Something a little different today. I’ll play a lot of games online, though I have a few that I do enjoy. One that I’ve actually been playing for six years now, but I’m surprised I’ve never written about or talked about before, is called NationStates. As far as I know it’s unlike anything else that’s out there, it’s fairly easy to play, and they can offer some interesting scenarios.
I’m not quite sure how to describe it in the general terms of gaming, but the basic premise behind the game is that you create a nation state, given the name, and then determine, based on a series of questions that you get on a daily basis, how your government is going to run and how it’s going to fit in with the rest of society. Every day that you go back to the game you get to see what kind of impact the choices you made have on your nation, and get the alter your stance as you so choose. Sometimes you find that the choices you make don’t result in the responses you expected, but I tend to believe that’s pretty much how it is with regular government.
The next step after creating your nation is to decide if you want to join a region or create your own region. You have to be somewhere, and early on I used to take my civilization around to different regions before deciding to create a region of my own. The region is called Fairness For All; that I decided to call the capital city Mitchellopolis might seem a bit narcissistic, but that’s one of things you get to do. Unfortunately right now I’m the only member of my region, as it would be fun to have other nations involved, but that’s okay because it allows me to have the deciding vote for my region when it comes to participating in the World Assembly.
The World Assembly is where your nation state gets to either vote for or against something along with all the other nation states that are out there, kind of like a United Nations. Sometimes you’re voting for things like whether there should be international laws created or repealed, and sometimes you’re voting for or against a nation state or a region that’s being blamed for bad behavior. I have no idea what happens to those nations that get condemned, and I haven’t really weren’t all that much about it.
They also have a forum where people can get together and participate in all kinds of things. I’ve only been to the form a few times overall these years, because truthfully I forget about it. But the few times I have gone has been interesting, and you usually will find out what new thing is going on with the game because the owners of it are always making some kind of change here and there.
The best thing I like about the game is that it doesn’t take all that long to play unless you really want to get into the forums. At this point, because I’ve been playing so long, my nation has a population of around 8.6 billion people. Try imagining a world where there were so many nations that had billions of people in them; yeah, that would be a freaky proposition, but this game allows for it.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a little bit of diversion and have a little bit of a Napoleon complex about you, at least take a look and decide if it’s something you wouldn’t mind doing. And if you do, I wouldn’t mind you joining my region for a while just to figure out how things are going for you, and one of the best things about the game is that you can always leave and join other nations without much trouble.