Experiment: How would you explain Gameplay to an outsider?

[Socio Polor]

GP is the battleground or warzone of NS. On one side you have an army trying to take over, occupy or otherwise destroy territory. On another side you have an army trying to restore land to it's people and fight or retake territory (regions) back to how they were before being raided. I got this understanding when I first got into the R/D community while in DEN. Though GP isn't all about R/D, and that's what a lot of people seem to be confused or misunderstanding about. It's a big portion of it, but R/D doesn't cover all of GP. GP can also be about building relationships and settling regional comminities on the site. GP can also help us find ways on how to make NS a better site sense GP takes up a massive mechanical portion of NS, not just the forums. In fact IMO the Gameside is what makes NS, NS. Without it we'll just be another typical forum on the world wide web.

[Pollaetorian]

GP is the battleground or warzone of NS. On one side you have an army trying to take over, occupy or otherwise destroy territory. On another side you have an army trying to restore land to it's people and fight or retake territory (regions) back to how they were before being raided. I got this understanding when I first got into the R/D community while in DEN. Though GP isn't all about R/D, and that's what a lot of people seem to be confused or misunderstanding about. It's a big portion of it, but R/D doesn't cover all of GP. GP can also be about building relationships and settling regional comminities on the site. GP can also help us find ways on how to make NS a better site sense GP takes up a massive mechanical portion of NS, not just the forums. In fact IMO the Gameside is what makes NS, NS. Without it we'll just be another typical forum on the world wide web.

You and Bel say that and I agree, but this forum doesn't care about discussions of about regional governance or communities.

[Socio Polor]

GP is the battleground or warzone of NS. On one side you have an army trying to take over, occupy or otherwise destroy territory. On another side you have an army trying to restore land to it's people and fight or retake territory (regions) back to how they were before being raided. I got this understanding when I first got into the R/D community while in DEN. Though GP isn't all about R/D, and that's what a lot of people seem to be confused or misunderstanding about. It's a big portion of it, but R/D doesn't cover all of GP. GP can also be about building relationships and settling regional comminities on the site. GP can also help us find ways on how to make NS a better site sense GP takes up a massive mechanical portion of NS, not just the forums. In fact IMO the Gameside is what makes NS, NS. Without it we'll just be another typical forum on the world wide web.

You and Bel say that and I agree, but this forum doesn't care about discussions of about regional governance or communities.

Indeed, that's why most GP activities and discussion take place on the gameside or some offsite chat channel (Discord, Skype, etc)

[McChimp]

You and Bel say that and I agree, but this forum doesn't care about discussions of about regional governance or communities.

That soft rubbish is what RMBs are for.

[Seahassee]

It is essentially a model UN where all the nations are autocratic and led by megalomaniacs.

As a Model UN delegate and a GP lurker, I can confirm that this is too true.

[Unibot III]

Well, I'll give my answer but it's a very Unibotian answer.

I would say Gameplay is Geopolitics. It's a complex engagement between competing constellations of players self-organized in relation to others by their stance to conflicts, typically proxy in nature. The definition of "success" is elastic and generally every 'movement' contends to be successful on their own terms.

Our politics exists in a 'plane' of activity that is neither 'OOC' or 'IC' in the traditional scene, players act in a manner that is self-aware that the game is a game, but it varies to what extent their behaviour is sincerely an extension of their real selves. We tend to make a RL/NS distinction more than a OOC/IC distinction.

At the more micro-level, there's intra-regional politics, local stuff, but without geopolitical significance these dynamics often don't transcend communities to become a capital-G "Gameplay" event.

---

I started and never finished a intro to Gameplay politics back in 2016-ish, but some of the content might be interesting to some folks. I don't plan on finishing it.

International politics in NationStates as we know it today began with the coup d'etat of the Pacific, which saw Francos Spain rise to power in the summer of 2003. Dissidents of Francos Spain's regime, the New Pacific Order (NPO) would corral international actors to their defense, prompting a dramatic series of confrontations over at least the next three years. This 'Great War' (as it's come to be known as) took place between the NPO and its greatest rival, the Alliance Defense Network (ADN) on a number of fronts: through propaganda, politics, intelligence and combat. Simultaneously, military factions like DEN were emerging as competitors and adversaries in their own right.

