By Unibot
"And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
- Dylan Thomas
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
- Dylan Thomas
A collection of eight new essays in honour and reflection of NationStates.
The Brave New Frontier
NationStates now awaits the most significant update to its game architecture since the introduction of 'Regional Influence' in 2006 which replaced the griefing rules of old - there is no timeline for its implementation. The proposal is finalized and remains the "top" of Sedgistan's "wish-list" as the Gameplay Development Manager. As it is a "biggish" update, [violet] herself will be involved in coding the project.
A plurality of players (37.5%) favoured the change in an opinion poll conducted last year, with UCR players favouring it more than GCR players. Treating it as an inevitability, regions and organizations are already preparing for its implementation. Earlier this past June, for instance, the League established a planned-frontier region, Concord. The Treaty of Par Vollen between Europeia and the Grey Wardens names "the Frontier / Stronghold update" as a challenge ahead requiring international cooperation and adaption.
The proposed change would see the creation of two 'classes' of user-created regions, Stronghold regions, a traditional UCR with a founder and a new chain of succession for founders that cease-to-exist, and Frontier regions, a founderless UCR that receives an influx of newly-created nations. The immigration rate for individual Frontier regions would be subject to how many other frontier regions exist and whether a frontier satisfies a set of criteria, some of them known, some of them deliberately vague. The number of nations immigrating to the existing feeder regions would be cut in half. The full details of the proposal are located here and worth a read.
The Frontier/Stronghold proposal was first suggested by [violet] to respond to two issues. First, feeders have been growing in size disproportional to the rest of NationStates - game-created regions like the North Pacific possess an inordinate amount of influence over the voting floor in the World Assembly - and there is also a continued desire among many players to protect their regions from invasions by adopting some kind of chain of succession for founder-nations to "opt" out of threat of foreign invasion or occupation. The Frontier/Stronghold proposal is conceived as a double-edged sword, whereby choosing one option (Frontier) or the other (Stronghold) comes with its own inherent strengths and weaknesses.
Arguably, the implicit assumptions of the Frontier/Stronghold proposal reflects Sedgistan's worldview as a gameplayer. In the past, Sedgistan has shared that he sees game-created regions as static, stagnant, and bloated, and user-created regions as lean, innovative, and competitive. Last year, for instance, he wrote "the feeder regions have grown too large. It stifles gameplay having such a significant amount of power concentrated in a small number of regions, and their significant inbuilt recruitment advantage impedes the ability of others to grow dynamic, interesting new regions (whether gameplayers or not). Feeders are great for occasional scheming and significant political events, but the real creativity in NationStates tends to come from player-created regions. It's also bad on a technical level having such bloated regions."
In an earlier post (2010), pre-Devonitians, Sedgistan complained that "feeders have been stagnant for far too long to be interesting," and that feederites had a risk-adverse mentality. The introduction of Regional Influence, he argued then, was the root of inactivity within feeder regions. Game-created regions, under this line of thinking, are like public sector entities, and user-created regions are the private sector: the former may manage a public good, but the latter produces and distributes other goods more efficiently and with far more innovation under the pressure of competition and budget constraints.
Unfortunately, I think any players expecting the Frontier/Stronghold proposal to revolutionize NationStates will be disappointed. There are clear red flags on the horizon that indicate the introduction of Frontiers will not bring the value that players may be expecting, indeed the whole plan is underestimating the realities of today's NS Gameplay - genuine new immigration is rarer and the game itself is even more conflict-averse then when Sedgistan complained about it a decade ago. When the taps are turned on, new frontiers can expect to receive not just new nations, but a sizeable chunk of dead puppet nations and other puppet nations that quickly relocate: these nations (which feeder regions already receive in great numbers) are in many ways responsible for why game-created regions are the way they are, in that there are so few players present to engage with the region or regional government substantively. User-created regions may appear lean and innovative, but it helps that they receive a cross-section of the most engaged and most enthusiastic of newcomers through outreach and recruitment.
Growth will be more limited than imagined: approximately 1000-1500 nations are currently created a day. So, naturally around 500-750 nations will be divvied up daily between the game's frontier regions on an uneven basis. Out of these 500-750 nations, we can reasonably expect that 200-300 nations will relocate shortly after being founded, and 350-500 nations will stay relatively dormant and cease-to-exist within a month. Shockingly, the daily difference between the number of nations going "in" and going "out" of a feeder regions trends towards zero. A frontier would need two-fifths of the maximum frontier allocation to intake as many nations as a regular feeder does today, and a full one-fifth to match the intake of a feeder at half-rate.
How many frontiers will there be, and how disproportional will the distribution be, will ultimately determine its sustainability as a system. My guess, and it is only a guess, is there will be a central tendency towards there being too many active frontiers to generate significant gains over time for most or all frontier regions. That is to say that there may be dozens of frontiers qualifying for enough share of the allocation that there will be too little butter to spread across the toast. Moreover, players are very innovative - in a competitive system designed to maximize input, regions will organically work towards optimizing the share of nations their frontiers are receiving under the hidden criteria, which will in time cancel the fruits of each other's labour collectively.
