Jennifer Government: NationStates

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Jennifer Government: NationStates
URL	nationstates.net
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Society game
Registration	Yes
Owner	Max Barry
Created by	Max Barry
Launched	Late 2002
Revenue	Partially from advertising.
Current status	Active

Jennifer Government: NationStates is a multiplayer nation simulation browser game. It was created by Max Barry in late 2002, based loosely on his novel Jennifer Government. Its long awaited sequel, Nationstates 2, was announced in April 2008, with beta testing expected later this year. The game is expanded by users using offsite forums to construct centres of learning, discussion and play.

Contents 1 Play 1.1 Beginning 1.2 Issues 1.3 Rankings 1.3.1 WA Categories 1.4 World Assembly 1.4.1 Renaming of the United Nations 1.5 Group play 2 Roleplaying 3 Technical history 3.1 Technical failures 4 Statistics 5 Forums 6 NationStates 2 7 References 8 See also 9 External links

[edit] Play

[edit] Beginning

The object of the game is to take charge of a country. At the start of the game, the player chooses a few basic characteristics such as name, currency and style of government. Answers to the questions in the next page determine the initial rating of the country's civil, economic and political rights rating. The nation's population starts at five million and increases every day automatically with play.

[edit] Issues

Gameplay hinges on deciding government policies: the player is presented with automatically assigned "issues" and chooses a response from a list of options. Players can also dismiss issues, to ignore them: this has no effect on the nation.

The frequency with which new issues arise is set by the player (from five to fourteen issues per week). After the original thirty issues written by Barry were found to be too few for the game to develop satisfactorily, players with national populations of over 500 million have been allowed to propose new issues since July 15, 2003.^[1]

All issues have a peculiar characteristic, and no option is the "correct" one. Each usually has a positive and a negative aspect, although the latter is usually highlighted, and both are always exaggerated. Many issues are posed in terms of radical or extremist beliefs, and the accompanying opinions are rarely well-founded. This is for both humorous and didactic reasons: many opinions are extremely funny or ridiculous, and the player learns that there are no perfect ideas which will work in every case.

There are occasional "Easter Egg" issues.

[edit] Rankings

The player's decisions affect the nation's status in the areas of Political Freedoms (how democratic the nation is), Civil Rights (how much freedom the citizens have), and Economy (how strong the nation's economy is), as well as other variables, such as crime rate, industry size and public sector spending.

Based on the nation's personal, economic, and political freedoms, they are assigned to one of 27 "WA Categories" (see below), from Scandinavian Liberal Paradise and Capitalist Paradise to Corporate Police State and Psychotic Dictatorship.^[2] The "other variables" are used to compile the game's daily WA reports, which lists every nation in the game in order of their rank in that day's chosen variable.

The nation's main page briefly describes the population, government, economy and latest policy decisions resulting from the player's choices. The National Happenings section at the bottom of the page shows ten of the most recent events, which includes WA activities and changes to the nation's characteristics (e.g. Motto, Currency, etc.)

[edit] WA Categories

The WA categories, which is modeled according to the nation's political, civil and economic freedoms, are as follows:

• Anarchy
• Authoritarian Democracy
• Benevolent Dictatorship
• Capitalist
• Capitalist Paradise
• Civil Rights Lovefest
• Compulsory Consumerist State
• Conservative Democracy
• Corporate Bordello
• Corporate Police State
• Corrupt Dictatorship
• Democratic Socialists
• Father Knows Best State
• Free Market Paradise
• Inoffensive Centrist Democracy
• Iron Fist Consumerists
• Iron Fist Socialists
• Left-Leaning College State
• Left-Wing Utopia
• Liberal Democratic Socialists
• Libertarian Police State
• Moralistic Democracy
• New York Times Democracy
• Psychotic Dictatorship
• Right-Wing Utopia
• Scandinavian Liberal Paradise
• Tyranny By Majority

[edit] World Assembly

Players may voluntarily join the NationStates World Assembly, making their nations automatically affected by the decisions of that body. However, various players role-play disobedience. Discussions on draft/proposed resolutions take place on the forums, often home to all manner of political debate. A dedicated team of volunteers moderate the forums; most of them also moderate the game to keep it free from vandalism.

[edit] Renaming of the United Nations

The World Assembly was known as the United Nations before April 1, 2008. On this day, the fictional organization was renamed in response to a Cease and desist order from the real United Nations^[3]. Though widely believed to be a prank at the time (as intended with the date of the announcement), the legal complaint was revealed to be real the next day^[4], implying that the name change would be permanent. References to the "United Nations" or the "UN" were universally replaced on the official website, but remained prevalent in old forum posts and fan-operated websites.

