. The players who are officeholders are the ones who do the most to contribute to regional activity by being active themselves and by inducing activity in others. Appointments, elections, and legislative votes revolve almost entirely around promises and proposals for increasing activity. Whoever has the best ideas and best track record for promoting activity is the one who leads. Third, the Mass Region is cosmopolitan. It regularly seeks formal and informal alliances with other regions because it subconsciously wants to draw players from those regions into its own community as dual citizens. The relationship of the Mass Region with an ally, in its purest form, is symbiotic: the Mass Region and the ally cooperate through cultural events, exchanges of citizens, and the like to increase activity in both communities. In the degraded form, the cosmopolitanism of the Mass Region is parasitic as it attempts to steal activity away from other regions for its own benefit.

At the pole of the Ideological Region, identity is fidelity. The primary aim of the Ideological Region is to enrich and satisfy its members by giving them a place to interact with likeminded individuals. Ideological regions usually import their ideologies from the real world, be they ethnic or national groups, religious denominations, political camps, or even sexual orientations; but purely in-game positions, such as stances on military gameplay, can become ideological too when they become the regional focus. To the end of enhancing fidelity, the Ideological Region, lying opposite the Mass Region, has its own unique features. First, the Ideological Region is exclusive. It defines itself by the individuals who are part of its group. Outsiders are not necessarily disliked; but their presence, if it were to rise to too high of a level, would corrupt the community, depriving it of its identity. The Ideological Region, while its members have a significant amount of latitude to do what they want, views guests with suspicion and is quick to expel them if they express intolerance toward members. Second, the Ideological Region is politically theoretical. Offices tend to held by the "true believers," the members who have the greatest fidelity to the region and who are the most committed to and the most articulate in the ideology. Appointments, elections, and legislative votes revolve around principles. Whoever is the best standard-bearer is the one who leads. Third, the Ideological Region is isolationist. Unless it is proselytizing or carrying on dialogue with ideological allies, it usually eschews relations with the external world because such ties could compromise the central mission of acting as a refuge for a certain group of individuals.

The Mass Region would, of course, love to see fidelity in its membership; and the Ideological Region, likewise, wants to be an active community; but these are not the main goals toward which they are striving. The aim of a region, or the thrust of its efforts, is what places it closer to one pole or the other. A quality mass region, to obtain activity, embraces the values of inclusivity, practicality, and cosmopolitanism. A successful ideological region, to achieve fidelity, affirms exclusivity, theory, and isolationism. One is like a theme park while the other is like a private club; both are places where people can enjoy themselves. Occasionally, there will be a revolution in a region, shifting it from one pole to the other. Such revolutions can come about democratically or undemocratically, and they can be sudden or gradual. The death of a region begins when it forgets or ignores its ideal and drifts into the no man's land between the two poles. Mass regions that start championing ideologies, for example, or ideological regions that start accepting too many outsiders are already on the path of decay. Whether founding a new region or building up an existing one, a person must always keep the ideal in mind. What works at one pole does not necessarily work at the other.

Given this outline, it is possible now to judge regions objectively, assessing where they are, where they have been, and where they are headed. The conceptual framework that I briefly develop in this essay need not be the only one employed in regional evaluations; though, its generality lends it to a wide scope of applications. Appraising mass regions is certainly more straightforward because of the availability of quantitative empirical data. On the other hand, judging the quality of an ideological region, because it is a rationalistic task in which one must try to detach himself from his own biases and opinions, is more difficult by its very nature. In conclusion, I wish to repeat that neither model is inherently superior; they are both ways for players to create robust online communities. Hopefully, we can start to move away from regional subjectivism, deepening the observations made here and possibly even creating yet more systematic approaches to rendering judgments with respect to regional quality as well as prescribing strategies for regional improvement.

---

A New Generation of NationStates: Where Are We Going?
By The Church of Satan

As you know, over time the effect of new players arriving and old players leaving have certain effects on the state of things across NS. I can definitely say that things have changed from when I first started in NationStates. In this lecture I'll take a look at what has changed over the last 2 years and speculate as to how things might turn out, based on my observations. Let's begin.

Military GP: Before & After

Before

Beginning when I first got involved in military GP, my first mission was May 8th, 2013 at the region Disciples of Christ United. The regioni tself no longer exists, I expect it CTE'd although I know not when that happened. When frattastan first got me into military GP, I was very enthusiastic and for several months I took part in literally every mission the RRA had going. This did eventually change. For a multitude of reasons I now only take part in military GP when asked to. Somewhere along the line I suppose I lost my zeal for military GP. This seems to be the case though for many people. I think I lost interest in military GP some time after my own region became inactive. This was about February or March of 2014. Why does this happen though? Is it the repititive nature of military GP that is unavoidable? I myself am inclined to think so, but it isn't the only factor. Politics play a strong part in it as well. Especially with regards to organizations that insist on warring with others (e.g. the FRA-UIAF "war"). Hearing people bicker about things like that take away the fun involved in military GP, which is difficult to avoid because it is nearly everywhere. One would have to remove themself from public interaction to best avoid it, but why should we have to miss out on everything else? Obviously it's a difficult issue and how does one go about resolving it? One would think that people could just keep such opinions to themselves, but this is not our nature. As human beings we feel the need to share our opinions with others whether they like it or not. This is not something that is likely to change.

After

So around March or April of 2014, I took a backseat in military GP. I still get involved when people ask me, if I happen to have the time. The exceptions of course are those such as frattastan, Guy and Wop. People who have been around for quite a long time and somehow remain very active in military GP. Other examples of the lack of interest include the SDF, SPSF, LWU and the FRA. The pattern they all share is that only key members of the regions/organizations now show any interest whatsoever in military GP. How might we renew the interest of those who no longer take part? After all, people like frattastan, Guy and Tim can't do this forever. Even TBR has seen a top ranking member retire. If this continues, military GP will largely be a memory and this definitely seems to be the most likely conclusion. Would things be more peaceful as a result? I'm inclined to think so, but without this facet of NationStates, people will begin to leave and NationStates will be no more. That sounds a tad dramatic, but it does sound quite feasible given enough time. Nobody of course expects places like NationStates to last forever. It's impressive enough that it has lasted over 10 years. Nowadays I find myself taking part in a maximum of 5 or 6 missions a month despite the various defender armies I've joined. I do take part in missions for those that I'm not a part of, but regardless it still doesn't happen often.

The new generation of players hardly get involved in military GP for long. Roleplay seems to be the dominant aspect taking over right now, as seen in Renegade Islands. It is a defender region, but as of late there are those that have been pushing for an addition of the "Roleplayer" tag to the region. It's going to happen and when that does fewer and fewer people will even bother to register to regional forums. How many places will follow suit and what will happen as a result? Are regional forums on the way out? I feel that in time it will become a trend. When that happens, what will become of regional governments? Which brings me to the next part of my lecture.

Regional Government

Before

When I first started playing NationStates, way back in April of 2013, all the way to the end of 2014 approximately 16 different people ran in TRR's various elections. This includes Officer elections, delegate elections and speaker elections. Elections averaged about 5 or 6 people per election. In 2014 TRR saw several new faces running for officer and speaker. They were highly contested positions.

After

This year however, a total of 3 or 4 people have or currently are running for election/re-election. That's a total decrease per election of at least 2 or 3 people. That may not seem like much, but keep in mind that there are only 4 officer positions, 1 Speaker position and 1 Delegate position. Nevermind that delegate elections haven't occurred yet and the position of Speaker is still determined via the challenge system. So that means currently there is one less person than the total amount of officer positions. It's no secret that involvement in regional governments are at a low, maybe even a record low. We've all seen the same handful of people running for government positions, every election in pretty much every region we might keep an eye on (I'm looking at you GCR's). This makes it more difficult for fresh faces to get involved and even discourages them from trying again. However we know this and at the same time we contribute to the problem, despite the fact that we might say otherwise. Don't think I'm using TRR as a template for all of NationStates though. I'm sure you know the trend is almost the same in other regions. Things do not bode well for the future of NationStates.

Conclusion

As these 2 vital facets of NationStates continue to decline, so will the usefulness of offsite forums. IRC will remain largely untouched, as the communication between people across NS does not rely completely on these 2 things. One result that I foresee from this however, is a general increase of telegrams, RMB posts and in-game forum posts. The gameplay section of the NS forum will fluctuate as usual and I'm unsure how that will affect NationStates as a whole. I believe that increase will not last though as old players leave and new players come. I believe less new players will arrive as veterans retire after years on NationStates. I don't believe NationStates will last another 10 years. However provided NationStates continues to provide a fair amount of spare cash for Max Barry, it'll hang on for as long as it can, until it is no longer profitable to keep NationStates running. I'm sure of course such a thing has been said before and I would be quite happy to see NS last another 10 years.

---

The Rules Of The Game: A Comparative Study Of Two NS Communities
By Gruenberg

Rules are an intrinsic feature of all games, so much so that even satirical games nominally without rules, such as Calvinball or Mornington Crescent, have to abide by the singular rule that there can be no other rules in order to sustain their anarchic fun. Rules are necessary to ensure the game retains its meaning, to ensure that new players can enter and thereby continue the game once its original players are no more, and to ensure fairness. Given this, an important aspect of studying games is to study how their rules came about, how those rules work in practice, and how they compare to the rules of other games.

NationStates was originally a game with no rules beyond the limits of its technical architecture: war and trade was not so much illegal as impossible, for example. The unmoderated forums went the way of all such enterprises when conducted on such an unexpectedly massive scale: absolute chaos, until Melkor Unchained and Reploid Productions were appointed as moderators and began to bring order. R/D play emerged organically, at first operating in a lawless frenzy, then checked by arbitrary rules, and finally codified into the formal Influence system. The NSUN was similarly disordered until the introduction of rules by Enodia.