My suggestion to Sedgistan and the game developers would be to consider allocating nations not on the basis of a common denominator that is rejigged or subject to a multiplier, but assigning a fixed allocation to the 'order' that frontier regions find themselves in based on sequence of the "most qualifying" to the "least qualifying" frontiers. For instance, the "top" frontier might receive one half of the allocation, the next frontier in the sequence would receive one-quarter of the allocation, then the next frontier in the sequence would receive one-eight, and the next one-sixteenth, and so on, then distribute the remainder evenly to all frontiers. This fixed approach would ensure that the model predictably produced an allocation that was valuable to top performing frontiers in spite of the entry of new frontiers and natural competition between frontiers.
The proposal as stated also depends on a level of conflict that is unrealistic. The proposal assumes enough conflict and military engagements between frontiers to reduce competition artificially, and the proposal also assumes that military activity in current founderless regions (that will soon have the power to replace their departing founders) will be sufficiently displaced by new military activity in frontier regions. But in today's NationStates, conflict between major regions is uncommon and taboo, and even in regions like Warzones (e.g., Warzone Asia, Warzone Sandbox) that used to be thought as a free-for-all, it is the philosophy du jour to defend these regions just as other regions. Frontiers will also have a more sophisticated security apparatus than the typical founderless region, which can be inactive and dormant, which will deter and obstruct many invasions and upheavals that might be possible in an environment where the region's security isn't as professionalized.
Frontier regions will emerge as planned societies, just like any user-created region today, with a de facto founder that is conventionally recognized and deferred to, and these regions will be treated as their intellectual property. Many frontier regions will simply be opportunistic fronts for related communities that are based in stronghold regions. My greatest fear in relation to the Frontier/Stronghold proposal is that it is establishing a class of user-created regions that will be even less interesting than feeders at their worst, with these regions garnering less interest as a political focal point than feeder regions and farming its most active players for an outside outlet. A class of regions that in the past was primarily concerned with their own general appeal and ability to recruit will now prioritize rent-seeking and gaming the system; we've seen how user-created regions like NationStates, Canada, and Europe, that haven't needed to recruit, have chronically suffered from a lack of engagement and an absence of structured government.
And will the proposal really address imbalances in the World Assembly? I hardly see how it can. These imbalances in terms of endorsements are baked in and will sustain themselves over the long term even as the rate of newcomers to feeder regions are cut because the proposal won't result in the endorsement gap vanishing. A tech change to NationStates cannot address voting inequality in the World Assembly substantively without either a significant shift of existing WA endorsements to other regions or a change in the voting system itself.
* * *
Kandarin often shared an anonymous quotation that said "Games like Nationstates are like a big cardboard box, and there are two kinds of people in the world. The kind who look at the empty void inside the box and ask "Where the hell is it?" and the kind who jump into the box with their friends and make it into a fort, or a spaceship." When considering future tech changes, I feel that the developers should try to revive the true spirit of NationStates as the box of a thousand things. Game changes should seek to enable the creativity of gameplayers - a broad, blank canvas. One of the problems with the Frontier/Stronghold proposal is just how detailed it is, and intentional; it has a clear idea of how regional communities should operate and it tries to predict their desires and behaviour. We should spend less time thinking about how NationStates could change to fix specific "problems," and instead consider simply what it is missing, i.e., the problems we don't know we have.
A lot of admin time as of late is invested into mini-games that are in a way too well developed to facilitate the kind of off-beat creativity that made NationStates wonderful and unpredictable. These mini-games are thematic, rules-based, deliberate, and predictable - the IPO 2013 event is an exception in this regard as it captured the spirit of NationStates because players disrupted the mini-game entirely. The card market is intriguing but feels limited and static as it's based on one item (cards) and limited creatively to the updates that admins make. My thinking is blow it up - make the marketplace, a marketplace for NationStates. Allow players to submit their own items and artwork for loot boxes. Allow regions to auction off executive powers. Sell special NS Issues. Unlock new macros to customize your nation further. Create regional treasuries so delegates can build their own portfolios, tax residents, and distribute earnings or items.
We should ask ourselves what is NationStates missing? Perhaps, it's lacking a source of 'scarcity' between regions, like an economic or trade system, that independently justifies conflict? Perhaps, we shouldn't just be focused on seizing delegacies but considering other tools of disruption and aggression that would allow regional adversaries to impact one another without necessarily occupying the region?
We could also seek more features that facilitate in-game governance to conduct what is otherwise conducted out-of-game. This might mean a customizable in-game voting system for elections or the adoption of regional resolutions. We could create "sub-rooms" for Regional Message Boards with customizable names (e.g., "Roleplay," "Summer Olympics," "WA," or "Regional Assembly") that can be archived, hidden to outsiders, or passworded, that allows discussions to take place in-game without being lost in the stream of consciousness that occurs in a general message board. Another possibility would be subscription services that automatically delivered messages to RMBs and TG boxes to notify players of regional updates, current votes, or deliver periodicals and news media.
