I've been playing this game since 2003(2?) and I have yet to find another game like it. I like this game for it's simplistic interface allowing people of different thoughts, countries,and ideologies to share a common communication medium. I will freely admit that his game has shaped parts of my real life persona simply through interaction and understanding of different viewpoints and it does this over a simple text interface. I have argued, sympathized, ridiculed and bonded with many different players and it has made the time I spend playing this game worthwhile.
For the first time in over a decade of playing this game I saw the deletion by moderators of entire regions over a mindset. I'm talking about Nazi sympathizing players. What I'm talking about can be found here in this locked topic. http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=217052
I am not a Nazi sympathizer. Any group that idealizes eliminating entire groups of people based on their belief needs to really needs to adjust their thought process. It's an interesting juxtaposition putting the mindset of the Nazi's next to the the mindset of deleting entire regions in NationStates in order to suppress them. Certainly I am not claiming that the mods are doing what Nazi's did, that's absurd. However, suppressing the free exchange of ideas suppresses understanding simultaneously increasing the animosity between groups.
I fought a very long fight in the region of Axis back in 2003 and from that I learned a lot about Nazi sympathizers. I found out that one of them lived bout 20 miles away and he would be happy to kick my a** in real life. Certainly didn't appreciate that however I did learn a lot about how deeply ingrained the mindset goes. I really thought people were sympathizers because they thought it was cool, I found out something entirely different and disturbing.
Without this game and allowing these exchange of thought to take place I would have never known how disturbing the sympathizers are. I hate to think that due to some activity or change in rules that this exchange of ideas would come to halt. Sure there are people that will be offended but like a TV they can change the channel to something else. In this game you have to actively seek out regions to participate in. Everyone has been offended by something that was written on a board somewhere in this game but we shouldn't let it suppress the "Magic" of NationStates. Without a free exchange of ideas NationStates is not much of anything else.
To state the obvious, this is not my game, this game is Max's game. He or those he has entrusted with the power (mods, violet) have complete control over how they decide to control the game and what needs to be done to it to make it better. I am making a plea to not suppress speech in the manner that has been done with the Nazi groups. It's offensive speech but it has been useful in real life to understand how to deal with this group and others like them. I believe other people will also benefit in the same way.