Today, Max Barry's dream of a game limited by only the most basic set of rules, against spamming, flaming, hacking and such severe offences, is largely gone, replaced by a set of multiple games, sometimes overlapping, all with their own sets of rules: roleplay is governed differently depending on whether it takes place in the International Incidents forum or the Portal to the Multiverse; the rules on gloating in some parts of the game do not always apply in Gameplay; even the supposedly unrestricted Forum 7 in fact operates by a number of codified rules.

This lecture looks at two particular communities within the NationStates game, the World Assembly and NS Sports, and compares the way rules govern those two largely unrelated games. In particular, it seeks to contrast the withered and increasingly unsustainable irrelevance of the WA game with the vibrant, active success story that has been the Sports genre, and to argue that a significant reason for this divergence stems from their respective differences in the origin, scope and manner of their rules.

Both the World Assembly and NS Sports superficially date from the period of substantial game upheaval in 2008-09, from the reset of the NSUN to the transfer from the Jolt forums, but both can trace their origins much further back, the WA to the NSUN itself, which began operating in a recognisable manner within a couple of months of the game coming online, NS Sports to a litany of sports threads scattered over the NationStates forum and originating in Ariddia's first World Cup.

Since those humble origins, both games have seen substantial revision of their rules: almost every single early NSUN resolution would be illegal by the standards of the modern WA, while the inaugural World Cup was organized using random dice rolls, a practice now seen as incredibly bad form in NS Sports culture. Yet those early experiences also fundamentally shaped what was to come: the NSUN's first resolutions established that it was to be an organization for debating international law, and the World Cup actually continues to this day, one of the longest running and most successful roleplays in all of NationStates.

Beginning in cluttered chaos, both games began to organize themselves, and used rules to do so. The NSUN banned references to real life events, attempts to change game mechanics, and proposals intended to defame or harass other players; NS Sports evolved a system of scorination, a technique by which results were decided using a partially random number generator that took into account a combination of ranks based on prior participation and bonuses for roleplaying.

Differences began to emerge, though, in how rules were created and enforced. The NSUN, and later the WA, came to be heavily dependent on moderator decisions, particularly once the moderators began creating new rules that did not come from the players. This led to a class of rules governing MetaGaming, restrictions on committees, the banning of repeals using only national sovereignty arguments, and many other individual rulings forming an increasingly complicated mosaic impenetrable to all but the most dedicated players.

NS Sports, by contrast, saw little moderator involvement beyond ensuring basic forum rules applicable to all were followed, and its rules were instead created by the players. These included limiting participation to one puppet per user, creating a voting system for hosting tournaments, and devising sometimes complicated mathematical formulas to determine ranking points. To enforce these rules, sports began organizing, more or less formally, committees of people entitled to vote on matters and to write constitutions governing these organizations: the World Cup Committee is the longest running, most prominent, and largest, but similar entities exist for sports from basketball and baseball to cricket and the Olympics.

Both games went from spontaneous disorder to a regulated, at times legalistic, system of rules, yet in one, that system flourished, while in the other, it proved suffocating. It is increasingly impossible to play the WA game at all because too much is dependent on moderator capriciousness, yet at the same time the moderators are a small group of players mostly uninterested in the WA game itself. As such answers to rules questions are usually vague or unhelpful, when they can be solicited at all.

By contrast, NS Sports is essentially self-governing, beyond moderator intervention to calm flaming in OOC threads or check on puppet status, although even that is more a matter of community enforcement than top down rules strictures. People voting on hosts, decided to exclude players deemed to have broken rules, rewarding contributors with roleplay bonuses, and choosing whether or not to participate in new tournaments are all players who actually enjoy playing that part of the game and have an interest in seeing it continue and grow.

This distinction can be seen in how the communities resolve disputes. In the case of a legality problem in the WA, the resolution depends on moderator intervention, so much so that it is highly difficult for even experienced players to offer newer ones any guidance because they cannot predict how the moderators will eventually act. By contrast, NS Sports has been able to resolve serious issues, such as Spaamgate, Qazox's puppet escapades, Burchadinger's plagiarism, and numerous hosting disasters, all through their own internal procedures.

Whether or not a particular nation wins a host bid, an unranked nation defeats a highly ranked one, or an improbable result is generated: none of these outcomes ever concern the NS moderators. One moderator, The Archregimancy, is heavily associated with NS Sports, but the extent of his official involvement is mostly limited to preventing the World Cup Discussion Thread from spiralling too off topic, and even he has routinely expressed a preference for players to resolve questions such as puppetwank themselves rather than plead for moderator intervention.

By contrast, many NS moderators have a background in the WA game, and even then that well stocked corps is incapable of keeping up with the demands of the forum. But it is a hole they have dug for themselves by establishing rules that can only be resolved through moderator discretion. The MetaGaming rules in particular have been massively injurious to WA roleplaying, while there is no moderator imposed limit on NS Sports roleplaying, which has as a result spawned remarkable creativity and inventiveness. It would not be an oversimplification to attribute the contrast in the success of the two different games to the extent to which one rewards and the other punishes roleplaying.

The limitations of the game mechanics prevent the WA from now embracing the model of NS Sports community-driven rules decision making, however. The unfortunate unwillingness of the admins to abandon the nonsensical delegate voting system means that active WA players have little to no chance of actually enforcing any community standards. Because there is no real relationship between the forums and powerful delegates of large regions, a situation where one group of players is trying to roleplay the game and a completely unrelated group with totally different and in many cases opposing priorities are deciding the outcome of the game has been created.

Whenever reforms of the WA are proposed, suggestions of putting rules enforcement in the hands of the players are routinely dismissed and indeed, without reshaping the voting system from one where power lies with those who have no interest in using it fairly or wisely into one in which genuine community standards can be upheld such an endeavour would be difficult. But the example of NS Sports provides an instructive contrast of a successful, active, and (mostly) harmonious model of community-driven rules enforcement that calls into question the received wisdom that the only way of running the game is to have moderators convene in private, removed from player concerns. It might be time to reconsider.

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Gameplay Alignment Test and the LEO test Compared or How is LEO filtered through the NS game mechanic?
By Nasania

Disclaimer: throughout this lecture I make reference to various RL ideologies of a controversial nature. I do this in the neutral academic tone and in no way am I using those terms for emotionalistic or derogatory reasons. Therefore here are the definitions I am using:

Fascism: an ideology about increasing Order at the expense of both Equality and Liberty. They believe that society should be stable and orderly at all times and democacy and individual expression can be hindrance to that goal. Strict Institutionalism would be a better synonym for this ideology.

Communism: an ideology about increasing Equality at the expense of both Liberty and Order. It believes that society should work for the good of people and by the people. The Smurf village is a good example of communism.

Anarchism: an ideology about increasing Liberty at the expense of Equality and Order. For them individual freedom is so precious that neither government or society should interfere with said freedom. Capitalism.org is a good example of the right-wing variant of this ideology. This is NOT the same as anti-establishmenatarianism which wants to eliminate institutions entirely. Hermits might be the best example of this ideology in action.

In my time on Nationstates, I have come across something that I found intriguing: there are governments that operate regions and ideologies that guide those governments. When I think of ideologies, I compare them to the RL ideologies like communism, nationalism, and anarchism. When I analyze ideologies and politics, I use a formula called the LEO test. LEO is an ideological framework that classifies Real Life ideology along three basic axes with a fourth axis I will elaborate on later. Liberty for the Libertarians, Equality for the Liberals, and Order for the Traditionalists. You may think that liberalism=liberty and in European parlance that is true, however in the United States liberalism is associated with Egalitarians(Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party for example) with Libertarianism being associated with the liberty value. Let's compare the LEO test with the Gameplay alignment test and answer the question: How does the LEO test relate to the gameplay alignment test?

First, if you are not familiar with The Gameplay Alignment(GA) test, I will explain. The GA test is an ideology test created by both Solm and Unibot to discern a player's ideological orientation within Nationstates. It has two dimensions and recognizes four ideologies: Defenderism, Raiderism, Cosmopolitanism, and Regionalism. We will discuss each of these ideologies in detail.

Defenderism is the ideology of the Rejected Realms, United Defenders League, and Lazarus. The defenderist believes that each and every region is sovereign and that said sovereignty must be protected. For them, all regions are equally sovereign and no outside force has a right to trespass on said sovereignty, and such people who would violate that right must be militantly opposed. In short a militant advocacy for an equal right to freedom between the regions is their usual defining characteristic. With the LEO test they usually score as liberal Egalitarians. There are exceptions though. The Utilists and Regionalist defenders for example, scored as conservatives. This shows that there is something else driving the defender side which we will determine by studying their opposing force.

Raiderism is the ideology of the Black Riders, the Black Hawks, and Lone Wolves United. The Raiderist believes in the free expression of the will, and espouse that the transcendent will to power is the ultimate reality of Nationstates. What is Will? It is all that is willful. According to Wikipedia: “Actions made according to a person's will are called “willing” or “voluntary” and sometimes pejoratively “willful” or “at will”. In general, "will" does not refer to one particular or most preferred desire but rather to the general capacity to have such desires and act decisively based on them, according to whatever criteria the willing agent applies.” I will let a political scientist, R.J. Rummel, further elaborate on the concept: “The will is the power of choice; it is the power to bring the person to act in a specific way; it is the mode of transformation of potentials, dispositions, needs, sentiments, and interests into manifestations; it is the active force that adjusts the motivations and temperamental dispositions to one's intentions in a particular situation.”
For a Raiderist all regions are potential targets and, if it be their will, that region will be raided. Some even go beyond this and uphold a transcendent 'Raid in of itself' (Raideron group.) Their LEO score, interestingly, is all over the place, sometimes occupying the same space as defenderists. The Wolfist manifesto scores as Anti-Libertarian Egalitarian. Some of the other Raiderists score as anarchist, others communitarians, some as anti-Liberty extreme establishmentarians. The only unifying characteristic between them is the 'will to raid.'