All good intentions of any tech changes, including the Frontier/Stronghold proposal, will have to reckon with the culture and norms of players themselves, which are often conservative, risk-averse, slow to change, and deferential to community leadership. That is probably the area where current developers are most likely overestimating user participation and buy-in for the Frontier/Stronghold plan. You can add things, you can change things, and you can take things away, but any theory of adaption, without foresight and some luck, can prove wrong if players maladapt to a change in a way that is not only unexpected by its developers, but also counter-productive and undesirable.
Discordification and the Long, Never-ending Peace
Last year I sat down to write an unreleased essay when I came to a sudden and rather obvious realization: how on earth could I be qualified to write about a game that I haven't really played in six years? I had only really played NationStates for six years to begin with! You silly fraud, you. Indeed, whenever I would write that the political culture of NationStates had changed, that it lacked substantive conflict and in-game institutions were being neglected for Discord, I was told the same thing repeatedly: you're out of touch, Unibot! Old! Decrepit — maybe even fossilized! You don't know what you're talking about, Unibot.
Fair enough, I thought.
So I put the writing pen down, and I decided I should conduct a survey among players in NationStates which launched in November of last year.
In that survey, a plurality of respondents said that NationStates was not in decline (fair), but that optimistic result masked obvious problems that players perceived with the present state of NationStates. Half of respondents described NationStates as "toxic." More than 70% agreed that NSGP "is experiencing an extended period of interregional peace. Players have shifted their focus accordingly to cultural activities, socializing, and card-collecting." And most reported this as a negative change. A near majority of respondents also agreed that today’s NSGP "involves less politics, divisions, and ideological distinctions than in the past" and "regional governments should focus more on their regions in-game and less on Discord." Almost two-third of respondents said they would be "excited" by the prospect of coup d'etat in a feeder or sinker, and near two-thirds also said that such behaviour was strongly deterred by the "fear of being ostracized."
The main takeaway is that not only has NationStates firmly entered a new era, players are also conscious of this, even if they fear acknowledging it (or worse still, doing something about it). The Long Peace continues to reign supreme. The last "hard" coup of a feeder or sinker region was the Fedele Coup in October 2019. Surpassing more than three uninterrupted years of peace, this marks a historic milestone never before accomplished in NationStates. Seemingly the whole of Gameplay is unifying and reconstituting itself in a way that is pre-Cold War, pre-DEN, almost Neo-Antiquity: Balder has signed treaties with The League, Concord, and 10000 Islands; Europeia has revived old agreements with the South Pacific; and the North Pacific (very eloquently) declared in January of this year that it has "effectively ceased any feasible raiding activity ... (having) concluded it is currently not in our best interest to work with these (raiding) organizations, but more than that, it is not in our interest to pursue most raiding operations more generally."
This kind of open, easy cooperation and coordination between defenders, independents, neutrals, and independents constitutes a sea change in geopolitical activity. For the sake of comparison: in 2012, I privately begged Europeian officials to no avail to help the UDL and FRA forces liberate a region from literal Nazis, whereas in 2022, the ERN, LDF, and SPSF worked closely in an attempt to liberate Realm of the Whispering Winds.
Establishing itself as the pre-eminent pariah and a catalyst for unity are today's remaining invader organizations - namely, the Brotherhood of Malice (and by extension, Osiris), the Black Hawks, and Lone Wolves United, whose run-of-the-mill raids this year in Stargate and Venice, botched electoral meddling, and vague plotting (Operation Ragnarok) have inspired wide-spread outrage and condemnation.
In response to the relatively mild offense of "tipping" the delegacy of Equilism, the Modern Gameplay Compact, a new multilateral alliance between Balder, Europeia, the North Pacific, the Pacific, the West Pacific, recently took extraordinary measures to ban members of the Brotherhood of Malice and the Black Hawks from participating in any of their cultural events or being "platformed" by any media. The Modern Gameplay Compact has also initiated an unprecedented blackout on these invaders in the WA, promising unconditional support for repeals of legislation passed by these offenders and the use of targeted offensive liberations. These measures, among many things, call into question the freedom of the press in the MGC and the merit of its intervention in the WA, if major regions are endorsing the repeals of GA and SC resolutions not on the basis of the resolutions, but grudges with their authors.
(The irony of the overwrought "we have built while you have burned" rhetoric is of course that prominent members of Equilism have previously couped and occupied several member-regions of the Modern Gameplay Compact, and the BoM/TBH have not.)
The world is more connected, more united, and cohesive than ever before, transcending conventional geopolitical lines.
Why? Well, this cooperation, in my view, is a response to the relative organizational weakness of today's invaders (who aren't as valuable of allies as they were in the past), but also a reflection of the challenges that independent regions have increasingly faced to decompartmentalize their active support for invading abroad from their support for their own regional sovereignty and that of its allies. It's harder to navigate that political balancing act in a climate that doesn't tolerate such nuance.
