[GBM] Ghost of Paul Proteus Haunts America, Occasionally Opens and Closes Creaky Doors

Day 2,749, 15:02 • Published in USA USA • by Paul Proteus
I will buy no votes, and this article shall receive none.


Been a while since I've used this banner

"Humankind cannot stand very much reality."

And thus, here I am again. I'm not back, so to say. I have no interest in what I suppose we still refer to as "politics" at this point. Still, it's worth announcing, as I've been gone a while. Well not gone. If I were feeling more creative, this article might be titled "Ghost of Paul Proteus Haunts America, Occasionally Opens and Closes Creaky Doors" and be a relatively amusing satire. Maybe I'll title it that anyway.


Or something like that, you get my point

I have noticed that there hasn't been much good literature coming out of this game recently. I enjoyed Aramec's article, though I don't agree with his interpretation of the statistics. Still, he wrote something, kudos to that.

Let me start this article simply, there are a few assertions that I feel fairly safe in making.

1) This game is dying

2) Everybody seems to know how to fix it

The former is undeniable. What we take part in now is virtually unrecognizable from even a few years ago. I'm surprised the servers are still up. The latter is both amusing and disheartening. Let me share the conclusion that nearly 6 years of playing this game has come to. There is no solution. We cannot fix this game. This isn't the same game we want it to be, in fact it's barely a game.

Aramec asserts that activity has gone down in relationship to multi-term presidents. He has pretty graphs, and a pretty damn good article saying so. I'd like to believe that's true. It means that we can do something to change our future. If we just set term limits we could revive activity. Or, according to Jude, who has become slightly less elegant in his writing, if we just topple those nasty elites and the metagame, new players won't be turned away, and erepublik will once again become a massively popular panglossian paradise.


My slightly less informative graph. Graphs get votes, right?

I suspect Aramec doesn't really believe the downturn in activity is tied to a lack of term limits. He's smart, and this game's decline tends to be out of our hands. The point he makes is in service of a good idea. At this point, why must our presidents be those who know how to run. Most people don't even think Oblige is particularly better than competent. Term limits would certainly make metapolitics more interesting, and I'm sure it'd help keep a few newer players on the margin interested. But it wouldn't really solve our collective problem, at best it'd be a temporary salve, at worst, it'd be useless legislation accomplishing nothing but irritating our best players who now have to turn to find which puppets they can best employ for their shadow terms.

And like all arguments that begin with a conclusion, the argument itself isn't particularly strong. The narrative that we began having multiterm presidents following Tenshibo and my own mediocre-terrible terms doesn't hold up. They were indeed as bad as Aramec claims, though the blame should rest equally on our shoulders for poor communication, and in my case burnout, as well as two multi-term presidents, even then, particularly Artela, for terrible foreign policy that got us into a stacked, and in that moment, unwinnable war, as well as on Oblige who obstructed SCI money for political gain, namely to be elected and spend it again. Beyond that, Aramec's comparison of arguably the eUS' golden age with a period of significant downturn is not exactly fair, he's not even comparing the rate of turnover Pre-PaulShibo and post, he's comparing a string of our highest activity to that of our lowest.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why votes are stagnating, it's not a lack of excitement in the political process, but rather that the silent majority of lurkers have stopped playing, as the game has deteriorated. They've quit and gone un-replaced, as have our more active players. As a game that used to have multiple classes of players, ranging from two clickers, to mid-tier activity, to only the most active, we now have one, heavy metagamers who have some emotional attachment to this game, or entrenched political power, that overcomes eRepublik's decreasing quality. Any variation in voting during a hotly contested election is likely not due to increased interest from any voter base, but rather mild fraud and friendly accounts being reactivated.


Apparently the Silent Majority are also an incredibly bizarre comic-book property. Look it up

So if Aramec is wrong but with a noble cause, what's Jude? On a personal level, I like Jude enough, but from observation, what once served as an effective question to power has now developed into obsolete obstructionism. Much as the "elites" are a political class; Jude, Wooky Jack etc. are part of a political class I'm going to similarly derogatorily dub "Individualists". Individualist players tend to claim to be playing for egalitarian and democratic ideals. Maybe they are. My argument would be that those ideals, essential to a thriving society, are similarly obsolete and damaging to a dying one. We shouldn't play eRepublik like a political simulator anymore, because it's not. Even if everything were "fair" and the metagame died, what you would have is not a better game, but rather no game. Individualists, however, frequently play with a specific goal in mind in which self comes before party, and certainly before the country. Their view of how the eUS should exist preempts any attempt at community-based organization.

This is essentially what happened in the Feds. Jude and Artela joined the Feds with a specific goal in mind, and it involved using the party. Anyone who says otherwise is categorically wrong. I was Vice Party President at the time, and when Tyler gave them both Leadership access, I was in stark opposition. Jude at least was through a party job, Artela simply leveraged perceived competence and experience. I'm sure they had a noble goal, but as soon as they lost any challenge to the status quo of the party they had joined, they left. The political history of the Feds is far from simple, but the party had long since diverged from the strength in community it had possessed even a few years ago, and it quickly became clear how many members valued their own interests over that of the party.

This is not to say the Feds are a good party, a fair party, or a worthwhile party. It is to say, however, that those who criticize the Feds, the Country, or any lasting institution with hyperbolic populist phrasing, using corruption as an absurdly out of scale crutch, frequently do so because they do not play this game to improve any such institution, but rather to replace the work of others with their own. This is not sustainable, and is ultimately more harmful to the community than anything else.


If it's eRepublik, it's certainly piss

What is surprising to me, is not the pettiness, but rather the static nature of this community. It's clear that those in power have generally not changed in the past few years, but those in opposition have remained equally constant. The same people being derided for obstruction are recognizable no matter how many times one quits and returns. My only question is this: is it fun to continue to act out the same scene, the same caricatures to the audience of an online browser game's death throes? I would imagine not, but perhaps I would be wrong.

In declaring that this game isn't fixable, I don't mean to be over-pessimistic. We'll never have the same community, or the same game as we did when a country the size of Switzerland had a more active player base than the US does now. I'd imagine the solution would be in reimagining this game and in pushing the envelope of what can be accomplished in an ostensibly democratic browser game. I personally think roleplay would be fun. But that would require working together, a task so quixotic and reprehensible to some, that it clearly is a pipe dream. Or as an old friend once said, "Pie in the Sky."


PS: Here's your moment of Zen~

Yours,
Paul