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Et tu, eRepublik?

Yes, vatos, this is very much another "tl;dr". Well, what can I say? It's another lazy Sunday afternoon and it's been a good while since I've luxuriated in this kind of thing...

Please note: if rambling philosophical explorations are not your cuppa tea, then, as one eRep writer once responded to me in a PM after I made a cutting comment on hir article (which I regretted doing, and learned from), then take heart in the fact that: "I didn't write it for you." and kindly just move along, my friend.


It strikes me that eRepublik is unlike other war games. So-called real life continually and mercilessly bleeds into this game. But could it be that the more obvious ways in which it does so are not the most important ones after all?

As for the usual notes of this little chorus, my dear friends, you've heard them before...


Game Mechanics and Social Strategy

Por ejemplo, you've seen the on-going polemics about the meaning of and relative importance of game mechanics at one end of the spectrum and social strategy at the other. Without falling too deeply into that abyss, let me just observe that it seems to me that advocates whose perspective takes them closer to one end of that spectrum (or another) both tend to rely on "realness" and "anti-realness" arguments to bolster their attitude. Which is to say, the polemic itself is constrained within a (largely unexplored) discourse on what "realness" actually means with respect to the game.


Ethical Game Play

Deliberation also pops up from time to time regarding the role, if any, of ethics in a game that not only supposedly simulates, to one degree or another, corporeal existence, but (obviously) is engaged in by (with the exception of bots) real human beings. Again, the discourse itself is bracketed by "realness" without really exploring that nature of that "realness". One camp rationally observes that ludic delight is obtained by the opportunity to transgress "real world" ethics without real world harm. The other argues just the opposite, and just as logically, that contravening one's "real world" ethics in the game inevitably causes pain to actual blood-and-bones human beings and therefore should be avoided.

Both argue within the context of perceived real world ethical implications of one style of game play or another. And, as usual (guilty myself!), with little empirical evidence to bolster their logic.


The Economics Module

Another popular thread for exploring the nature of the game is deconstruction of its economic model. I've written about this at some length my own bad self.

Although I tend to fall into the camp of players that seeks fun in finding ways to détourne the default economic model, my basis for doing so falls back onto the same set of real-world contradictions that breathes life into the virtual model to begin with. Which is to say: how to manage the deleterious effects of unfettered capitalism? In that respect, as with the ethics question outlined above, although I choose to be "transgressive", I'm still working within the real-world framework that gives rise to this model.

Likewise, my friends who embrace the game's capitalist economic model as-is also tend to embellish it with real-world-derived enhancements like a black market, a banking system, and -- in what is arguably one of the most creative steps ever taken in eRepublik -- complex monetary management systems like the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve in the eUSA.

The point, of course, is that "e-communalists" and "e-capitalists" are both playing out scenarios heavily influenced by our knowledge of (and our criticisms of) real-world economics.


The War Module

In reviewing real world influences on game play, I'd be remiss if I didn't also note that layered on top of all this lies the heavy hand of the game's central ludic conceit. As all players are well aware, the default identity of a player is closely associated with a virtual nationality that mirrors a real-world nationality, inevitably carrying with it, as Jürgen Habermas put it in his criticism of Carl Schmitt, "the existentialist notion that 'the political' consists merely in the self-assertion of a collective identity over and against other collective identities". By the way, Carl Schmitt, for those who don't know, was a fascist intellectual who wrote approvingly of a Euro-centric New World in which nation-states would engage in "civilized war".



In all of the cases outlined above, little satisfaction ever seems to be achieved in constructing what might be called a normative phenomenology that exists completely within the game world (as, for example, in chess, RISK, or poker). Why is that? In other words, why isn't it just dead obvious to everyone "how to play the game"?


Add as a friend

I would suggest it may be because, added to the mix of game mechanics, social strategy, choices regarding ethical/transgressive behavior, the complexity of economic strategies, and the dead hand of the war module (I am being consciously teasing with that comment, I realize that), we also have the entrancing multi-lingual and trans-national communications aspect of the game, which allows us to reach out to people around the world.

The presentation tier of the game software is available in ten languages. Articles, shouts, forum discussions and chats are posted in even more languages and dialects. Yet despite the babel, cross-cultural communication takes place. This is thanks -- in all likelihood -- not only to the prevalence of lingua franca languages and to tools like Google Translator, but also and very importantly -- just as in de facto "real" life (but perhaps even more so) -- to deeper communicative commonalities: to wit, the universal neural associations we all make, no matter what languages we speak, with personal pronouns, especially the informal second person.

eRepublik has been called "Facebook with war". What is sometimes overlooked in the popularization of that rather droll meme is that the process that supports and promotes the idiosyncratic adjudication of the (I would argue, nearly atavistic) impulse towards informal second person pronomial address into the virtual construct of a "friend" is not only shared by these two remarkable softwares, it is at their core.