Defenderism and Raiderism are the two opposing philosophies on a single dimension that measures military gameplay attitude. Raiderism is an ideology that advocates raiding as a way of life, it believes in imposing your own will on a region, temporally or permanently. I contrast here between a raider and a raiderist in that the former is a policy position(an action that someone may do) while the latter is an advocacy group.
Now what about the imperialists? They are actually a particular brand of regionalists according to the LEO test who extend the desire for order(Latin: Imperium) beyond their own region. Now I will say they are NOT raiderists. Rather, the raiderists are off on their own dimension and some views of the Raiderists will clash with Imperialists. The Imperialists may view raiderists as a disruptive force to imperial hegemony(especially if the raiderist targeted an imperialist colony/ally) and a threat to the stability of the Empire. Raiderists don't care if they cause chaos on the international stage or a local community. Everything is for the ultimate goal of fun for them. They do have a concept of Raider Unity, but it is followed more out of a strategic necessity to counter their opponents, than a necessary ideological doctrine for raiderists. Now I am not saying that the imperialists won't co-opt the raiderists. Think of the way RL governments have licensed pirates and 'freedom fighters.' Raiders are very much like privateers in that they disrupt the order of the Nationstates world, but are hired by governments to destabilize or disrupt an opponent's strategy. In short their collaborating/hiring of raiders(and raiderists) is a tactic, not the strategy. The strategy is Realpolitik while preserving their own Order is the undelying doctrine of the imperialist. For the Raiderist, the raid is the tactic, Raider unity/organization is the strategy, the doctrine is: satisfying the Will.

Regionalism is an ideology about domestic policy, specifically promoting Regional identity, and is prevalent in the Game-created regions, imperialists, and traditional Communist regions. However, the form of Regionalism espoused by the test is not quite as broad as I use it. The GA test characterizes regionalism only by its isolationistic expressions. In short it mistakes consequences for causes. The LEO test shows that the root cause of this isolationism is a desire for state stability to the point where differing internal opinions results in a knee jerk reaction of “purge the rebels!” Basically they are in self-preservation mode against anarchy. Not all regionalists are in self-preservation mode. The imperialists for example feel their state is secure enough to be extending their imperium to other regions (except where they are operating on the pre-emptive attack doctrine).

Cosmopolitanism is the ideology about domestic policy and is characterized by a laissez-faire attitude towards how citizens relate to their governments. They stand opposite of regionalism and believe that regional government should not interfere too much in the individual's experience of Nationstates. However, the GA test doesn't account for the anti-regionalists who oppose all forms of regional government and lumps them in with the Cosmopolitans. To further complicate the issue is that many seem to define cosmopolitanism as the same as interregionalism. When I test people like Unibot(cosmopolitan-defender), and cosmopolitans in general, they score with a low, but still positive, preference Order with a principle preference for equality or liberty.

Now I am going to reconcile the LEO with the GA test and the ideocube of Nationstates which is a 3D extension of the nolan chart and measures policy position. Here is my theory. The GA regionalism/Cosmopolitanism dimension measures the Order dimension, so regionalists should look like nationstates conservatives. Now does this mean they will read like GOP? Some will some won't. Conservatism is a broad ideology and encompasses many individuals and clouds of ideological groups. George W. Bush, Barbara Bush, Richard Cheney, Napoleon I, Napoleon III, Benito Mussolini, Barack Obama, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, Vladimir Putin, Rick Santorum, Michael Peroutka, Zell Miller are all examples of RL conservatism. Fictional conservatism includes Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. What all these individuals will agree on is a need for institutions and maintaining the status quo. What they will disagree on is their secondary preference for liberty or equality, and how much these values must be comprised to satisfy the Order preference. Mussolini almost says “Liberalism? Humbug!” scoring 16% Equality and has an even lower liberty score(6%). You will typically find his rhetoric contains around 78% Order rhetoric. The closest match to that rhetorical score I have found anywhere else is Emperor Palpatine's “First Galactic Empire” speech. Napoleon actually scored as an equal balance between equality and order(in other words a moderate communitarian) and if he had compromised slightly more with Liberty, would have been a centrist. His main goals was to maintain the Unity of the Nation. Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Obama, Bonapartes, Mussolini, Putin all prefer equality over liberty with Mussolini being the most extreme and Napoleon I being the most moderate of the Socialist Conservative branch. Hamilton, Burke, George Bush, Peroutka, Hamilton, Zell Miller and Santorum represent the Libertarian Conservatives with Dubya being among the more moderate and Peroutka the most extreme. Overall, this suggests that Regionalists will find agreement with some of the rhetoric of the above politicians and would sound like the NS equivalent of those politicians. The Francoists(who score as ideologue to hardline welfare conservatives), McMasterdonia(Ideologue left conservative), and the Utilists, should find most agreement with Bonapartists, Cheney, Laura Bush, Mussolini, Putin and Obama. The Imperialists with their concern with Regional Sovereignty, Independence, and Colonial self-administration seem to be more concerned with Libertarian Conservatism and probably would find more agreement with Dubya, Hamilton, Zell Miller, Peroutka, Santorum, and Burke.

What about Stalin and Nationalistic Communists? Well as communism(Equality fanatics) became the establishment, the term communism got carried over to the point where a Fascist in either the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea would officially be a hard-line “communist” however their commitment to egalitarian principles had significantly diminished. This is why some of the 'communists' (Real Life and otherwise) may score high on Order rhetoric. It is because they are establishmentarians enthralled with communist symbology and traditions more than the ideological underpinnings of communism as a movement. In nationstates, some communists disavow regionalism in favor of more internationalistic communsim.

For example when I tested Zennyism, she scored very similar to other egalo-Establishmentarians in Nationstates, particularly the Francoists. This is why I juxtapose Zennyism and Francoism together in an ideology test I made. The Zennyist is actually a little further to the left of the Francoist and has a slightly higher libertarian preference, but is still within conservative ideological zone. Dear leader Zenny probably finds some agreement with ideological principles from Bonapartists, Putin or Obama and it wouldn't surprise me at all if she used Bonapartist writings as a source for her writings.

The opponents of the Regionalists, the Cosmopolitans, will be a compromise of libertarianism and socialism in their leanings. They sound like and contrast values from John Rawls, Robespierre, Strelnikov, Emma Goldman, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Hill Green, Karl Hess, Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and Andrew Sullivan. The LEO test suggests that both Unibot and Eluvatar(who are cosmopolitans) likely find most agreement with John Rawls and Andrew Sullivan but some disagreement with Thomas Hill Green because of his higher preference for liberty than Equality. In governing a region they will seek Solidarity first, informed by liberty and tradition being a necessary evil. They likely view the conservatives(Francoists and Imperialists) as latent Fascists while said conservatives will view them as the Nationstates equivalent of Communists in their political leanings. Now notice how the Gameplay alignment test tends to lump the libertarians and anarchists with the Socialists and Communists? That's because its axis only measures the player's relation to regionalism(which is usually an element of conservatism, except where regionalism means secession from a larger body.) Anti-Establishmentarians and Anarchists won't fit nicely on the GA test, being obscured in the 2D framework of GA. They will be lumped in with individualists even though they may have vehement disputes with each other.

Now about the Defenderists and Raiderists how is that dimension reconciled with LEO? That dimension actually measures a fourth dimension beyond the standard 3D LEO system. Interestingly there are RL ideologies that operate on the fourth dimension. These ideologies can occupy the same place as their opponents and seemingly distant positions at the same time. Basically they operate as ideological blackholes. Ideologies in RL that fit this are National Socialism(particularly the Libertarian Nazi Green Party) and the National Anarchist Movement. Nazism occupies a space as principally anti-Egalitarian, and occupies both Fascism and Anarchism at the same time. On the GA test they should score as Raiderists. Does this mean Raiderists are nazis? No, just that Nazism has a necessary Raiderist component in the ideology. Many raiderists probably oppose nazism and theoretically, according to the model, could combine militant centrist ideology with universal oppositionists (I am guessing this would be a Nietszchean centrist) and oppose Nazism on the grounds that it is too establishmentarian. To be honest I figure the raiderists would most likely combine Anti-establishmentarianism with communism(Objectivism+Maoism) based on their history of appropriating communist symbology(Wolfist Manifesto.)

So to sum up regionalism/cosmoplitanism=order dimension, Raiderism/Defenderism=Will dimension. So now let's combine the ideocube from nationstates. Looking at how all the establishmentarian governments are centered on the Father Knows Best State with low political freedoms, that will be the order value. New York Times democracy will be the typical Anti-Establishmentarian government. The anarchist governments are all high on personal freedoms so we will set that as the Liberty value. The Moralistic Democracy will be the Anti-Libertarian government. The democratic Socialists prize equality so we will set them as the default value for communism. Anti-Egalitarianism then would be the same as the Capitalist Paradise. Fascism would either be Father Knows best state or Iron Fist Consumerists if they particularly hate Liberty.

