Our guest today is
The Grim Reaper, known in roleplay circles as well as gameplay circles - he is a talented writer and roleplayer, a long-time member of
The Rejected Realms, member of the RRA, and founder of the exciting new roleplay region
Greater Azhukali. One a personal level, I first realized what a funny and detailed writer Grim was when he wrote a satire of NS. Since then we’ve become NS family and I’ve enjoyed getting to know him and also learn about his delightful stories and projects <3
This interview took place on January 6, 2019 over Discord.
How did you learn about NationStates? How long have you been playing NS?I've been playing on and off since about 2008 - if I recall correctly, I found out about nationstates purely coincidentally. I think I ended up here just by googling political simulators online. At the time flash games were all the rage, so you could generally google some sort of game online and find something interesting. I was super into sim games, and was just starting my interest in politics. And the rest is history.
Was your first nation named The Grim Reaper or a variation of it? And where did you found if you remember?Oh, I couldn't possibly remember where it was... It was Vortiaganica - I picked up The Grim Reaper from the username release in 2011!
Oh exciting what was the username release of 2011?2011 was when the boneyard first started - now, usernames get released over time as time passes from the nations having CTE'd. However, in 2011, there was a pretty large wave of initial releases where usernames that 'would' have become eligible to take under the new rules before the invention of the boneyard were made available. The Grim Reaper was one of them.
Is there any other significance or symbolism behind your nation name and\or flag?At around that period, I was very interested in how mythology depicted various concepts - two of the more consistent depictions in global myth that I'm aware of tend to be Time, and Death, which are to an extent fairly related not just as concepts but as depictions. One of the things that really drew me to The Grim Reaper was a vague interest in developing a personal composition of 'Death', the anthropomorphization, as a warmer, more appealing figure - less grimdark, and so forth - as a 'vanity' account. By vanity account, I mean a sort of persona to play in the game for OOC discussions based on a desirable, real-life-inspired name - something that USS Monitor is well known under all their various aliases in NSG, for instance.
It was something of a thought experiment; to think through the cachet that mythology has for us in the real world, and what it means to try and envision that differently.
Unfortunately,
The Grim Reaper never became a huge mainstay of my RP, so I was never really able to express any of those thoughts in depth.
But it has, of course, become the consistent identity I use throughout the game, so there's one win!
I think having a consistent identity is almost like a brand in NS and part and parcel of the personas players have. That said, how did you get involved in gameplay?It was Balder and Osiris opening up. It wasn't a particularly in-depth decisions for me; I just thought it was an interesting way to get into a big region on the ground floor, and obviously I was well-aware of the feeder GCRs as almost all nationstaters are. I didn't have a great - or any - conception of how a sinker like Lazarus or TRR would differ from the feeders, but I did know that they were influential, big, and seemed to have no problems growing in comparison to the RP regions or the general chat regions I was familiar with, which had to actively recruit constantly.
It was an interesting experimental ground to want to try and transform, particularly in order to explore one of my biggest bugbears in the game - a total lack of GCR theming. At the time, none of the GCRs had a really consistent theme that I can remember, if you exclude the NPO as a broad theme, but both Osiris and Balder obviously lent themselves to and embraced a pretty deep thematic element almost from Day 1.
Oh when was this approximately? So you were there when Osiris and Balder became GCRs?I think it was around 2011 as well? I'm not good with times, but yes, I was one of the first people in Osiris. If I remember correctly, I was in Osiris in the first hour it was up, as it came out in the afternoon Melbourne time. I also ended up running in their first delegacy election with Nicholas Sinterklaas, a Christmas-themed puppet of mine, although I didn't do very well.
That's so cool! Makes me wish they would reset\reshuffle or at least finally get some female themed GCRs created.I think more and more we are seeing some crossover between NS communities but it is still rare to find a player so well immersed in both Gameplay and Roleplay. How did you get involved in the roleplay community?That, I barely even remember. I know I started off in Forum 7, which at the time was a combination of what we now call Forum 7 as well as Portal to the Multiverse. I participated in the occasional character RP back then, as well as the chat threads - Nana's Bistro being the largest and best known for most of F7's history. Those collectively were how I started to meet people who would eventually move into the main RP world of NS, like Madjack.
From there, my first involvement in II at large was with Vortiaganica, which was a slaver state. Vortiaganica became a member of a group called IASEN - International Association of Slave-Exporting Nations. It wasn't particularly active for a long time, and neither was I, but some of its members DID participate in the broader RP community. At some point, somewhere, I became interested in the RP community. Azhukali became the first RP region I joined - with very little RP experience to point to, as F7 still purged RP threads after a week, and no links to people who could endorse me, my main options were regions that were 'open', requiring neither invites nor applications.