In Facebook, the "frienditization" of the second person is generally considered to be (more or less) "real". In other words, it is widely felt that the software channel simply provides a long-distance extension to something with which we are already intimately familiar. While the verbitization of "friend" is emblematic of the interactive phase of the virtual age of communications (which actually started in the 1960's, but achieved its now widely-visible logarithmic curve only a few years ago), its ancient (and possibly pre-historic) neural-linguistic antecedents are sometimes overlooked. I'd observe that "friending" is equally "real" in eRepublik and the fact that the game supports and encourages reaching out across cultural and linguistic barriers makes this aspect of "realness" doubly significant.

In the biological human world, the ever-increasing cosmopolitanization of the instinct for the "tu" is, arguably, a driving force of our modern age in nearly every respect. And so, the availability of a meta-linguistic element of game play, particularly its emphasis on the "tu", inexorably blurs the line between the game world and the real world in deeply intriguing and perhaps unexpected ways (not all of which I would by any means pretend to be able to predict).


The conjecture I would make is that, despite the Schmittian horror of the war module (more on this below), the real world relentlessly seeps into eRepublik -- in a very good way -- precisely because it tirelessly encourages us to be friends, despite and practically in opposition to the centrality of the war module and (as I will argue below) the game's utter dis-location from the key modern societal drivers of the real world.


Kant Cried

Those of my dear readers who delve into philosophical tomes have no doubt already discerned my indebtedness to Habermas and, from there, to Kant. Perhaps a brief side-track would be in order for those who are not familiar with these sources.

Jürgen Habermas, a German intellectual, is one of the most highly respected political thinkers of our time. His major contribution to modern thinking is inspired by the cosmopolitanism of Immanuel Kant (see, for example, this essay on Cosmopolitanism), but moves well beyond Kant's vision of "a league of nations" (not to mention Kant's earlier vision of some form of one-world universal republicanism), to promote a view of the evolution of international law in a cosmopolitan constitutional context via a multidimensional model of transnational and supranational governance.

Kant sought a way to move beyond the "state of nature" that had long existed between tribes and nation-states, and tended to focus on the model of the French Revolution as key learning moment. Habermas, with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, sees the dismal atrocities committed by 20th-century republics and tends to view cosmospolitanism as more of a human, and somewhat less of a statist, task, although the role of institutions and of states within them remains key to his vision.

Hegemony and Tolerance

OK. Well, those are alot of multi-syllabic words for an eRep article, but they capture the essence of our modern real-world dilemma. Finding ways to achieve Habermas' vision is where we are at.

My fellow Americans should note that the world-view expressed by Habermas has many echoes in 20th-century American political discourse, from Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, to the rich veins of American pragmatism (with, for example, its emphasis on womens' education and ending stereotyped racial and religious constructs), to the USA's embrace of a renewed vision of the role of the United Nations and other transnational humanistic organizations in the wake of the Cold War.

But Habermas' vision is also deeply opposed to use of "hegemonic liberalism", particularly as it was expressed in the Bush Doctrine that led to the (second) invasion of Iraq.

This distinction is perhaps confusing or even disturbing for some citizens of the USA, particularly in the wake of the events of September 11th, 2001. One way to appreciate the dissimilarity of Habermas' view of universal democratization vs. that of Bush & Co. is to consider the concept of "tolerance". As Habermas pointed out in a 2002 interview, the Edict of Nantes (in 159😎 permitted French Protestants to profess their belief provided they did not question royal authority or the supremacy of Catholicism. In other words, tolerance is a paternalistic concept. It is an act of mercy, the granting of a favor; it contains an implied threat about "overstepping the bounds of tolerance".

The major development in modern democratic society along neo-Kantian lines, that is, in the development of a universal, constitutionally-ordered cosmospolitanism founded in international law, has been precisely moving beyond this type of tolerance, which has its roots in the religious empires that developed out of the Axial Age, and embracing instead a post-Enlightenment constitutionally-protected accordance of equal rights in which nobody has the privilege of defining the limits of tolerance exclusively on the basis on their own preferences and value-orientations.

When liberal-capitalism becomes hegemonic, however, it reverts to the old Axial style of tolerance and is thus a retrograde movement within the context of developing an internationally-accepted system of law based on truly cosmopolitan lines. (This is exactly why Kant abandoned his idea of a one-world republic; he saw that it would become despotic.) Habermas would argue that such trends towards hegemony are actually a shocking betrayal of America's own best traditions. A so-called "militant democracy" that uses the façade of universalism to impose its will on other nations is in serious danger of losing sight of the very self-correcting learning process that's at the core of democracy itself: the right to dissent, even to engage in civil disobedience, as a way to defend the core constitutional principles.