Now let's take advantage of combining LEO with GA. The result is that Regionalism would be low on Political Freedom and would be the equivalent of a Father Knows Best State. Cosmopolitanism is kind tricky as already stated, so it would include both New York Times Democracy and inoffensive Centrists. The raiderists and defenderists would be all over the place. The RL Nazis would be both Corporate Police State and Anarchy due to their weird ideological warping. Objectivism, an anti-establishmentarian ideology, would be Corporate Bordello or Anarchy. The GOP would be Father Knows Best state leaning to Libertarian Police State. Bonapartists would be closer to the Corrupt dictatorship. Democratic Party Would be like Democratic Socialists. Libertarians and Anarchists would be the Left-Leaning College State.

I suspect the biggest differences between the ideological paradigms above is that the GA Test views the R/D as the foreign policy dimension and the Cosmopolitan/regionalism dimension representing domestic affairs. The problem with conflating policy with ideology like this is that policy doesn't delve into the root cause and is more focused on effect and by separating foreign policy from domestic policy, gives the impression of more division than may actually exist. Because of the inadequacies of the gameplay alignment test, I have created a new dimension to try to 3D the GA test: Imperialism/Sovereigntism test which basically accounts for the foreign policy angle ignored by the regionalism/cosmopolitanism and raiderism/Defenderism dimensions. Regional Sovereigntism is an ideology started by Eluvatar to try to break free of the moralism in defenderism. When I apply the LEO model to Regional Sovereigntism, it is a somewhat more moderate version of Unibot's defenderism: Libertarian Egalitarianism. Imperialism is the other ideology but one I have yet to discuss is Independentism. Independentism is a new ideology that is promoted by the North Pacific, Imperialist regions, and Zennyists. Its LEO score is identical with the Imperialists, is ambivalent to Francoism and opposes Regional sovereigntism. Their manifesto indicated they support Libertarian Establishmentarianism. To be honest, I had some difficulty testing this one though due to the fact that I had to define the concept Sovereignty. For some, like the regional sovereigntists, it is a value of liberty; for the imperialists it may be a value for order which will make them much more hard-line conservative(particularly egalitarian conservative) in scoring. For the Independents it may score as a libertarian value which means there will be some tension between the imperialists and independents over this issue of sovereignty in the future, with independents becoming much classicaly liberal in ideology and perhaps taking on a position like the RL Declaration of Independence, which scores as right-wing libertarian.

To conclude my lecture, I will make some predictions based on tha data above. First, the Libertarian Independents will split off from the Imperialists over the definition of Regional Sovereignty. The independents will want to preserve their region's independence and neutrality in interregional affairs but as the imperialists become a much more central force, they will likely attempt to distance themselves and eventually split off. This brings up a recent conversation I had with Christian Democrats. In it we were wondering why there were no enlightenment style revolutions in Nationstates. My response was that there just aren't that many enlightenment revolutionaries out there at the moment. This could be their opportunity to appear on the world scene. Granted in the past there were governments that used that brand of liberalism(the East pacific for example) but they seem to have disappeared for the time being. We'll just have to wait and see.

Second, due to their shared ideological kinship, the francoists, imperialists, zennyists, and the North Pacific will ally at some point in the future. Now the North Pacific may be an odd one to include but one must remember, the North Pacific has moved considerably right-ward since their founding. In the past they were Egalitarians(Grosseschnauzer and Eluvatar for example) and were allied with the defenders, but as they have become a much more secure state they no longer see a reason to side with the socialist regions. This also partially explains why they have dumped the defender side in favor of independentism as most defenders are egalitarian-leaning(some are communist.) With regards to Zennyism being allied with imperialist regions, the LEO test effectively shows that Zenny is using Communist Symbology for otherwise traditional imperialist ends and that they share much in common with each other. It also suggests that she will find allies with the Francoists so I would recommend watching for that in future interregional developments.

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[Unibot III]

Predicting the Effects of Issues
By Starrie

Large communities have been built around the gameplay and roleplay aspects of the NationStates, but at the core of the game, less mentioned, are the issues that manifest in the differences between each and every nation. There is almost an art to interpreting issues -- a game one participates in to nudge the numbers closer and closer to perfection. For years, many have tried to divine the mechanisms that govern the effects of issues. GM Frisbeeteria has even claimed that it is completely impossible to do so. However, this article attempts to detail how one might, with a great deal of time and effort, lay the mystery to rest.

It helps, of coures, to take a look at what we already know. In issues 34 and 35 of The Rejected Times, Dr. George gives a few pointers of maximizing or minimizing some stats. Most of the article is pretty common sense, but there are a few hints. Dr. George mentions some bias toward high economy and low civil and political rights, although it is unclear whether this bias is statistically significant. He also mentions general guidelines a nation may take to get low stats in all three trends -- be paternalistic, extreme, and brutal. Unfortunately, it is also unclear whether the relationship between low stats and paternity, extremism, or brutality is causal or merely concommitant.

Perhaps the most extensive theory about nations' statistics and issue effects is New South Hell's "Spectral Theory", in which each nation and issue has '(macro)-themes' like Liberalism, and subthemes (named micro-themes), like culture, which are parts of macro-themes. Each theme a nation possesses is given a value from -9 to 9, and together, the themes and values of each nation make up a "spectrum". A nation's spectrum succintly and accurately characterizes its nature. Accordingly, each issue can also have theme values depending on how it affects the host nation, and here, a database of issues and their thematic values can be found.

While New South Hell's spectral classification is certainly interesting, there is little evidence to suggest it accurately mimics the behind-the-scenes workings of NationStates. Moreover, the classification cannot, and was not designed to, allow someone to predict the effects of issues on their nation.

Two years ago, I collected a list of about 10,000 decisions made over a period of three months by some puppet nations. Not wanting to manually figure out the effects of each issue, I shoved them through a shiny new neural network library. If you've never heard of a neural network, you can think of it as an statistical model, or a predictor, based off an obsolete model of the brain, which predicts outputs from inputs. Sadly, the experiment was an utter failure and the predictor I got was unusable. This was mainly due to the "curse of dimensionality". If each nation has fifty variables of input (for example, public/private sector, economy, civil/political rights, etc), and there needs to be at least three points of resolution along each axis (that is, low, middle, and high economy), then 3^50 = 7.2E23 datapoints are needed -- for each and every issue and decision. Clearly a larger sample is needed.

Indeed, many people have already attempted to create listings of the effects of each issue.
However, they all fail for one of several reasons.
1. The sample size is too small. Most collections don't even have stats from all of the issues and decisions, much less multiple samples.
2. Changing game mechanics. Given the refactoring, we know there has been at least one major change in the way the game works. Much of the old data is therefore probably now obsolete.
3. Current nation state. Most records don't note the stats of the nation enacting the decision, which has a major role in determining the effects of the issue. A communist and capitalist nation may react to the same issue very differently.
4. Bias. Manual sampling will always be biased, even when exact numbers are visible, in the kinds of issues that tend to be recorded, the nations which tend to record the issues, and many other factors.

Automation is therefore necessary. There are two main methods to go about collecting data, both with their own merits and demerits.
1. Monitor the world's decisions through happenings pages.
2. Create a bunch of puppets and control their every decision.

When monitoring decisions through the happenings api, there are a few things to keep in mind.
1. One must first compile a dictionary of "following new legislation ..." phrases so that you can match the text of each happening to the corresponding decision and issue. This could be quite a pain.
2. There are just too many nations to keep track of without breaking the api rate-limit. Therefore, it is necessary to use some clever thinking and determine which nations are and aren't actively making decisions in order to effectively sample.
3. The sampler has no control of the decisions made by the nations here. It is entirely possible that out of the hundreds of issues and thousands of decisions, some decisions will be made so rarely that very little data is acquired on them. In order words, the data isn't collected uniformly over the sample space.
4. Many nations tend to make multiple decisions per update, so the change in the nation's stats must be explained as a combination of multiple issues. This vastly complicates the statistical analysis.

There are also a few things to keep in mind when collecting data through puppets.
1. Given the scripting rate-limits, an individual can only operate 7200 nations simultaneously. Which sounds like plenty, but actually yields a lower data collection rate than monitoring the entire world's decisions does.
2. One "benefit" of this method is that it's scalable -- multiple people working can collect vast amounts of data. Of course, creating tens of thousands of puppets will probably get someone in some serious trouble.

But there are some major advantages to collecting data through puppets.
1. The sampler has full control over how the nations act, so the problem with the non-uniform sampling distribution just becomes a matter of cleverly controlling your nations to explore a wide variety of states and categories (which is admittedly rather non-trivial).
2. Tabula rasa. Newly created puppet nations are not tainted with the bureacratic inertia of already active nations.

Wait what? Bureacratic inertia?

One might notice that issues appear to have smaller effects over time. Perhaps it is the case that issues lose influence as a nation's age increases. However, a small and informal sample conducted revealed this is not actually the case. Instead there is something Frisbeetaria calls "bureacratic inertia", which he refused to elaborate on. Nonetheless it is not too difficult to imagine how this inertia works -- as a nation continuously legislates in one direction, they will find it harder to reverse course, or even halt.

More recently, a comment by Ballotonia lent more insight, or rather, confusion, to this concept. A nation with no police force but which wanted one needed to overcome a "steep negative" before they would reach their goal. But this raises some questions, because there is a difference between a negative and "bureacratic inertia" -- anyone who has taken a physics class will know the difference between inertia and displacement. While this discrepancy might seem to be quite the problem, the distinction is actually not essential. The important take-away from these comments is that there are, very clearly, internal variables which influence the statistics of nations, and this is another reason why shoveling data into a neural network won't just work.