More broadly speaking though, this global cooperation is a product of increasing social connectivity.
The adoption of platforms for greater online social connectivity that are free-flowing, instantaneous, and audio-based, has metastasized throughout NationStates Gameplay, first as purely text-based communication (IRC, MSN) and later with platforms with audio-visual component (Discord, Skype). But for the sake of simplicity we'll call this increased social connectivity, "discordification." Discordifiation has politically realigned NationStates to an extraordinary extent: at a macro level, it inspires mass cooperation and cohesion between previously rival regions, deterring international conflict and intrigue; at a meso level, it contributes to inactivity and maladministration within regions; at a micro level, it places peer pressure on individual players to conform and encourages them to exhibit relational aggression to advance their own status and position. It is all one phenomenon and one cause with many effects with a global, regional, and interpersonal scope that happens simultaneously.
Discordification is an NS-specific term that combines a number of real-life phenomena that have long been studied, like the "Network Effect" when the utility of a service for a user grows as the number of users grow (encouraging further adoption) and "Groupthink" where an overwhelming desire arising within a cohesive group to avoid conflict and reach a consensus fosters poor decision-making. The components that conceptually constitute Discordification should seem familiar, we see them everywhere in 'RL' in politics, business, and technology, but these phenomena manifest in a fundamentally original way in NationStates due to the way that its intentional virtual communities and "worlds," which are as old as Myspace, have adapted to the reality of modern social messaging.
Discordification
Cause: Gradual abandonment of traditional text-based forums and formal institutions, like a legislature, for free-form online chat, especially voice chat.
First-Order Effects (Interpersonal)
- The humanization of traditional political opponents
- Personal drama overlaps more frequently with the administration of regions and organizations
- Neglect of the region and administration in favour of Discord where more time and attention is spent
Second-Order Effects (Communal)
- Overwhelming pressure for social cohesion, i.e., "to get along"
- Formal institutions, like a legislature, suffer from inactivity due to player withdrawal
- Players value access to these social networks more than they value access to traditional executive and legislative branches
Third-Order Effects (Societal)
- Political positions converge for the sake of consensus with little regard for intellectual or philosophical coherency
- Lack of direction, identity, and nuance
- Bullying and relational aggression
Fourth-Order Effects (Organizational)
- Severe administrative dysfunction as the legislated processes of formal regional institutions break down, effectively constituting a state failure
- High executive turnover (e.g., elected officials) but stagnant informal leadership (e.g., influential people, influencers)
- Difficulty distinguishing between societal dysfunction that is "in-game" versus "real life"
Fifth-Order Effects (Cyclical)
- New players join NationStates and adapt to current organizational cultures and practices, unaware of how they’ve changed. This is key as NationStates is a “younger” game than its anniversary would have you believe: in 2021, my research found that half of NS Gameplay joined NationStates after 2016 — there were more players in NS Gameplay that reported started playing in 2020 alone than there were from the combined years of 2002 to 2011
- Strong internal pressure on peers within an in-group to deny problems with their group and take responsibility. This includes publicly denying this very process is occurring, self-reinforcing the overall phenomenon. Nobody wants to be the person who concedes publicly that there is a problem...
- Players who are most dissatisfied with these changes leave, players who are most satisfied stay
I think it would be fair to push back at this juncture and say "whoa, Unibot, slow down now" and ask how can one minor change (how we communicate) have such a big impact? This is a good question that must be addressed at length with a number of contributing factors. First, players naturally have a difficult time separating the person from "make believe" when disputes are resolved over voice chat and they come to know the players through audio-visual communication as people, not just online personalities. Next, peer pressure and the compulsion to conform and protect one another's in-group is stronger when peers know each other on this more personal, human level. For this reason, the diversity of opinion and values which promotes wider conflict and ideation is rendered unsustainable within large, communicative peer groups.
In addition to this, players instinctively seek out power wherever it is: if the decisions are being made in a Discord server, not a legislature or cabinet office, then they will privilege being in the Discord server. Establishments are also concerned primarily about their self-presentation, so if voters aren't evaluating or even paying attention to the health of the region, they won't preoccupy their time with maintaining a "healthy" region. Some players are also much more sophisticated "social strategists" than others, and they thrive in this new game environment where traditional forms of authority — laws, customs, values, charisma, and "likability" — are less valuable. The combination of these contributing factors results in this change in social connectivity to escalate and effect everything: pacifying the international scene, paralyzing regions, and trapping players within a social network that can be uncomfortable and unpleasant.