[edit] Group play

Nations are grouped into regions. New players begin in one of five Pacific regions and may move their nations into any other region at any time, or set up their own. Many regions have an elected leader, or Regional WA Delegate, and some participate in complex regional governments, though some contain only a handful of nations. Players occasionally attempt to collectively "invade" another region by entering it and seizing control of the regional Delegacy, though it may be hard to garner and coordinate support. Within the game, this process is called "region crashing". Some regions have password-protection to stave off such attacks.

Many multi-regional organizations have formed - either to organize invasions or to organize those who defend against raider play.

Invading, or "region crashing", first became prominent with a group of players calling themselves the Farkers (now referred to as invaders or raiders), who all arrived due to links between the game and the website Fark.com. Steps have been taken to reduce region-crashing and griefing, while regulating the more benign invasion types. In order for a nation to eject another from the region, they must have a specific amount of "influence", which is partly derived from the age of the nation. This helps ensure that invaders do not flood a region, install one of their own as WA Delegate, then eject the original members from the region.^[5]

[edit] Roleplaying

NationStates' relatively simple simulation has given rise to more in-depth and freeform role-playing, with players using their nations' statistics to measure how their nations would fare in international trade, diplomacy, and war. Some players have even developed complex statistical calculators.^[6] Part of the appeal of NationStates lies in the ability to create an unrealistic utopia (or dystopia) as the subject of conversation and political philosophy, without needing to worry about practical matters, like national defense, that might become factors in a more comprehensive simulation.

[edit] Technical history

Due to the past unreliability of the NationStates server, which commonly led to slow or inaccessible forums, January 2004 saw the announcement that the British gaming company Jolt Online Gaming would take over hosting of the site as well as the development of NationStates 2^[7]. On 28 June 2004, after several delays, the game switched to the new servers; however, continued programming issues compounded by the death of Max Barry's father caused the forums to remain down until July 13, 2004.^[8] Flag size increased from 6k to 10k around August 15. Two Google Adverts were added May 2008 for the first time in the game's five year history. [1]

[edit] Technical failures

At three points during the game's existence, the large amount of data required to hold the names and information of over one million nations exceeded the amount of room available on the game's server. Rather than shutting down, the server continued to operate, but failed to save any additional data. As a result, anyone who logged into their nation found that their nation's name had been changed to "The 0 of 0", and that their region was suddenly without a Delegate, Founder, or name. On each occurrence, game administrators loaded a backup file from the previous day. The first "Great Disk Space Disaster" occurred on April 27, 2005^[9] with subsequent errors taking place on August 27, 2005^[10] and April 2, 2006.^[11] The April 2 incident may have been a result of the April Fools joke the day before, where the game had been turned into an online matchmaking service, "NationDates".^[12]

[edit] Statistics

As of December 7, 2004, players had set up over 1,000,000 individual nations since NationStates premiered in late 2002^[13]. At any time fewer than 80,000 remain in existence because of inactivity, or as a result of deletion due to various rule infractions. Though the specific time has varied greatly over the years on-line, NationStates has a current inactivity limit of 28 days (or 60 days if nation-owners enable "Vacation Mode"), after which the system automatically deletes the quiescent nation.

Until 18 March 2008, Moderators could only resurrect nations deleted for inactivity (though not for rule-violations, unless circumstances warrant a repeal of the deletion) on the request of the nation's original owner. Since then, users are able to resurrect nations, by logging as usual with a valid password, and then confirming the password again^[14].

Resurrected nations arrive at the region Lazarus, rather than the Pacific regions where newly-made nations start out. This is still the case despite changes to the nation-revival system.

[edit] Forums

NationStates also has a forum community. Originally, they were phpBB forums hosted by the NationStates server, but after NationStates was acquired by Jolt, the forums moved to Jolt's forum site. The off-topic / out-of-character 'General' forums are mainly used for recreational purposes and political discussion. Role-playing is done in the NationStates and International Incidents forums.

[edit] NationStates 2

On April 21, 2008, Max Barry announced the upcoming launch of NationStates 2^[15]. It is now known to include complex functions for war, trade, diplomacy, and customization. The website predicts a launch "later in 2008" and allows users to sign up for an alert by email and text message. In spite of the game's beta version being "nearly finished", users are encouraged to submit feature requests.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Cyber Nations
• Micronation
• eRepublik

[edit] External links

• Official Website
• Jennifer Government webpage
• Jennifer Government: NationStates Forum
• List of websites and forums for the various regions of NationStates
• NSwiki, a wiki encyclopedia about NationStates
• CBC.ca article
• NationStates Statistics