Oh so the mystery continues...
Cormactopia Prime wrote:Guy wrote:I am loathe to lecture experienced players on what gameplay needs, but I have to say that as the years go by, the less convinced I am that more conflict!! is the solution to NS' woes. Particularly, I think it's worthwhile to distinguish between interregional and intraregional conflict. While the former has some role to play (particularly through military gameplay), I've found the latter completely not conducive to the good running of a region.
Just to be clear, when I call for conflict I'm consistently calling for interregional, not intraregional, conflict.
While I've sometimes engaged in intraregional conflict (most have, whether they like it or not, because sometimes in a region you care about you can't avoid conflict), I've never been a fan of it, which is why I've helped take radical steps in Osiris twice to put a stop to our most destructive conflicts.
That said, there are some folks who believe intraregional political conflict, as long as it doesn't explode into intraregional military conflict (i.e., a coup or civil war, which isn't even possible in most stable UCRs), is healthy. For example, this used to be a major tenet of Europeia and imperialist regions like TNI and The LKE, and for all I know it's still important to them. To each their own. I've certainly never found it to be healthy in the regions in which I've participated, but Europeia and the imperialist regions do seem to handle it better. Perhaps that is in fact because intraregional military conflict is totally impossible in their regions, so they're forced to come to political terms with each other either by decisively winning elections or legislative victories, or compromising. Or maybe it works for them for some other reason. In any event, the point is I don't feel like it's my place or anyone else's to tell them that doesn't work for them and they should stop doing it, but overall I agree with you that intraregional conflict is risky and often, but not always, unhealthy.
I don't want to engage in serious discussions on a forum that has devolved from that substantially, but conflict is an inherent part of Gameplay or at least it used to be before people tried equating conflict with toxicity and using that as a weapon to actually destroy any possibility of conflict\competition\activity\engagement.
There are types of conflicts but humanity and politics exist because of conflict. We've seen what happens when regions don't have any form of competition (regions where barely one person runs for a position or people are elected or selected by whomever and then don't do their jobs or positions exist as sinecures for the "well-behaved boring sycophantic type"). Competition and conflict create a need and desire (like sports or politics in the real world) to actually get things done and to keep creating change and improvement. This is why, sometimes, when one or two people leave a region everything they built gets lost or breaks down.
People promoting democracy but against conflict (whether intra or interregional) are ignoring history and\or trying to sugar coat not just this era of politics but the majority era of politics. This is a political simulator game. There are many ways to play it (we've had politicians who were from a variety of fields\disciplines from acting, law, philosophy, etc) but the idea that conflict has to be eliminated is why there is a deep feeling of stagnancy, of the kind of "nothing matters, so no one engages any longer." Historically, entrenched and often totalitarian systems of power are the kind that want to stifle dissent because it is in their best interests to do so. In fact, conflict has been lopsided in NS for some time which I think has been one of the bigger problems (one side seems to decisively win and is entrenched giving little or no opportunity for fresh blood as it were).
The easiest way to see what the lack of conflict does to humanity as a whole is to look at Serenity (2005) and what happens on and to the people of Miranda. The goal of "no conflict" in a game is no more game. That's simple and simply put. We play games to get over obstacles and challenges and compete with other players to "get good." Why would this game arena be any different? Why would NationStates, a game inspired by a book that imagines itself to be a political simulator with a liberal bent (like reality
), eschew conflict? What is the alternative "successful" model being offered here? This line of thinking feeds into "get rid of R\D." I mean with this mindset the best way to end conflict is to end the game, if that's not possible then to end the possibility of coups\raids\tags and end R\D. Too far? Not really if you follow the line of "conflict is the biggest sin."Competition can bring out the best and the worst in people. Instead of trying to stifle it, perhaps creating some solid guidelines to how to engage in IC conflict (and creating these public and visible guidelines that are applied to everyone) would actually benefit the game. That and making sure that players can't weaponize "conflict is bullying" (to cover up their own inadequacies as players) in a competitive game would help restore health and a healthy competitive environment to the game. It reminds me of some of the dialogue around the U.S. women's soccer team and the disgusting people who seem to want to punish them for winning or expect them to apologize for winning. Nah.
Pinky up