In an essay earlier this year, "Lament for a forum," Ikania effortlessly traced the history of the Long Peace and its antecedents, noting the absence of feeder coups and ideological disputes, the change in defending culture and the adoption of the Discord platform. Ikania also questioned whether it was possible for a revival of interregional conflict without the "toxic attributes" that facilitated previous conflicts. Interestingly, the author also tied the Long Peace to Generation Z and new social norms that emphasize positivity, social safety, and inclusive spaces. However, half of NS Gameplay in that same 2021 poll responded by saying they found the present NS Gameplay environment "toxic" and a significant majority attributed the "fear of ostracization" (which itself sounds rather unpleasant) to the longevity of the Long Peace.
As an example, let us consider the Rejected Realms for a moment. The regular government updates (required under the Government Accountability Act) provided to the Assembly by the Delegate, when they’re not forgotten entirely, tell an increasingly bleak story, with updates now reduced to one-line sentences acknowledging vacancies, on-going dispatch revamps, and the successes of “Theme Tuesdays” and “Werewolf Wednesdays.” From the outside, the region appears either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge its obvious problem with inactivity. The Assembly hasn’t been this inactive in (literal) decades, the Rejected Times hasn’t posted an edition this year, and the Rejected Realms had four delegates last year alone due to a string of resignations (which included many officers). Not only has legislative changes to TRRMC not produced more accountability to the Assembly, the Assembly has shown no interest in holding any official accountable for their activity in years. In one case in 2020, a delegate fell so inactive they forgot to file a regular update which triggered a snap election that was widely condemned by the Assembly as unnecessary and unfair. That delegate after being returned to office with a supermajority later resigned before their first term would have elapsed, describing their own term in public office as unaccomplished.
But is discordification sustainable indefinitely? That is an important question for the future of NationStates Gameplay which I cannot definitively answer.
Clearly features of discordification are reproductive and cyclical, as new players adopt current cultures as they arrive and a pseudo-consensus continues to spiral and develop, however it is an open question whether such a feedback loop is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’? Positive feedback leads to instability (at some point, it goes “ka-boom”), negative feedback eventually reaches equilibrium (“blah”). One answer may lie at observing how the higher order impacts of discordification affect retention, when the number of new players is unchanged? That is to say, does player retention decrease over time in a sustainable way? Discordification could represent a terminal problem for the game, "an End of History," as some have suggested likening it to works of Francis Fukuyama. Or perhaps this cohesion could break under the strain of older political rivalries? Or there could arise enough backlash that policy actors are forced to respond to the problems that discordification causes? There also remains the possibility that a new platform which further advances social connectivity within the game could act as a technological accelerant to the crisis just as Discord has. I am always an optimist, but I grow more pessimistic about the structural capacity of regions to recognize the problem, acknowledge, and reverse course.
Quiet Cruelty, Absent Leadership
I remember one time in high school, I raised my hand to complain that it was unfair that the film studies teacher would be judging the popularity of short student films by an open rather than anonymous vote. People wouldn't feel as though they could be honest if everyone knew how they voted, I argued. The teacher, who was herself a rather sad person, responded tritely "that's life" and I better get used to it! Naturally, the class voted in overwhelming numbers for an objectively bad short film about a ghost by a charming young lass who fancied herself a "creative" and everyone was afraid of.
Economist Timur Kuran calls this phenomenon, "preference falsification" whereby people misrepresent their preferences under peer pressure. A common theme throughout not just this essay, but many of this collection's essays is preference falsification and the effects of social conformity on group behaviour.
Indeed, for as long as I can remember, I've always been frustrated with conformity and its perverse consequences on decision-making within groups. At its worse, conformity contributes and exasperates our most complex political, economic, and social problems as a collective irrationality. Trying to resolve social dilemmas under the weight of peer pressure is a key leadership challenge, sometimes it means unraveling a "spiral of silence," while other times it means pushing a bandwagon up a hill till it gathers momentum.
When people misrepresent themselves under social pressure it undermines our workplaces, our governments, and our society, and it has an extraordinary impact on communities like the ones we've cultivated in NationStates by censoring sincere organizational introspection and impeding positive change. It is not just that leaders have to rise above this, but leadership is itself by definition the act of advancing positive change and introspection against such social forces: breaking through the "walls" we erect for ourselves in challenging us to do better.
But what happens when there is no leadership in a community?
What happens when the most socially savviest among us use these skills only to advance themselves, rather than the greater interests of the community?
How ever pessimistic these series of essays may appear about the state of NationStates Gameplay today, I would like to acknowledge on a positive note that today's NationStates, with the efforts of players like the "Protecting Our Players Accord" (2019), is a safer place for all players. It really is!
At one time, NationStates mirrored the problems that persisted across the internet in the early aughts, with a gaming culture that was essentially naïve to the presence and impact of catfishing, harassment, manipulation, exploitation, unhealthy and toxic relationships, even pedophilia, that players struggled to navigate, especially as adolescents. It wasn't normal, it wasn't healthy, it wasn't right, but as a child, adolescent, or young adult, these problems may have seemed, without knowing better, just a part of life or growing up. Changes in online culture have brought with it a safer gameplay environment for players in NationStates, many of whom are not only young, but treat NationStates as a safe space to practice politics and the essential skills of politicking, persuasion, and organization.