So how can we use our newly minted data?

On the lower end of the ambition scale is the option of just compiling a database of decisions and matching a given input nation, with decision, to the closest datapoint in the database in order to "predict" what some possible effects will be. However, this isn't really a predicative system, and ignores the internal states of each nation.

Fortunately, there are many machine learning techniques (long short-term memory neural networks (LSTM) and hidden markov machines (HMM) come to mind), which keep an internal memory or representation of previous inputs -- the series of decisions which each nation makes, in order to account for a nation's internal state. Since I'm no machine learning expert, I won't go into the specifics of how this is accomplished, but it is likely that these techniques will produce the useful predictor that a naive neural network is incapable of.

The downside is that these "deep learning" techniques are often black boxes -- they work, but it is impossible to explain how they work. Even if they can successfully predict issues, they provide little information into how the game actually models nations. In fact, the reverse-engineering of these black-boxes is one of the most active fields of research in machine learning.

I haven't painted a very rosy picture, but if you have a vast amount of data, or are willing to create thousands of nations to collect it, and if you can work around refactorings and the constant addition of new issues, if you can compensate for the effects from WA resolutions, if you know a bit, or a lot, about machine learning, and if you can spend some thankless years working on a doubtful endeavor, then the rest should be smooth sailing, and I wish you luck!

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A Society of Rejects: Individualism, Liberalism and the Nature of Democracy in the Rejected Realms
By Unibot

Introduction

As I write this paper, a paper I had intended to write for months, Lazarus stands now as a shining example of the importance of civil rights, democracy and constitutionalism; rising above its crisis and recovering from an awful imperial occupation (from the New Pacific Order), Lazarus’ path towards liberation was always a battle fought between those who wanted to see Lazarus as an open liberal democracy and those who would have rather it been a client-state of the New Pacific Order. In fact, the entire conflict originated when Stujenske voided the Bill of Rights and the Constitution – proving the power and the legitimacy that these legal and political instruments of democracy can hold – they take on an immaterial value of their own as a ‘line in the sand’; often the international community and natives will tolerate quite a lot of upheaval – the People’s Republic of Lazarus and the Osiris Fraternal Brotherhood were both, after all, created with upheavals, but Stujenske found out the ‘hard way’ that without constitutionalisation and a promise for political independence and open, transparent governing institutions, a transition will face extreme opposition.

This paper discusses that ‘red line’ that Stujenske crossed; a year ago, Lazarus was embroiled in another unfortunate conflict with Osiris – the Osiran-Lazarene War – which seems like a distant, forgotten memory from so long ago now. As with every crisis, every other featured articles get tacked on near the bottom with the Rejected Times – in it, I had penned an article called ‘The Divided Defenderdom’ (TRT XXVIII) which lay quiet beneath the drama and fury surrounding the Osiran-Lazarene War. I’d like to take some time to revisit that article, however. In that article, I argued that defenderism is often erroneously identified as the main ‘political ideology’ of defenders – instead, I found that liberalism was in all actuality, the dominant ideology of defenders and the principles and practices of defenderism simply just followed naturally from liberalism. In doing so, I argued that liberalism was the superior alternative to independentism, because independentism (which is effectively ‘realism’) only provides a normative framework for foreign policy, not strictly domestic policy – whereas liberalism provides a normative framework more holistically which covers domestic, martial and foreign policy – and throughout this essay, I hope to demonstrate more clearly how that is the case!

I believe that the Rejected Realms is the ideal example of what I meant in that article: it is an unequivocally liberal state – a true embodiment in practice of liberalism in terms of its public policy and its constitution, including its conduct abroad. Do note that throughout this paper I will use the term, ‘liberalism’ as a broad political ideology which is based on a number of tenets; most notably, the concept of individualism, the idea that society is divisibly made of individuals with their own claims to rights and freedoms from one another, egalitarianism, the notion that individuals are equals of one another and deserve equal treatment, universalism, the idea that rules and standards should apply to everyone ‘universally’ (e.g., we all have the freedom of speech), and a fancy term that Professor John Gray uses called ‘meliorism’, which suggests that society can improve; that is to say, that the quality of life can progress if society wills it and acts to develop these processes (as opposed to sheer cynicism about the value of collective action). From these four principles, it stands to reason that liberalism is normally deontological, in that it bases matters of right or wrong on principles of fundamental equality and individual autonomy, plus liberalism is also supportive of popular sovereignty and praises the full breadth of rights and freedoms that can be accorded to the individual, especially with respect to a free market and a respect for each other’s ‘conception of the good’ (a political philosopher’s term for ‘way of life’).

While liberalism itself isn’t new by any means – it’s originally from the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially – there have been some challenges to liberalism over the years in real life. Because liberalism emphasises the distinction between private and public spheres of life to protect the freedom of individuals to pursue their own lives and personal activity, liberalism’s distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ is integral to the liberal system of government, society and life – it’s how the world is effectively divvied up into spheres of life, public or private, to reproduce a stable society. This distinction, however, has been controversial. First, some early critics argued that liberalism had failed to acknowledge the importance of maintaining economic and material equality in its pursuit of open economic freedoms – this created a division between Classical Liberalism, which supported extreme economic freedom, and Social Liberalism, which advocated for the creation of a welfare state and the regulation of industry to protect the general wellbeing of society. During the seventies, feminists went further and argued that the distinction between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ was wholly false (i.e., ‘the personal is political) in the sense that domestic settings and home lives had often been protected from government and police intervention under the guise of personal privacy and freedom, despite the fact that ‘the home’ had long been a site for the domestic oppression of women.

I would argue that the distinction between Classical Liberalism and Social Liberalism is only marginally relevant in NationStates and rarely complicates matters because NationStates does not possess goods or scarcity, at least not internally (between regions, recruitment may be seen as an interregional market, perhaps), so the distinction between Classical and Social Liberalism rarely manifests itself, because in a post-materialist society, the overall concerns of liberalism as a whole, liberty and equality, are equally realised without contradictions arising with economy or commercial activity or profit, for that matter. Meanwhile, the inherent social contradiction between liberty and equality was long resolved by Victorian philosophers who argued liberty required personal limitations to flourish. I also don’t think that the feminist challenge to liberalism plays a prominent role in NationStates because there is no ‘home life’ in NationStates and even when an institution of marriage is present, it’s fairly transparent and open compared to real life, because partners do not share a living space, nor is there an equivalent concept of domesticity or home life and home work. However, I think it’s possible that on some issues, marginally, the issues with ‘the private’ that feminists have identified can be problematic for liberalism, even in NationStates, especially with cases of sexual abuse and harassment, where NationStates courts and regional moderation can fail to adequately respond to problems as they arise.

Moving forward, therefore, through this essay, it is important to bear in mind that I will compare the Rejected Realms to a broad constellation of liberal thought, which, in my view, cannot be narrowly considered ‘classical’ or ‘social’ or ‘radical’, because of the lack of economic and domestic activity in NationStates.

‘A Society of Rejects’

How and in what way might we consider the Rejected Realms, a liberal state? To me at least, this isn’t an uncontroversial question to ask – the Rejected Realms was not necessarily made by political progressives and it will continue to serve as a region for all rejects, not just simply those who identify themselves as liberals – in fact I can think of at least a handful of key players who helped develop the Rejected Realms in its early days after the departure of Kandarin who are not liberals. Nonetheless, I would argue that the Rejected Realms follows a consistent pattern of liberalism in every facet of its institutional structure and its public policy.

Let’s begin an analysis into the Rejected Realms with the mythos of ‘the reject’ first….

In the eyes of many, the reject is strong-willed, able and eminently independent. The title of this piece, a ‘A Society of Rejects’ refers to what one might think of the Rejected Realms – a society made of social and political gadflies – swatted, ejected and left here to sink into obscurity; rejects can progress in the Rejected Realms along our fairly horizontal social ladder as people with minds of their own, independent, that is, of collective opinion. That’s, in my mind, very different than the local mythos that some other Game-Created Regions are promoting, where their collectivism praises ‘the sycophant’ or ‘the social butterfly’ or ‘the pastoral’ – those who build and reproduce social cohesion – whereas the Rejected Realms often celebrates and welcomes the very same users whose basic existence frustrates attempts abroad to build socially harmonious communities. While it may be a severe over-exaggeration to regard the entire caucus of regular members in the Rejected Realms as a pack of grumbling, miserable curmudgeons, the mythology of the reject appears to be deeply and profoundly rooted in a strong individualist structure present in the Rejected Realms; this is to say that when we speak of the ‘reject’ we imply that they are individuals. While each member is connected to one another with a mutual stake in the governance of the region, they maintain a robust sense of intellectual freedom and hold no obligation with one another to agree with what they believe on the hopes of preserving a semblance of communal harmony and order – rejects don’t tie their identification of others as rejects based on their silence on the opinions of the majority, but instead, the moniker of the reject is a mass expression of the importance of the role that political minorities play in the Rejected Realms, almost as far as to suggest even that each individual user is their own minority.