The Great War has long since ended, but the same fragmentation still remains to this day. Regions are still divided politically along military lines; some, called “defender” regions profess a need for international justice and peace, closely guarding the right of regions to coexist without unprovoked acts of aggression. Contrastingly, “raider” (or “invader”) regions argue players should be free to invade who they wish, appealing to the political neglect of invaded regions and the fun of invading.

Stuck in the middle are regions which contend to act strictly in their own interests, but their differing interpretations of those interests has led to a myriad of distinct labels: “imperialists,” who defend the act of invading as an extension of their region's power and dominance, “independents,” who regard invading as an extension of their region's diplomacy (e.g., cooperation with allies) and “unaligned,” a label of convenience for regions Meanwhile, “neutral” regions are regions that do not have a military and see themselves as agnostic to this whole debate. Larger neutral, independent and unaligned regions are often caught in a political proxy war of sorts as insiders and entryists jostle for control of their foreign policy.

Who's Who...

Game-Created Regions (GCRs), consistently some of the largest and most influential regions in NationStates, are currently split along these lines but the divide is complicated. “Sinker” regions (where nations are resurrected or rejected) are more clearly split down partisan lines, for example.

The Rejected Realms and Lazarus are officially defender regions and have a close cultural, political and historical relationship; the same sistership appears between Osiris and Balder, which are officially imperialist. Relations have often been strained between these two factions since the imperialist-led invasion of the Rejected Realms which brought about the subsequent collapse of the Pan-Sinker Security Pact (PSSP); since then they've accused one another of hostilities, harboring subversives, and excluding each other from diplomatic conferences; ultimately finding themselves on opposite sides of the Osiran Civil War, the NPO invasion of Lazarus and the (uneventful) Lazarene-Osiran War.

“Feeder” regions (where nations are founded) have a more complicated relationship with geopolitics. Historically, feeders were mostly neutral and characteristically isolationist. Diplomacy between feeders almost exclusively would take place with other feeder regions under a sense of “feeder unity” - a guiding mantra of the NPO and its “francoists,” who regarded the diplomatic isolation of their fellow feeders to be to their political advantage. An exception to this was the North Pacific, the largest and most influential feeder, whose diplomatic and military outreach set itself apart from the other feeders and was disparaged by its critics as “userite” in nature.

This characterization isn't nearly as salient as it once was, though, especially as the NPO's influence has declined over the years and the East Pacific and the South Pacific have developed their own armies. Indeed, this late engagement on the military scene on the part of some feeders has revived interest in them as regional partners and theatres of global politics over the past few years. But whether any of these feeders can truly said to be independent or unaligned, defender or invader, is almost perpetually under active consideration and debate; the West Pacific and the Pacific, meanwhile, have remained close allies and devoutly isolationist and neutral (with an imperialist bent.)

[An Amphibious Equation]

It's only in recent years with a surge of cosmopolitanism, that Military Gameplay on the R/D side has had a larger play in the Geopolitics as Unibot described, and still Belschaft isn't wrong either. It shouldn't be conflated as the same thing.

I think the biggest mistake people make is in fact conflating X and Y into Z or one of the other.

On the surface it all looks the same, but there is nuances. There's biased subjective personal opinions, but that shouldn't detract from those nuances.

Examples are Defending is also Raiding (Mechanically same thing, just at reactionary and for abstract reasons), Civil Wars and Coups (heavily subjective), Imperialism and Independence (projections of power with aggressive force and politic).

In a nutshell, we're always arguing over something from serious to trivial or someone is leading some troops somewhere for various reasons.

R/D as a category is and should be a subset of Military Gameplay as a whole that generally ignores politics and mechanically does one or the other for the sake of it, fun, or personal driven ideology. Left vs Right is it's own subset, always been going on before Geopolitics got involved. They're usually only politically personal ideologically driven unlike R/D and Geopolitics can be ignored.

While there has been a massing bleeding in of differing sets of Gameplay as a whole, they're still distinct things.

[Kylia Quilor]

When I say 'R/D', I don't mean the minigame of Pure defenders against pure raiders (though I wish pure raiders was all pure defenders defended against), I mean the 'physical' act of raiding and defending,. which, however much it annoyws me, are the only two actions takeable in NS Military Gameplay - capture, or defense.

[Tim-Opolis]

It is essentially a model UN where all the nations are autocratic and led by megalomaniacs.

As a Model UN delegate and a GP lurker, I can confirm that this is too true.