Regrettably, however, we've seen one set of problems replaced with a new problem: namely, a rise in cyberbullying and relational aggression in NationStates, which is actively being denied by some, especially those who engage in it. Merriam-Webster defines cyberbullying as the "abuse and mistreatment of someone vulnerable by someone stronger, more powerful." In an online and primarily text-based game, cyberbullying manifests itself as taunting, "chirping," deliberate social exclusion by peers, and "logging" and strategically leaking out-of-context messages to embarrass victims. This so-called "invisible" form of peer group manipulation and bullying requires a higher degree of social intelligence on the part of its perpetrators than conventional verbal or physical bullying. But it is harmful, and it is primarily sought to advance the power of some for the domination of others.
For me, this problem does not simply run parallel to the overall trend of discordification but rather, it is perhaps the most harmful consequence of it.
In a controversial essay last year, "Here Lies the Abyss, " Ridersyl argued that a major Gameplay group was prioritizing the skills and efficiency of their players over a positive organizational culture which fostered toxic behaviour, shitposting, manipulative behaviour and "punching down." Another essay, "On current GP events," by Chingis called for WA commendations for invaders to be respected, and inadvertently invited a discussion on whether it is healthy or not for a game environment to be as cohesive as contemporary NationStates Gameplay has tried to be.
In a game environment where players increasingly do not respect good government, or ideology, or aspirational leadership, to obtain, assert, and maintain power, players resort instead simply to cyberbullying to establish themselves within a social hierarchy in lieu of another system of authority; they score "political" points with their peers, assert their "leadership" by essentially being mean, and neglect to intervene against bullying primarily out of self-preservation.
Previously, political personalities courted power by pandering to regional prejudices or appealing to the political centre for votes, or positioning themselves at the heart of an ideological movement. But when you're no longer invested in the work of government, or who nominally leads it, or what they do with it, and you're no longer invested in any consistent, normative idea of what rights or freedoms or powers or immunities exist in NationStates, the only source of authority that remains is primarily social and relational, which manifests itself as bullying through trash talk, exclusion, and the use of technology to threaten, embarrass, and shame.
Social studies suggest that "pure bullies" rather than acting on low-self esteem, exhibit high self-esteem but limited empathy: they're adept social strategists, overachievers, and are perceived by their peers as popular but less likeable. That is to say, less people like them, but everyone thinks of them as popular regardless. The risk to NationStates is that a political environment governed by such social aggression absent much of anything else (e.g., government, philosophy, ideas) is inherently harmful to players who are the targets of this bullying, but also a source of shame for players who adapt to this by pitching in and bullying others to "get ahead" and deny bullying by their peers to preserve their own position.
In summary, I'll wrap up with a favourite quote of mine from a former professor who once quipped "politics is about who is in, and who is out." Politics is always about who has power, that hasn't changed. But what has changed about our politics in NationStates is what power is, and the path to obtaining it, when our formal, in-game systems continue to deteriorate and informal places of discussion grow in their relevance.
The Rise of Selective Technocracy and the Compliance State
NationStates Gameplay isn't the only part of NationStates that has been impacted by Discordification, and I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to address the World Assembly. As a sub-game, the World Assembly is the most exposed to changes in NS Gameplay because there is an incentive for authors to court regional delegates, communities, and super-organizations and blocs for their support on resolutions, which results in WA Authors becoming more exposed to NS Gameplay than participants of other sub-games, like roleplayers or generalites, who have no overriding motivation for cross-participation.
Interestingly, IRC was never overwhelmingly adopted by authors in the World Assembly as a common mode of communication in the same way as it was for other NationStates sub-communities. Official IRC channels related to the World Assembly were typically dormant and went underused. Instead, most communication between authors happened in either a public or private forum. Today, however, WA Authors overwhelmingly have adopted Discord as their communication platform of choice, and the NS WA boasts an active Discord. Early collaborations between authors are often discussed via a Direct Message (DM) on Discord too, then edited in a shared Google Doc.
It is not hard to find evidence of Discordification in the World Assembly today.
Drafts are often now presented to the World Assembly with the vetting complete externally, and the actual in-game consultation is simply pro forma. Other drafts are frequently presented to the World Assembly that are based on inside jokes or internal discussions on the NS WA Discord. Influential players are also not only more entrenched than they were prior to Discord, but now form a self-appointed secretariat that interprets how the rules shall apply. And at least one player in the World Assembly recently (who I will leave unnamed) was effectively excommunicated by his peers for having a disagreement with another WA Author.
But the most significant consequence of Discordification within the General Assembly is at the ideological level, where it has followed the same pattern as it has in NS Gameplay of synthesizing different classical viewpoints in a chaotic, atonal manner. A decade ago, the World Assembly was embroiled in a passionate divide between ‘International Federalist’ (IntFed) authors, who were a part of a newer generation and more liberal, and ‘National Sovereigntists’ (NatSov), who were veteran players and more economically conservative. International Federalism was a kind of liberal continentalism, exemplified by social justice legislation like “Quality in Health Services” by Sionis Prioratus that sought universal access to healthcare, whereas National Sovereignty presented itself as a kind of libertarian conservatism, exemplified by blocker legislation like “National Economic Freedoms,” by Krioval, that sought to limit WA intervention in national commerce.