Speaking on a more institutional basis, it should be said that over the past few months since March and onward, my government has been working to craft a Bill of Rights, the latest proposal, ‘Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities’, for which voting is currently underway. This Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities protects the rights and freedoms of citizens; it’s become clear, especially with the crisis in Lazarus, after all, that rights legislation acts as a legal barrier against tyrannical government – the dissolution of the Lazarene Bill of Rights was a move that immediately challenged the legitimacy of Stujenske and his administration. The Charter outlines the rights and freedoms which the Rejected Realms recognises as inalienable – rights to free expression, open participation and equality. The latter, egalitarianism, is a different concept to articulate in a post-materialist society; equality in this sense means strictly legal equality such that the law applies to all equally without the use of ‘arbitrary or discriminative criteria’. Bearing this in mind, egalitarianism and pluralism seem to follow one another in NationStates, because the Rejected Realms’ longstanding practice of encouraging members of all ideological positions to join the Rejected Realms reflects the equal nature of all members, the valued differences of opinions and the universalism of legal equality.

With the Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities, there will be no ‘supreme authority’ in terms of interpreting what is and is not a violation of the Charter; instead, the Assembly will comb through different opinions on controversial matters to converge on a final opinion as to whether any future initiative or executive action contradicts the rights and freedoms of members enshrined in law. I had originally intended for the Charter to exist like the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – a throwback to another liberal, Pierre Elliot Trudeau whose constitutional amendments implemented a document similar to Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights (a statutory law) into the Canadian constitution, thereby ensuring that the Supreme Court could strike any general law as contradictory with the constitution if it violated the Bill of Rights. Trudeau, operating from the same background of liberal rights and individualism as I have described here, sought to transform the makeup of Canadian society from classes and religious denominations, into individuals with a mosaic of ethnicities and sexualities.

It became increasingly apparent however that a constitutional amendment would not be appropriate in the Rejected Realms, partly because the enumerated rights would seem out of place and also because there existed no supreme legal body to interpret the rights enshrined in the document anyways, so the speaker had suggested looking towards Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, in addition to the United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act – these proposals, acting as statutory documents, removing the power of courts to effect government policy, which in effect, better reflected what would happen with our Charter of Rights, because there is no judiciary in the Rejected Realms, of course.

The Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities, however, is not only legal protection that citizens have of their individual rights; take for example, the new Regional Message Board Act which establishes that members have the freedom to post on the Regional Message Board, which acts as a ‘common site of conversation’.

Indeed, several major institutions in the Rejected Realms have been established as a part of its liberal programme – first and foremost, members universally and equally have the right of suffrage – to vote and decide their leader and the members of the executive which reflects the significance of popular sovereignty in the Rejected Realms. While the executive does have great power, the one thing that the executive cannot decide is who is a citizen and who is not – this decision is made by an independent political body, the Citizenship Council, which represents an important balance of power that maintains the liberal (as opposed to illiberal) structure of the Rejected Realms government; too many regions, after all, see their democracies eroded when executives manipulate the citizenship process in a way that is tantamount to sheer electioneering. The Citizenship Council is itself all about balance – councillors are each individually decided by various methods – it, like the courts in a traditional liberal government, is an appointed body that balances the spheres of power between the Assembly (whose citizenships are decided by them) and the executive (who are elected by the Assembly).

Kandarin once remarked that the Rejected Realms Army was so prominent in the Rejected Realms that it appeared to be a region built around an army for many. Milograd also joked, years later, that the Rejected Realms was a region built around a newspaper. So it seems to me that the Rejected Realms’ pattern of growth traditionally centres around a major institution – historically, the Rejected Realms Army and contemporarily, the Rejected Times. What both of these institutions have in common is that they are private monopolies with a public relationship with the Rejected Realms – the Rejected Realms Army has a monopoly on armed forces in the Rejected Realms, while the Rejected Times has a public monopoly on regional journalism in the Rejected Realms. The army is run by its commanders and the Rejected Times is managed by the Rejected Realms Media Corporation. The separation of state from these institutions as a working public-private partnership represents liberalism emphasis on property and the freedom of private initiative. Playing a role in the liberal state, the Rejected Times is an outlet for free expression for citizens, while the Rejected Realms Army protects the region’s delegacy and its popular sovereignty dutifully and advances the cause for freedom abroad.

Foreign policy in the Rejected Realms itself boldly fits with traditional liberal foreign policy, or even liberal intergovernmentalism, a set of ideas closely related to the European Union. Liberalism in international studies, often called ‘idealism’, is the opposing view to realism in foreign policy. Liberals as foreign policy experts believe that the world is not in relative ‘zero-sum’ competition between world powers or that balance of power is needed for security and peace; instead, liberals see world powers as able to achieve gains simultaneously and even cooperatively in a ‘positive-sum’ manner. This leads liberal foreign policy to emphasize the importance of improving mutual dependencies between partners and bolstering the influence of multilateral organisations and spheres of international governance to bring peace, stability and policy convergence between regions. Nowadays, the Rejected Realms is a major player in international dialogues with a large network of allies, friends and partners. It is involved in two major (and currently) multilateral organisations, the Founderless Regions Alliance and the XYZ Treaty, meanwhile it is linked with Lazarus through a complex layer of multiple treaties. Additionally, the Rejected Realms also maintains alliances with a number of different regions from various backgrounds like Taijitu and The Independent Order, while also maintaining agreements of non-aggression with Osiris and The Pacific.

The Friendship Agreements, a recent initiative, has also allowed my government to advance a new network of allies with newer regions who may not have been chanced with a full treaty previously – the inspiration of friendship agreements came from my own studying of European Union foreign policy and liberal intergovernmentalism, where the European Union has advanced its own ‘Neighborhood Policy’ across the European continent. Indeed, the Rejected Realms is not a warring, competitive, exceptionalist or realist state, it is a liberal one – it plays a role as a peacemaker, builds friendships openly and genuinely, and believes in the power of multilateral governance to transform our interregional politics. The latest constitutional amendment even notes that the Rejected Realms ‘shall uphold the principle of self-determination and refrain from the invasion of other regions outside of times of war’ which in turn reflects the Rejected Realm’s universalism in seeing a right of self-determination that applies abroad universally as an international ‘law’ of sorts where other regions might be inclined to expect you to not invade them, while they invade others.

We may ask why the Rejected Realms is such a liberal state? To me the answer lies in the history of the Rejected Realms – something that academics might call ‘path dependence’ which allows us to study how antecedent conditions (things that happen) effect the path of a region’s institutional development: one choice leads to another, which suggests that the path of development for a region is nearly deterministic. In the case of the Rejected Realms, our region is particularly vulnerable to security concerns (we cannot eject members), unlikely to be couped by a group of professionals with a long term vision for the region (because they would not be able to hold the region easily), and home to any and all rejects from across NationStates. As of consequence, it took a centralised figure (Kandarin) to organise the region politically and bring stability to the region, while he notes that he and the Rejected Realms Army (RRA) sought defending to improve the region’s image abroad, while he built a foreign policy based on ‘being friends with everyone’ to secure the region especially from an early threat from Atlantic Alliance. As a home to rejects, the Rejected Realms was also uniquely affected by the occupation of the Pacific, because opposition to the New Pacific Order naturally became locals in the Rejected Realms.

From this it follows that the Rejected Realms would develop a natural inclination towards multilateral institutions like the Alliance Defense Network which provided security for our region and opposed the New Pacific Order, from there it follows that the Rejected Realms would also later become a member of the Founderless Regions Alliance, despite its lack of focus on the New Pacific Order, because the Founderless Regions Alliance inherited the Alliance Defense Network place as a leading multilateral defense alliance. As major institutions in the Rejected Realms reflect these peaceful, liberal norms that the Rejected Realms gravitated towards, naturally the privatisation of these institutions, the army and the press, has aimed to protect them from unwanted political change – i.e., the spread of independentism. Furthermore, it could also be said that the Rejected Realms’ path dependence reflects Warzone Codger’s Peacezone theory; with no reject allowed to be re-rejected, the Rejected Realms has to solely rely on native and foreign support for security and cannot take aggressive measures to secure its delegacy – that to me is one of the significant factors, if not the most significant, in explaining the Rejected Realms’ transition to a constitutional democracy in the wake of Kandarin’s departure, because a constitutional democracy can bring legitimacy to new delegates with each leadership transition and in an uncertain security situation, legitimacy becomes extremely important for gaining popular and foreign support.

Challenges

Certainty there are some challenges to this theory and the notion, that is, that the Rejected Realms is a liberal state. The first and foremost challenge would be that the Rejected Realms does not have a judiciary – a judiciary in a traditional liberal state is a check on the democratic processes because liberal democracy is skeptical, if not critical, of the judgement of the majority, where if not checked, a liberal may argue that minorities are not protected from the tyranny of a majority. A judiciary is also extremely significant in the liberal criminal justice system where it plays a role as an independent figure to carry out the course of justice, determine guilt and ensure that defendants and complainants’ rights are respected.

However, I would argue that the absence of a judiciary in the Rejected Realms is not a rejection of the value of judiciaries in the abstract per se, but a decision made in light of realities – limitations of NationStates – the experiences of the constitution’s drafters, who had found judiciaries in NationStates to be effectively useless. The problem with judiciaries in NationStates is politicisation – the vast majority of offences are summary offences which can be addressed without judicial oversight through forum moderation, which means judiciaries usually only address highly politicised indictment cases (i.e., treason) or judicial reviews (i.e., legal questions); positions on judiciaries become a lucrative seat for politicians and ‘statesmen’ who use the powers of judicial review to undermine the Assembly and use their position as justices to undermine the justice system. Instead, the Rejected Realms balances issues of justice between four different major institutions: the administration, the executive, the assembly and the citizenship council – the assembly and the executive work together to resolve ambiguities in the law and the administration and the citizenship council enforce memberships in line with policies set by the assembly. This process, instead of being statutory, is consuetudinary and a polycentric legal order, where power is shared and problems are resolved organically.

