It has been more than a year since the moderators unveiled their plans to reform rules interpretation in the General Assembly. Having failed to satisfy players with their modifications to the ruleset and recognizing that they simply lacked the staff to police the General Assembly forum, moderator staff introduced the General Secretariat — more affectionately known as GenSec — which is composed of a panel of community members and charged with interpreting the ruleset.
The logic behind the reform was that experienced players were more equipped to interpret the General Assembly’s vague, complicated ruleset than a small staff of moderators (astonishingly, just a single one, Kryozerkia, most of the time) whose responsibilities often extended beyond the GA forum. Having not only served on GenSec for the entirety of its existence, but also having been an active participant (and critic) during the pre-GenSec era, I believe that rule interpretation has become more reflective of community expectations and is grounded in a shared understanding of the General Assembly that many moderators simply lacked.
But while we could dedicate pages to the quality of GenSec’s decisions, defending our rulings is beyond the scope of this lecture. Our goal here is to understand the General Assembly in the GenSec era. To do so, we must ask ourselves three questions:
- How has GenSec shaped the GA?
- What should GenSec’s role be?
- How can we move past litigiousness and toward policymaking and roleplay?
To begin, GenSec has essentially, if subtlely, redefined the General Assembly’s gameplay, not alway for the better. Regardless of whether our rulings are too conservative or too revisionist or whatever other complaint you can envision (we’ve probably heard it), the transition away from moderator standards and toward community self-regulation has brought with it some pernicious, unexpected consequences: devolving rule-interpreting authority to members of the community has pushed the game away from policy debate and towards litigiousness and meta-game rule debates. In essence, by placing a rule-interpreting body of players at the center of the General Assembly, we are placing an unnecessary emphasis on the role of the rules. Rather than debating a proposal on its merits, players are more predisposed to dissecting its legality through GenSec. The community viewed moderators as distant and almost peripheral to the General Assembly. By contrast, the GA forum has basically been defined by the centrality of GenSec since the latter was established. In making rule interpretation so central to the game, we have inadvertently created an avenue for many players’ innate litigious tendencies.
To see this new culture at work, one need look no further than our inaugural ruling. Rather than using GenSec as a tool to ensure his proposal would not later be pulled, Gruenberg created a proposal specifically designed to test the limits of the rules — a test case. The query, which involved determining whether mentioning the Security Council violated the metagaming rule, was not a bona fide effort to ensure his proposal was legal. Rather, it was an attempt to score a point in the emerging rule meta-game.
More recently, the row over the House of Cards rule demonstrates an intensification of this trend. The House of Cards rule is the quintessentially uncontroversial rule. Historically, the rule prohibited mentioning extant or repealed legislation in the text of a non-repeal in all circumstances. The dispute arose over whether the new version of the rule was as strict, and quickly devolved into what many outside observers might view as pedantry: What does it mean to “rely?” Can one resolution truly ever be totally independent of another? Do non-binding prefatory clauses create an essential base for the remainder of the text? Speaking with my pragmatic, rather than my legal, hat on: this does not matter. It has no real consequences on how policy debates unfold or how players maneuver politically to pass their resolutions. If some other entity could arbitrarily choose one or the other, the real impact on the game would be negligible. But with GenSec, obliged to respond to most challenges, at our fingertips, many players have made a new game out of litigating these minutiae. What the proposal does is important, still, but what is more important is whether there is some plausible interpretation of the rules that could possibly invalidate the proposal. If there is, we must explore it thoroughly and resolve it. Why? Because this is now an aspect of the game.
Put simply, the GA paradigm has shifted away from ideological disputes over the nature and ontology of the World Assembly power, which were debated intensely for years during the National Sovereignty vs. International Federalism era, and toward a moot court-esque meta-game that concerns itself with the rules first and foremost, and everything else afterward.
None of this is to say, though, that GenSec should be eliminated or that resolving ambiguity in the rules is, ipso facto, a bad thing. As I’ve noted, GenSec can respond to the community more effectively than the moderators. Despite the occasional protest, our rulings are largely popular and have formally enshrined implicit community understandings into the ruleset. Unlike our moderator predecessors, we actively involve ourselves in community discussions and probe petitioners for information and new perspectives. Most of our decision making is public, and those decisions that are not are declassified after a month. GenSec, despite its faults, is vastly superior to the moderator system. Additionally, there are genuine issues with the ruleset. The GA rules are notoriously confusing. Some rules could mean several different things. Ironing out those ambiguities was the very impetus for GenSec in the first place, to the extent that moderators lacked the community awareness to resolve those ambiguities effectively.
But while it is our responsibility to both translate community desires into changes in the rules and to clarify the rules, leaning on GenSec to iron out every ambiguity is bad for the game. First, this is unfeasible. If we were tasked with proactively eliminating every ambiguity in the game through rulings, we would see an nearly infinite regress of interpretation — every nuanced ruling would require more interpretation on some finer point, ad infinitum. If we attempted to eliminate this problem by making broad, sweeping rules, we could save ourselves some trouble and bring back the moderators.
If we conclude that GenSec’s ascendence has instigated a decidedly harmful paradigm shift due to the emphasis it places on rule interpretation, but at the same time recognize that GenSec is the body best equipped to deal with the ruleset, how can we move past the litigious contagion and back toward politics and policy? I have two broad suggestions. First, GenSec should use its new rulemaking power more proactively to rewrite the ruleset. Second, the community should be actively mindful of its natural tendency toward litigation, and should practice restraint in relying on GenSec.
The first suggestion is easy to implement. GenSec should do a thorough autopsy of the current ruleset, determine which rules create the most conflict and either remove those parts that are unnecessary and confusing or explicitly clarify their intent within the ruleset itself. For example, we can modify the House of Cards rule in such a way that makes its meaning crystal clear, foreclosing any possibility of future confusion. GenSec can more confidently turn down frivolous challenges when it can merely point to clear provisions in the rules.
Of course, we can’t craft a perfect ruleset free of ambiguity —ultimately, there will always be confusion, and that’s why we’re here. Furthermore, this approach would eliminate many opportunities to indulge in our moot court fantasies, but it does not, by itself, eliminate the cultural impetus driving litigiousness in the General Assembly. To truly address our litigation contagion, we must have a frank discussion as a community — literally, whether that be in a series of threads or through discord — about the intended scope of GenSec. If the community works to cultivate a consensus that GenSec is a tool, rather than the game itself, we can move back toward the things that matter: acrimonious policy disputes over imaginary people, backstabbing politics and international conspiracies.