This division, which in fact predated the WA, was consigned to the dustbin many years ago and the terms no longer really even apply to today’s WA General Assembly. Hulldom began an interesting discussion in a WA thread “A New Paradigm for the 2020s” that asked what divisions, if not NatSov and IntFed, were relevant in today’s WA? The discussion ended incomplete prematurely. Imperium Anglorum summarized the present state of things in saying that whether something is an international issue or not is no longer a point of discussion in the WA General Assembly, but rather whether something is “good” or “bad” policy is the central question. Sciongrad argued in an earlier 2017 essay, "GenSec and the GA" that the divisions between NatSov and IntFed movements had been replaced by litigation over the rules of the GA itself with the creation of a self-moderation body, GenSec. Imperium Anglorum, meanwhile, attributed this change in the WA General Assembly to a generational/cultural shift and regarded it as a natural evolution as the WA General Assembly focused increasingly on more technical issues with larger, human rights issues already well legislated.
I would disagree with Sciongrad's view outright as it doesn't appear that there is much appetite among GA regulars these days to contest rulings, even precedent-breaking rulings by its secretariat (that agreeableness being another symptom of Discordification). I would posit a different theory, that the WA General Assembly moved on from the NatSov/IntFed debate because of intermingling and voluntary exposure effects — today’s regulars in the General Assembly are a relatively cohesive group, yesterday’s regulars only interacted as a whole on the official forums and were divided into different camps between rival regions and social clubs. Outgroups have collapsed into ingroups: the result is stronger ties between authors with more personal interactions and conflict avoidance. This also means pursuing resolutions that avoid heated disagreements.
While it is true there was turnover of authors at this time, as Imperium Anglorum notes, changes in communication have prevented analogous divisions and disagreements from perpetrating or reviving among subsequent generations of authors under different terms or philosophies.
NatSov and IntFed has been displaced by a single pattern of action: selective technocracy. Under the influence of selective technocracy, authors extensively regulate policy areas that are non-controversial and non-divisive but avoid policy areas that are controversial and divisive. Since authors are prevailingly motivated to pass legislation without raising divisions within their in-group, the result is an overwhelming focus on issues where a consensus is present, or on issues on which most voters either have no firm opinions on, little knowledge about, or any real interest in.
Today’s WA is an institution that has strong opinions on retail credit, ship recycling, chlamydia, and 24-D, and little to no opinion on handguns, a minimum wage, sex work, unemployment, or mental health (not including legal competence, which is discussed extensively). Reversals on euthanasia, the death penalty, and drug decriminalization, tracks with changes in U.S public opinion, especially among youth. The WA has extensively detailed war crimes, but avoided the crime of aggression itself. The WA has set greenhouse gas emission targets and credits and ozone-depleting chemical reduction targets, but overlooked the question of how to finance climate action in developing countries. Moreover, today’s WA has effectively tried to address poverty in a single resolution, “Minimum Standard of Living Act,” that guarantees a “minimum level of access” to core needs (food, water, shelter, housing etc.). Poor or economically challenged member-nations were substantially exempt from the provisions of that resolution, without the WA stepping in to fill the gap and finance social welfare (contrary to how the WA years ago addressed healthcare and education in impoverished member-nations with landmark “IntFed” legislation.)
It is worth noting that “Minimum Standard of Living Act” was recently repealed.
I should add that an older extant resolution, the “Disability Welfare Act” roughly sketches out a need for member-nations to financially support people with disabilities, but doesn’t even consider what happens when a member-nation is incapable financially of doing so sufficiently, and it reads as a “fill in the blank” exercise that doesn’t address any specific issues with social assistance for people with disabilities — like, site accessibility, or establishing your qualification for assistance, or “welfare traps” where disabled peoples are discouraged from pursuing part-time work. And a much more recent resolution, “Homelessness Mitigation and Protections Act,” comprehensively details how member-nations should respond to homelessness and support people experiencing homelessness, and how the WA should finance these supports in the case of impoverished nations with limited capacity. But homelessness is only experienced by a small minority of those living in poverty. Thankfully for the rest, the WA has declared they can’t be executed under (not making this up) the “Don’t Kill the Poor Act”…
Conflating the issue of poverty almost entirely under one resolution as the WA has tried to do abandons any intersectional, multidimensional, or needs-based approach to poverty. Poverty can manifest more specifically as child poverty or senior poverty, or poverty among people with disabilities or veterans. Rural poverty or urban poverty. Poverty can be racialized. Poverty can be extreme or relative.