Another challenge that some might make against the Rejected Realms is that as a ‘defender region’ it is exclusive to others; however, I would argue that the Rejected Realms does not exclude others and in fact invites players of all stripes to join the Rejected Realms – its own forum description, ‘the region is nonetheless welcoming to invaders, defenders, and neutrals alike’ strikes at the heart of the region’s fundamental pluralism and its respect for differences. Our foreign policy is instead guided by the principle that others too have that same right to diversity and self-expression and not be trampled on or repressed from outsiders – it is not a position that is against invaders as people, but a humanitarian spirit that supports natives and their self-determination; the ethics of defending are not the ethics and politics of war, but the ethics of the physician – primum non nocere (‘first, do no harm’ – the principle of non-maleficence – wherein, like the Red Cross, defenders cannot hold personal judgement of invaders, but act only in a personally neutral fashion to help those in need. While my understanding of defending is not the position that all hold, I do believe it is a reading of defending that can explain why, at least in my mind, the pluralist defender state is not contradictory: it welcomes all at home and helps all abroad.

On a final note, some may criticize the fact that many residents in the Rejected Realms cannot vote (because they have not signed up as citizens) and are, as of consequence, divorced from the democratic process to some extent. While this may be true, I would note that I do not believe that this challenges the notion of the Rejected Realms as a liberal state – liberal democracies have always been suspicious of the masses and has made use of representatives and state officials to ensure tyranny does not ensue. This is a distinction between liberal democracy and direct democracy. I do think however, if the Rejected Realms is attempting to achieve a representative democracy it could in the future do more to achieve an overall ‘representativeness’ – I’ve pushed in the past for measures like resident-wide officer elections, and in light of some other Game-Created regions experimenting with measures like this too, including the North Pacific, the South Pacific and Balder, I hope that we too at the Rejected Realms can build on our democracy in the coming months with a plan to democratise our governing structure further and see to it that our residents can easily and openly participate in our region’s politics as informed denizens.

Conclusion

Liberalism stands as a coherent and comprehensive ideology that has allowed to The Rejected Realms to flourish.

While some have criticised defenderism for not forming a cohesive domestic political ideology, their criticism has been thoroughly misplaced because defenderism has never been the dominant ideology of the Rejected Realms – it is a set of principles which stem from our foreign and defence policy, but which only play a role in the grand schematics of the Rejected Realms’ public policy as precepts of liberalism.

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National Self Determinism and Regional Politics
By Warzone Codger

Introduction

It is a peculiar observation in Nationstates, foremost a political nation simulator, that there is a near universal consensus that players are allowed to manage their nations as desire. Players have introduced conflict in every other part of the game based on invented ideas, yet when it comes to one nation's type, the game's own basic way of identifying who you are, we have been willing to turn a blind eye and ignore it. The right to national self-determinism, an area which could have been predicted as a source for regional conflict instead turned out to be irrelevant in regional politics. What follows are observations on how nation type regional politics have developed, why we should bring it nation-type identity back to regional politics and proposed systems to bring about this change.

Observations on national self-determinism in current regional politics

Most regions have adopted the view to welcome players whatever their nation type and how they answer their issues. The GCRs and most major UCRs do not interfere with national self-determinism at all and where it has been factor, it has led to the construction of separate themed regions. To those who do care about influencing national self-determinism, segregation is the trend, and there are specialised regions for capitalists (Capitalist Paradise), socialists (The Internationale) and dictatorships (Alliance of Dictators, Psychotic Dictatorships).

Regional politics and government have instead revolved around player invented designs that are far removed from the physical game. It is remarked that regional governments are simply a delegate-enforced form of Government Roleplay that a group of players choose of believe in and abide by its decisions, one where the rest of region then accepts passively. Participation is driven by someone deciding to be interested in this type of Government Roleplay, based a shared set of personality affinities and differences, in contrast to being motivated by factors the player is already experiencing. This form of regional government is counterintuitive if national self-determinism and the nation-type identity that arise from that are what the player associates with and is relevant to them right now, compared to adapting to the personality values of others.

Reasons to incorporate national self-determinism into regional politics

As inferred above, national determinism and nation type is what a new player would first identify with, at least if/until they decide to learn the other player-invented constructions in the game. Therefore it would be more beneficial to create a regional government that makes national determinism a factor and appeals to something the player is already involved in, before introducing them the rest of the regional politics we know and love.

Secondly, there is an aberration among long-term game players, who far too deep in Government Roleplay, have forgotten what it actually means to be a resident native of the in-game region. However one defines it, it should mean more than keeping a nation alive by logging in once every sixty days as procedural necessity. By incorporating nation-type identity into the regional government system, which is explored below, and obliging players to answer issues on puppets (and while they are there, interact on the RMB as well) it is hoped there would be a greater connection between the in game region and the regional government.

Proposed systems to involve national determinism in regional government

The simplest way to make nation playing relevant to regional government is to have it influence in how votes are counted in the regional assembly. A basic model is shown below.

Equal nation type representation model: The regional assembly will comprise of 27 votes, the votes representing each of the nation types possible in the game. Each nation type vote will be decided by the majority of constituents, the players whose nations fall under that nation type. Consequently, players would be encouraged to pay greater attention to their nations, as rarer nation types would have more control over their nation type vote and thus gain more influence in the gameplay decisions of the regional assembly. It would also be a self-balancing system however, as the strength of each nation type ebbs and flows as players move. To the individual player, this system introduces an additional layer of strategy, similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, at whether they would achieve greater power if they stayed or changed. For this system to function there will be a greater restriction on when players could switch nations – players would be prevented from simply switching puppets to a desired nation type as it suits them.

Another consideration under this model is that issues have a smaller impact on larger nations, so it is harder for long-term players with established nations to change their nation-type voting constituency. This has the effect of empowering the newer members of a region, as low population nations could switch constituencies freely.

Variations

Proportional nation type representation model: The previous system has a problem where it could discourage recruitment from established players as more nations means a dilution of their power and it is more difficult for them to change nation type. An alternative system would be a Proportional nation type representation model, where each nation type has a minimum of one vote, but the nation type could gain additional votes depending on the size of their constituency. There would now be a trade-off between control and influence for a player deciding whether to switch nation type. For players with established nations, accepting the difficultly of changing type, where is still incentive to recruit to increase the influence and voting power of their nation-type bloc. Additionally, private forums could be made for each nation type for strategizing, further affirming nation-type identity.

Elected legislature variation: The previous models assumed an open legislature where everyone has a right to vote, with the changes made in the counting. Alternatively, nation-type representation could be achieved in an elected legislature system, where constituents of that nation type elect a person as their representative. By having clear constituents to represent and be accountable for, nation-type representation avoids a flaw present in most attempts to make an elected legislature.

[RiderSyl]

I read Gruen's article...

Gameplay must be killed in order for the WA/SC to grow into what NS Sports is? If that's truly the case, then, I'll be rooting against the progress of the WA/SC as an element of this site.

And I will not be alone.

[Solorni]

Gruen is basically the Bill O'Rielly of his faction, I don't think even he believes the stuff he says.

[Guy]

^ Serious reading comprehension issues

What Gruen is saying is that there is currently a situation where the votes of high-endo Delegates, typically disinterested in WA matters (and indeed, as you noted, usually GPers) are effectively determinative of the outcome of a WA vote. This is obviously quite unusual, and could possibly discourage participation in the WA itself (feeling of helplessness, having to suck it up to large WADs, etc.)

Nowhere did he suggest 'killing gameplay'. There are obviously many other ways to address this. He didn't even propose any severance of the link between GP and the WA.

This wasn't even Gruen's main contention regarding the WA. Almost all of his article dealt with the impact of moderation on it. Almost as a side note, he very legitimately pointed out this other issue, which does undoubtedly affect the WA and WAers.

[Vhearun]

Re-read the Gruen article and...yeah, it seems like he was using the NS Sports portion of the game in order to contrast, compare, and therefore criticize the way the WA, in particular the GA, conducts itself. Even that was narrowed down to the moderation between the two, and the rulings that led to that moderation. Really, of all the criticism that I've read on moderation in the WA, I find this one of the best simply because they took the time to contrast and compare it to another aspect of the game where what they want to happen in the WA is, in fact, working for that aspect.

I know that some of the more difficult rulings Gruen mentions haven't even been tackled yet in the big discussion threads going on. I'm quite eager to see how they are tackled. In the end, though,it might be interesting to see how the WA fared if it were handled like NS Sports. Though, I almost imagine by now it would be too late to change to that way of playing the game.

Gruenberg, I do agree with you. I'd love to get more involved in the GA and try my hand at a proposal, but right now I don't feel nearly competent enough to do so. Even my boyfriend wanted to join in and make a resolution, and I had to school him on how serious that part of the game was.

[Guy]

Update no. 17, July 2015

Hello. LR here as the Foreign-Affairs Officer of TRR. It's been awhile since our last update, so I hope you all don't miss us too much and enjoy this pleasant update .

New Delegate Elected

Most excitingly, we have a new Delegate. Following an intense election campaign, former TRR Delegate and prominent RRA Commander Guy was elected Delegate, replacing Unibot.

The election was initiated by Gradea, who first announced his challenge, reasoning that a year was too long for any GCR delegate to hold office. This drew inspiration from the community, as Cormac and Crazygirl also challenged for the position. Finally, Guy placed his name on the ballot. The campaign was fierce and the debates were intense, leading to a number of candidates withdrawing from the race. At the end of the election, the results were clear: McMasterdonia/Guy, a committed member of the community since 2011, pulled a clear majority, ending Unibot's time as Delegate. We thank Unibot for his time at TRR.