The other major open RP region from that time that survived was
Greater Dienstad, also a great region. Most of Azhukali's people participated in the RP community's big IRC channel at the time - now affectionately nick-named #sanc, founded by former mod and Azhukali member Jenrak. So though I joined late in Azhukali's life, and I never ended up really RPing with them, they DID introduce me to the world of NS' RPers.
You mentioned IRC, do players still use IRC today? Then, which NS platform do you use the most (Discord, Gameside RMB, Forums)? What do you think of these platforms and their strengths and weaknesses for gameplay and\or roleplay?As far as I know, no-one really uses IRC anymore - many of the #sanc crew either left the game, moved to regional discord servers, or joined what is now the major cross-regional RP discord, which is actually the NationStates Future Tech server. A lot of the more active #sancers felt that Future Tech provided a better basis for RP that was more character-driven, and discouraged people from 'godmodding' or 'techwanking' by requiring that people outright planned and organized the outcomes of their RPs.
Then, I currently use them all for different things - Discord is the best way to have casual chats with people, it allows for so much more transient conversation and topic changes and meeting new people. It is way easier to have a somewhat more personal connection with people on Discord than it is to do it on IRC or the RMB or forums. I still use the RMB and find it really appealing for smaller regions, with people who might be busier or not want to use a Discord channel? I'm in an NSG region where the primary mode of communication is the RMB, and it allows for a slower-paced flow of chatting that is more akin to like a Facebook feed than a Facebook conversation. I really don't think there is a whole lot of space to use either RMBs or Discord for RP - neither of them allow for enough preservation of information to have complex canons or conversations, and it limits you to a single 'thread' unless you're willing to do very complex stuff with Discord. It's just easier to use a forum where you can edit, prepare, plan an RP post, change it based on feedback, and have time to sit down and think rather than participate in a live conversation.
I've used Discord for 'live' RP before, both with NSers and with RL friends once, but it really is a weird experience that made me feel a bit tied down - a complex RP system that introduces a lot of downtime, or where people need to think quite a bit about their posts, makes it a little awkward at times, especially with people who have different typing speeds. Of course, you can also voice chat, but then you're really giving up on long-term RPs altogether if you want to exclusively voice chat.
What is your favorite historical NS event or moment? Why?The April Fools events are always a favourite of mine, but my absolute favourite was the first Z-Day. I'd been vaguely involved in the "NationStates Community", which was a region that was created for the NS IPO April Fools joke. The IPO april fools joke involved a 'stock issue', where nations were given shares based on their population and were allowed to transfer them between each other. NSC was formed to try and agglomerate enough shares to 'win' the game, by beating the number of shares that Max Barry claimed to have issued himself, on behalf of, well, the NationStates community.
The region went quiet for a year, and then with Z-Day, a lot of people who had been involved in it went back to try and figure out a good way to become involved with Z-Day. Basically, what was settled on was to turn NSC into a sort of quarantine region - where people could come from their home regions and get aggressively cured for zombieism, and then go back to their own regions to help them research a cure (healthier nations could research more effectively). As time went on, we organized 'cure teams', which were made of large nations that could go out to regions and aggressively cure their members as well, and we organized cure teams by population and time of day. That was a real hoot.
What I like most about events is how they bring people together towards a common goal! What are some contemporary projects or events in NS that you are working or interested in?Well, IRL I've got some other priorities to take care of first, but at the moment my biggest NS priority is trying to get my new region,
Greater Azhukali up and running. It's a bit of a slow start, but I have fairly big plans for it - not just as a conventional RP region, but as a hangout place really for people who like the idea of being part of a community that is built around RP rather than GP, just like we have in so many R/D-based GP regions and GCR communities where people who don't necessarily participate in the core activity of the region still feel welcome parts of the community who can both contribute to and get something out of the region.
At the moment, we are in the final stages of finalizing a flag and a map, which will let us start to really soft-launch the region. This map is in development!