The World Assembly undertakes extensive investments in universal libraries, databases, and scientific research, primarily of an ecological, meteorological or astrometric scope, but it is worth considering why it has consistently avoided the question of wealth redistribution and human security, especially given some peoples on the other side of the digital divide will benefit more than others from scientific and technological cooperation. Is the General Assembly living up to its mandate to “make the world a better place?” or is it making the world a better place only for some? Selective technocracy has left our hallowed halls bereft of the bigger question facing our world, which is not only how to make life better, but better for all, when inequality, marginalization, and stigma disadvantages some disproportionately. The World Assembly of today confronts easy questions, but often neglects the question of social and economic rights due to their controversial nature. The problem with the WA General Assembly as of late is not that it is compromising on difficult moral or political issues, but rather skipping over them entirely.
I would regard the softer, "Modern" National Sovereignism of Mousebumbles as the antecedent of modern selective technocracy. Mousebumbles identified as a sovereigntist and believed "the WA has largely over-legislated on many topics that do not merit international interference or meddling," but she also advocated passionately for niche legislation on the freedom of information, medical advancement and human rights, especially the rights and freedoms of patients. Mousebumples argued these seemingly mixed priorities were coherently tied together under a single ideology of informed consent, and that the WA should protect the freedom of both member-states and individuals alike to make their own informed decisions. This view, however, neglects the importance of socio-economic rights (second generation rights) and the freedom from want which are distinct from first generation rights: endeavoring to improve the state of international research and medical ethics, while ignoring the devastating impacts of global poverty on opportunity, health, and quality of life.
While Delegate of Europeia, Mousebumples co-authored a white paper with The Dourian Embassy called "The Modern NatSov: Freedom to Govern" which is still a widely-viewed guide in the annals of the World Assembly Legislative League (WALL). Intriguingly, it argued that while defenders were often still federalists, other gameplayers (e.g., Independents) were a natural fit for National Sovereignty. That guide introduced a softer version of National Sovereignty - modern National Sovereignty - that argued you should "support resolutions on the issues that are important to you ... The Modern NatSov is about making sure that as little power leaves your hands as possible, while not ignoring substantive issues that may shock the conscience." Effectively this meant that the 'Modern NatSover' could pursue regulation on any issue they were passionate about, provided it could be done "smartly" and without unnecessarily restricting national and personal freedoms.
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What every good WA Author can agree on, however, is that their resolutions should be obeyed, hence an established consensus on non-compliance.
The modern WA General Assembly has an obsession with compliance, giving rise to "the compliance state," layers of overlapping bureaucratic agencies in all levels of government that support the enforcement and dissemination of WA legislation (e.g., WAJC, WACC, IAO, WASO, WALDS, Read the Resolution Act). A shift occurred from the GA's emphasis on human rights enforcement (e.g., ICC, ICMP, and the ITA) in the early 2010s, which was concerned with serious rights violations, to a broader concern with all compliance enforcement in the late 2010s, which naturally involves more technical and purely regulatory violations. Today, defendants accused of labelling meat wrong are tried and adjudicated by the same plethora of agencies that deal with genocide and human trafficking.
Authors will often hold non-compliant nations in contempt as international “villains,” that deserve to be denied services, basic protections, and WA commendations. Realistically though, the root of non-compliance is, more likely than not, poverty, a lack of state capacity, or religious convictions. No nation, for instance, reasonably wants to live with asbestos, it’s just cheap, durable, and available. This lack of nuance in terms of when non-compliance is conceivable and when it is not, is reminiscent of higher-order Discordification. In effect, the General Assembly has unwittingly become an institution for rich, developed countries that overlooks poverty and the difficulties that developing countries, desperate for membership in an important international development body, may face in trying to implement expensive WA regulation.
This generation of WA Authors often challenges the orthodoxy of the past, like the Ideological Ban rule (good riddance), and non-compliance (which at one was believed to be metagaming), they've successfully repealed GA#10 (also good riddance) and seem open to repealing GA#2 and launching a peacekeeping program. But rarely this generation challenges its own present orthodoxy where there are just as many sacred cows to slay. Does the increasing number of resolutions really excuse a lack of an overriding philosophy to what issues the WA is pursuing? Is the WA overreaching? Is it ignoring inequality and poverty? Is non-compliance intrinsically evil? Is the World Assembly inadvertently criminalizing poverty?
To answer Hulldom's initial question - what new paradigmatic schism should come to replace the divisions of old? For me, the answer lies in global inequality. I would hope to see the rise of liberal internationalists committed to building a 'new social order' whereby developed and developing member-states work cohesively to preserve human security. Their efforts would stand in contrast to technocratic internationalists concerned, primarily from the perspective of developed member-states, in the role that regulation and scientific and technological development can play in bettering the lives of its citizens. The recent repeal of "Minimum Standard of Living Act" marks a critical moment, in that if replaced, the replacement could spark an important conversation over the purpose of the WA General Assembly. I for one say, down with the compliance state - and selective technocracy begone!
Genuinely. 