As a Model UN Head Del and a GP Shitposter, I can confirm we're way worse than even the most twisted Crisis Committee

[Vuori Kunin-Grrs]

It's extremely emotionally and mentally tiring, and above all, takes massive persistence and large amounts of time to be successful in.

[Th Empire of Wymondham]

It's the most confusing part of the NS forums filled with old alliances, old grudges, broken promises, broken fridenships, ideological struggle and general shitposting but without it NS wouldn't be the same

[Dysmastan]

Answer:

"Gameplay": what happens when bored kids and a drunk Max Barry mutually find the same idea appealing.

[Socio Polor]

It's extremely emotionally and mentally tiring, and above all, takes massive persistence and large amounts of time to be successful in.

It also takes lots of planning and your actions can lead to different results or counseqences and open many paths

[Kylia Quilor]

It's shitposting with rules.

[Dysmastan]

It's shitposting with rules.

That's funny. I like you. Keep being funny.

[Todd McCloud]

As someone who's more of an RPer these days, I try to first discuss differences between in-character and out-of-character, cause that's the crux of the argument when it comes to differences in how one plays this game. Roleplayers, for instancde, can generally do both, but they play the game in-character. Gameplayers used to have some in-character personas, but in general it is now almost exclusively out-of-character. To that end, it makes explaining to a roleplayer, or even a completely new nation, still a difficult task to surmise, but one that is more manageable.

I actually posted a lecture on this during the last NSWF, Bridging Roleplaying and Gameplaying

In my opinion, the ways in which people play this game are rather different, and that is a symptom of its open-eneded nature. Don't get me wrong, this is still a game centered about nation-building, but due to how the game has changed, there are now many facets available. It's a lil cliche to say 'well, what do you want to do?' but that's the point: NS kind of caters to multiple facets of playing a game, and they are always centered about conflict.

I'll try to tackle some of those definitions today too. I read some of the bullet points and that could be helpful (but I believe a definition list exists somewhere).

[An Amphibious Equation]

As someone who's more of an RPer these days, I try to first discuss differences between in-character and out-of-character, cause that's the crux of the argument when it comes to differences in how one plays this game. Roleplayers, for instancde, can generally do both, but they play the game in-character. Gameplayers used to have some in-character personas, but in general it is now almost exclusively out-of-character. To that end, it makes explaining to a roleplayer, or even a completely new nation, still a difficult task to surmise, but one that is more manageable.

I actually posted a lecture on this during the last NSWF, Bridging Roleplaying and Gameplaying

In my opinion, the ways in which people play this game are rather different, and that is a symptom of its open-eneded nature. Don't get me wrong, this is still a game centered about nation-building, but due to how the game has changed, there are now many facets available. It's a lil cliche to say 'well, what do you want to do?' but that's the point: NS kind of caters to multiple facets of playing a game, and they are always centered about conflict.

I'll try to tackle some of those definitions today too. I read some of the bullet points and that could be helpful (but I believe a definition list exists somewhere).

One can argue, since in effect Gameplay is simulating politics and military stuff in the only way we can, that we're role-playing a character. More akin to improv acting or a LARP roleplay than story writing.

The main problem is that while in story writing the creators can be attached to their character(s), they're not putting in personal emotion behind their character in a way that NSGP does. To clarify my point, we as Gameplayers are "living" our characters instead of writing about them.

One general RL rules I know of when talking to strangers and aquaintances, is to avoid talking about Politics and Religion. Because those things can be very decisive. A hardcore Conservative and Liberal meet and get along, until the conversation turns to politics and realize they very much oppose each other or replace for religion or other things that can cause such a result.

In NSGP, the characters we live as, have in game beliefs and naturally we bleed some of our RL personality into said characters. It's complicated, and it's true that there's been less of IC. Personally, I don't agree with Moldavi that Dualism is dead. Sedge may have set the tone in Gameplay to go against it, but it exists.

The major problems internally is taking things too personal and crossing lines IC, OOC, and the Rules.

In the past many things got past they shouldn't be allowed by our community. In the past few or couple years we've taken stances to root out problematic stuff, and of course there's no way to Miniority Report it so things will still slip past in occasions.

At the same time, we've gotten far too OOC. Looking back, at least as far back 10 years and now. There's been a lot of changes and some are contradictory but are still true to our current climate. (Note that changes do not mean Game and Rule changes, they can have effects, but I'm talking about the cultural climate and interactions).