Oh that's really exciting! I like the idea of a region built around RP. Do you have a type of roleplay in mind? Also, will ask you how to pronounce the pretty name Greater Azhukali in Voice Chat So we're primarily looking at more traditional, modern-tech nation RP, but I'm trying to investigate ways to make them easier to interact with for people who may only want to do one-off RPs, or who want ways to engage with the RP world that don't need them to build a whole nation up from scratch. My particular interest has really always been character RP, and even my nation RPs tended to be very based around characters - I didn't like to write the more stereotypical "big military conflict", and all my military RP posts always focused on the feelings and decision-making processes of the individuals involved in them, from the top to the trenches. I'd like to encourage a very strongly character-focused style of nation RP, as I believe that having people be more interested in their characters in their nations allows way more variety in the story-writing process. Hopefully, that can also be used to open opportunities for other people to involve themselves in the nations created by more established RPers, without feeling too constrained and feeling like they can actually write their own stories - long-term, short-term, or one-shot - even if it is in someone else's world.
And I've been told, of course, that there are plenty of NSers who like a very DnD style character-RP, and those have always been popular with GCRs, so 'hard' character-RP is definitely still an option!
What kind of government structure do you envision for this? Something more central like GCRs or?No, I definitely want to organize it like a more traditional RP region - I'm looking to avoid what I believe to be missteps by, say, GCR communities in terms of RP, where there are strict cartography staff who exercise a lot of personal control over the maps and who don't just take responsibility but also claim a pretty extensive right over the map, or canon-moderators who tell people what is or isn't correct beyond making sure that people who RP together like to RP together. I want it to be a largely community-driven affair with a pretty strongly defined permanent regional administration - a very thin hierarchy.
So maybe a slight segue, but when I was in TNP, I noticed that the style of modern-tech RP has really held on to some of the things that led the 'main' NS community to move closer to Future-Tech. A lot of the problems in that community were down to a very winner-takes-all approach to nation RP, and political RP, where characterization and really telling stories fell by the wayside on behalf of 'winning'. One of the problems with this, and in fact the central problem, is that this is both a symptom and a cause of an unhealthy social environment. Azhukali was popular not just because it was a great RP region, but because it was a group of people who liked RPing with each other. That's what led to the Future-Tech community of today, that spirit of sociability and RPing together first, and letting skill and quality develop organically from just wanting to tell great stories with each other.
I think there are a lot of opportunities in taking the next step - to move from wanting to tell great stories in collaborative RP, to actively developing ways that anyone can contribute to an RP world and its people no matter how much or how little time they want to devote to RP, and feel like part of that world's community, and have a place to just "shoot the breeze" so to speak. A lot of RP regions can, by nature, be very insular - you don't often hear of people saying "hey, I don't RP, but I read your RP and I thought it was cool, even if I don't RP myself". I think there's a lot of value on the RP side to having people who can help you work through ideas that they may be interested in reading, and not writing, and I'm really looking hard to find opportunities at the other end, for RP to provide value to non-RPers - even if that's primarily to drive activity and to create a core community from which the more informal social connections can come.
Many players, some looking at the game with rose colored glasses, lament the bygone era(s) and discuss the current one as stagnant or otherwise inferior. Players have proposed a change in mechanics or other features to bring new life to the game. What do you think about this?"I think there's merit to the idea that NS gets fewer newbies than before, which causes stagnation in ideas and means that there's less turnover to replace established players who move on. I don't think mechanical changes will fix that except by reducing turnover. More needs to be done to expand the actual activities offered by NS communities - so many of us older players mostly just stay around to chat with people we know, rather than to participate in any deep R/D or mechanical things. Mechanical features only ever really appeal to GPers IMO anyway, and a lot of the activity in the game is produced by so many of the other communities.
So, if you were Max Barry for a day what would you do?If i was Max Barry for a day I would probably just panic, but what I would want to do is maybe consolidate the RP forums a bit, and move P2TM to the RP section as well. I'd also love to see regions have more options for cross-regional interaction - create the potential for shared interregional message boards, where regions can each be a member of one interregional message board that can optionally cross-post to the main RMB.
What do you do for fun outside of NS?Mostly look for jobs right now. It's been a while since I've had free time, my no #1 passion in the world is anarchism, so I write about and read a lot about anarchism. Other than that I quite like to follow the news, and keep up on politics and philosophy.
My current time is mostly preparing for entering the workforce since I graduated. When I hang out with friends it's mainly boardgaming or online gaming, because a lot of my friends are very scattered around the country or world.
And, as you know, I'm a very big fan of sitcoms and British-style panel shows - other than those, I've replaced my TV watching with YouTube entirely.
Then, I also like to keep in touch with the real estate and business markets - I'm hoping to enter the real estate market in the mid term, and I'm the third generation in my family to take a more speculative approach to real estate, so it pays to keep up to date, and it's something I actually really enjoy.