Guy highlighted his major plans for the Delegacy as being the improvement of cooperation with other regions on cultural and security matters, as well as continuing the engagement and close relations with the on-site community.

Election Season: Yup, There Were More

As mentioned in our last update prior to this one, TRR's constitution was modified to have regular Officer elections every 4 months, to be held every April, August and December. Since then, we also decided to accommodate regular elections for the position of Speaker of the Assembly, who is primarily responsible for maintenance of debate in TRR's legislature. Elections for the Speaker are now held every four months in-between regular Officer elections. Delegate elections, however, will continue to remain on a challenge basis.

The April Officer elections resulted in fierce competition as seven candidates, both newcomers and veterans alike, contested for the four available positions. The results were as follows:

*Christian Democrats (WA Affairs)
*Kyorgia (Internal Affairs)
*Libetarian Republics (Foreign Affairs)
*Sad-States (Human Resources)

Prior to the Delegate election, the June Speaker elections were held. Guy was re-elected unopposed. Following his election to the Delegacy and vacation of the Speakership, a new contest was held for Speaker.

Two candidates put themselves forward for Speaker: ChurchofSatan and Tim Stark, otherwise known as Osiris' Pharaoh. Following a very tight vote, and the candidates making their cases to the best of their abilities, Tim eventually secured the Speakership with a vote of 10-6. We're looking forward to the [s]Timtatorship[/s] his most benevolent Speakership.

Helping Lazarus

The formation of the NLO in Lazarus and subsequent conflict strongly affected all aspects of TRR life. Lazarus is the RR's closest and oldest friends, the true bonds of friendship also being reflected by no less than four treaties. TRR immediately took the lead in responding to the situation, first attempting to secure a diplomatic solution through encouragement of the NLO regime to undo its devestating actions, and then more proactive measures through deployment of the RRA and the provision of temporary shelter and BBQ to the Lazarene natives-in-exile. TRR further boosted diplomatic support for the LUS by withdrawing embassies from the NPO and voting for their condemnation.

The RRA was closely involved with the Lazrene liberation attempt, with several RRA veterans leading the charge against the NLO through endo-tarting and RMB support. More importantly, the clandestine plan that eventually led to the NLO's demise with closely supported by RRA Commanders Frattastan and Guy.

We wish our Lazarene friends all the best with their new government and Constitution, and we are looking forward to continuing working with them closely.

Speaker's Report

Howdy everyone! While I'm currently serving in another office, I had the privilege of being TRR's Speaker for the previous few months beforehand.

The last two months were very busy ones in TRR's Assembly. Delegate Unibot laid out an ambitious legislative reform agenda, which included both Constitutional and statutory changes.

First, following passionate debate on our regional identity, TRR chose to entrench in its Constitution its respect for the principle of regional self-determination and opposition to invasions. This idea seems to have caught on, with our Lazarene friends using similar wording in their new Constitution. Second, as mentioned above, regular elections were extended to the Speakership. Lastly, TRR enacted its very first Charter of Civil Rights, which provides for ten rights afforded to all Rejectees, that decision-makers should have regard to.

Treaties have also been keeping the RR busy, with no less than eight treaties being ratified this year alone. Many of the Treaties involve reaching out to regions not usually involved in Gameplay, such as International Northwestern Union, while others are with more established regions such as Osiris.

Some proposals have not enjoyed as much success. Gradea proposed legislation relating to Vice Delegates, forming a Security Council (bearing a likeness to TNP's) and providing the power to declare nations Persona non Grata to the Delegate. These proposals were rejected by the community, as they had either already been provided for by existing law, or they failed to take into account TRR's unique situation in lacking the power of ejection. We wish Gradea every success with his future legislative endeavours.

Rejected Realms Army's News

The RRA is still here, and still defending 12 years since its inception. It participated in several defensive missions including liberation of belgium, Eternal Scholars, and A Blank Canvas. The RRA assisted with the delegate transitions in the North Pacific & supported the liberation efforts during the recent Lazarus crisis.

News In Brief

* The Citizenship Council is under new management. The Council consists of long-standing citizens Frattastan, Guy, and Christian Democrats.

* Natives of Taco Island invade Kandyland! Recently, the natives of 10000 Islands arrange a friendly visit to the Rejected Realms RMB. We celebrate with BBQ & Tacos.

* CG complains for more coffee

[Louisistan]

I second the complaint for more coffee.

[Libetarian Republics]

Update no. 18, December 2015

Greetings friends and allies! It's been five months since our last update so we're overdue for another one. Here's what's been happening in The Rejected Realms!

New Delegate Elected

Back in mid-June Guy was elected delegate and he did a good job. Unfortunately Guy stepped down because he no longer had the time to lead our government. Maybe he'll come back to the big chair someday. We would certainly appreciate it. This time around we had 4 candidates for the delegacy, Crazy Girl, kyorgia, Libetarian Republics and Christian Democrats. In true TRR tradition, Crazy Girl ran for delegate with no intention of actually taking the job. In fact that was her campaign. Kyorgia campaigned a strong emphasis on Recruitment and Integration. Libetarian Republics campaigned with a focus on Foreign Affairs, Culture and Integration. Christian Democrats campaigned with a very strong emphasis on quality & efficiency, hoping to merge various parts of the forum and improve the quality of work each department would pursue. After voting ended it seemed that Crazy Girl would have won by just one vote. However at the last second she withdrew from the race, not anticipating that she would win. Following voting procedure, the results were finalized.

Most of the candidates campaigns were positive overall, however concerns over Christian Democrats pro-life views with regards to World Assembly votes came up when he confirmed that there could be times when he would disregard the citizens choices in favor of his own. This contributed in some manner to the overwhelming success of Libetarian Republics' campaign. Libetarian Republics was elected with 11 votes. Although Christian Democrats protested the results due to Crazy Girl's withdrawal from the race, it would do little more than prolong an unnecessary conversation.

Officer Elections

Officer elections this time around was not so competitive as the delegate election. There were just enough candidates to fill all four positions, leaving just a confirmation vote. Incumbents Church of Satan and kyorgia ran for re-election, retaining their places in the cabinet. New faces to the regional government "game", 98X and SpiderJerusalem ran as well. All four candidates were elected with no competition or campaigning. Delegate-elect Libetarian Republics would place Church of Satan as Foreign Affairs Officer, kyorgia as Outreach Officer, 98X as Culture Officer and SpiderJerusalem as Media Officer. Outreach, the first change enacted by Libetarian Republics, is in charge of both recruitment AND integration. With the cabinet elected work has begun in making The Rejected Realms better. Here's hoping for a great term!

TRR at The NS World Fair

At the fourth annual NS World Fair, The Rejected Realms would once again celebrate Rejectmas with friends from across NationStates. As it did last year, Rejectmas went over well with visitors proclaiming "I love disconnected culture! Have a very hairy Rejectmas everyone", "I love your rejectmas manual too.", "Tangerines!" and "This is the most interesting regional booth I've visited so far." Tangerines and omelettes abound, Rejects and visitors alike took part in the traditional Rejectmas activities of truth-saying, fear-sharing and telling one another what they would lock up in cabinets so as to prevent their theft by The Silver Ghost. The new addition to our booth however, was a cryptic puzzle created by then Culture Officer, Church of Satan, who would discover that no fair-goer was able to solve it, both to his surprise and dissatisfaction. All things considered, everyone had a very smooth Rejectmas.

RRA Update

Over the last 5 months the RRA has taken part in numerous missions. Most notably its participation in the liberation and refounding of Hogwarts which is no longer in the possession of the invaders that had once stole it from the native community. The RRA also participated in the defense of Scandinavium and Union of Sovereign States among others.

[The Church of Satan]

Earlier today Hileville, the elected delegate of The South Pacific, disregarding all protocol and legal precendent, dissolved the charter of The Coalition of The South Pacific. The Rejected Realms does not recognize the Transitional Government of The South Pacific as the legitimate government of The South Pacific and condemns its heinous seizure of The South Pacific nor do we condone its actions against the legitimate government.

In accordance with the TRR-TSP Treaty of Peace and Amity, we hereby pledge our support of The Coalition of The South Pacific and recognize it as the sole government of The South Pacific. We urge the rogue elements within The South Pacific to undo their oppressive acts against The Coalition of The South Pacific and restore order to the region. We further urge other regions to likewise decry these illegal acts against The South Pacific.

Libetarian Republics,
Delegate of The Rejected Realms


The Church of Satan,
Foreign Affairs Officer of The Rejected Realms

January 31, 2016

[SouthMac]

In accordance with the TRR-TSP Treaty of Peace and Amity, we hereby pledge our support of The Coalition of The South Pacific and recognize it as the sole government of The South Pacific. We urge the rogue elements within The South Pacific to undo their oppressive acts against The Coalition of The South Pacific and restore order to the region. We further urge other regions to likewise decry these illegal acts against The South Pacific.

You do realize Hileville remains the legal Delegate under the Coalition as well unless and until the Assembly recalls him, right? I ask because I'm curious how you intend to pledge your support to the Coalition if nobody still supporting the Coalition can find the motivation to take the legal steps necessary to recall Hileville and the rest of the Cabinet, and designate a CSS member as acting Delegate. Unless that happens, there isn't a Coalition, and you'll look as silly as those who declared their support for "the legitimate government of Osiris" in 2013.

Not that The Rejected Realms looking silly is unfamiliar to any of us.

[Consular]

I would think dissolving the charter is enough to make him rogue.

Really though, when your position relies on a legal technicality Cormac, you're grasping for arguments.