Favorite movie and\or TV shows?My favourite movie is probably Schindler's List - I saw a /really/ good documentary a while ago that I can't recall, I'm a big fan of TV-style documentaries but I also like feature-length documentaries. My favourite TV show right is
The Good Place, but I was also a big fan of the lesser known British sitcom/dramedy,
The Ambassadors.
Favorite music?My music tastes are very eclectic, I listen to pretty much anything, but I tend to like things that have a lot of depth to their instrumentals and a lot of variation and a good, fast pace. although I broadly change my tastes between genres a lot, my general 'go-to' to point to as a favourite band is Vespertina - other artists I have been super into at times were
Francesco Gabbani who was the Italian entry for Eurovision 2017, and Nightwish the symphonic metal band, and various comedic musical groups or individuals (NSP, Weird Al, Bo Burnham, Tim Minchin)
Favorite book(s)?I haven't been reading nearly as much as I should be for a while, honestly - I'm still working through Tolstoy's
War and Peace, which I quite like, and I was also actually a fan of
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood.
In a more academic sense I enjoyed reading Jesse Cohn's
Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, but that is a very niche read. Actually no I'm going to change my answer. Pyotr Kropotkin's
Memoirs of a Revolutionist was what first got me to start really identifying with anarchism, rather than just as being interested in it, and I still believe it is one of the most interesting approaches to a political treatise I know.
Favorite philosopher?My favourite philosopher is Wilhelm Dilthey. He's a pretty niche philosopher; he was well-known in the 19th century, and is still best known primarily for his influences on Heidegger's work. Dilthey's main interest was establishing what the role of the human sciences should be - what a human scientist should seek to do, and how they should do it. He's probably most associated with the method known as 'hermeneutics', which is effectively the process of interpreting texts in order to get a closer understanding what the ideas and the concepts that their authors tried to impart, and how language is used by those texts. My primary interest in Dilthey is in his influence on events theory.
Dilthey's work came before later hermeneuticists really focused in on the more nitty-gritty of social scientific research, when we insisted on everyone being able to interpret texts in the same, predictable ways, to make broad, generalizable comments about the worlds that they try to communicate. But Dilthey's work offers a unique approach to interpreting texts not to know more about the TEXT, but about the people who write them; Dilthey's focus on the autobiography was unique at the time, and I personally believe that his work is, for the same reasons, totally applicable to understanding why people seek out participating in events, rituals, and festivals, and what importance people put on the 'active' texts of cultural participation that they create for themselves.
Who are some politicians that inspire you or are you favorite right now?My favourite politician is a chap named Joe Toscano, who is something of a perennial candidate in Australia who runs on various platforms, including "Don't Vote."
My favourite 'opposition' politician - someone who I fundamentally disagree with - is Nigel Scullion, who is pretty unpopular for being the spokesperson behind some really terrible policy but is generally a much more forthright person that most politicians, in that he is willing to admit to the many, many mistakes he has made and is actually pretty transparent about them. Both of these politicians are Australian.
Internationally my interest in politicians is a lot more generally left-wing - Jeremy Corbyn, AOC, and I am a big fan of the Catalan and Scottish independence movements.
What is the one or more political issues in the real world that concerns you deeply right now?The most concerning political current event to me is, unfortunately, not that interesting - it's Brexit. It's the most fundamental political change in the current day, as the war against ISIS is probably going to stagnate as the US pulls out, the relationship between the US and Russia seems to have stalled in both directions, and the Sri Lankan constitutional crisis has come to something of a ceasefire.
A more personal second place is the continued popularity of Peter Dutton in Australia, whose extraordinary powers in the current government far outstrip his actual popularity, and his ultraconservatism really teases outright fascism in terms of his relationship with the Australian Federal Police. I'd like to see him rolled in the next election - losing his seat is unlikely but I'd like to see him snubbed from cabinet/shadow cabinet.
When it comes to Brexit though, no deal is looking more and more likely, now that May's deal seems to be comprehensively buggered on all sides; the global response to Britain's new position in the world is going to be very dramatic, maybe at the global economic level, but certainly for changing how norms and institutions work and are viewed in this world
Coming back to NationStates and political concerns. So you wake up one morning and a receive the delegacy of any region you choose. Which would you choose? And what would you do as delegate?Probably lock-down and siege a fash region honestly. Otherwise, I'd take whatever the most dysfunctional GCR was and basically turn it into what I want
Greater Azhukali to be.
Thank you to The Grim Reaper for this interview and check out Greater Azhukali for a promising roleplay centered region! It’s always really exciting to build a region from the ground up especially when you have a clear vision! Good luck <3