As Bertolt Brecht had Galileo warn us in the Life of Galileo (193😎: "Pity the land that needs heroes."


Right... So, What About the Game?

Yes, that was a side-track, but an important one. Because it puts into perspective the realization that eRepublik's basic game mechanics -- especially with respect to "national" organization, as well as its war module and (I would argue) its economic module as well -- are all deeply at odds with the most vital vectors of concern to us in real-world modern ethics, economics, war, and politics. In this sense, eRepublik does not in fact model the real world, as it exists today, in its most important ways, at all.

On the other hand, the one area in which eRepublik is very much "in touch" with the themes elaborated by Habermas and similar thinkers is -- to return to my main theme -- its reliance on and emphasis on the use of universal, cross-lingual communications that provide a technologically-enhanced choice to employ the informal second person.

Let's look at it in another way...



February 2003 or August 1914?

If we want to boil down the course of the 20th century to two key moments that future historians will look back on and say "that's when everything changed", it's been suggested that two dates will stand out:

August 2, 1914




and


February 15, 2003




End of the Dream

The first date -- August, 1914 -- denotes the start of World War I, the "Great War", an event that dumped all pre-conceived notions of the "civilizing" direction of the Western nations into the trash and unleashed a series of events that culminated in not only the violent deaths of millions of people, but also: the end of the British and Ottoman Empires; the creation of the modern Arab World; the development of Soviet and Chinese communism, German Nazism, American neo-liberalism; the Cold War, with its threat of nuclear annihilation; and its aftermath. In short, it ushered in the modern 20th-century world as most of our parents and grand-parents, not to mention the current generations, have known it.

August, 1914 marked the utter failure, in the terms outlined above, of Kant's dream of a cosmopolitan world order managed sanely by either a single world-republic or by a coalition of the same. On the other hand, this fateful date is also a somber pointer to Schmitt's depressing world-view of humans as "beasts" who can (and should) organize themselves into states for the purpose of waging war on one another.


The New Awakening

The second date -- February, 2003 -- saw what was in all likelihood the most universal expression ever seen on the face of the Earth of anti-war sentiment. It was completely unprecedented. Millions upon millions of people protested in over 800 cities around the world. There were 3 million protestors in Rome alone. Protests occurred inside the US in at least 255 municipalities, including very large demonstrations in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. A world-wide poll in 41 countries showed less than 10% of the world's population believed the United States and Britain were justified in invading Iraq.

Unlike the also-controversial 1999 NATO-backed intervention in Kosovo, the 2003 invasion of Iraq caused deep divisions between Western Europeans and the Americans, as well as serious divides within the European states. While the extent of and responsibility for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo remains open to question (for example, evidence to points to atrocities committed by the KLA as well as by Serbian nationalists), there was some consensus that the intervention in that case supported a broader human rights agenda.

There was no such consensus in 2003. Habermas summed it up by saying, "Make no mistake, the normative authority of the United States of America lies in ruins." Many other observers -- Slavoj Žižek, for one, comes to mind -- have, in their own way noted the 2001-2003 period as a significant turning-point in modern history, marked first and foremost by the abandonment of long-standing principles by the world's "sole remaining superpower" but also -- and significantly -- by a massive, world-wide popular revulsion at such abandonment of principle.


A New World?

The point of reviewing these two potential key dates in modern history is certainly not to trigger any arguments about real-life American foreign policy. It is simply to note that the eRepublik model, particular the software construction of national states and the role of war within the game, is very much more similar to events associated with the first date -- August, 1914 -- than to those associated with the second one.

There are no structures built into the game that simulate anything like the events of February, 2003. Nor do many players seem to express a willingness to build infrastruture around the game -- as they have done in so many other areas -- that would reflect a neo-cosmopolitan need for a constitutionally-based international law to counter-act crimes against humanity with the goal, at long last, of suppressing the barbaric "state of nature" between national states.

While many players doubtlessly support such a movement in real life, in my limited experience there seems to be little desire for it within either the built-in or the layered-on morphology of the game.

So I can only conclude that, for the most part (an important hedge; you know where I'm going with that, my friend!), the "New World" of eRepublik is not new at all. It is actually the "new world" as envisioned by a fascist German intellectual decades ago, and decidedly not the New World that was proclaimed (if in a fuzzy and still, obviously, controversial way) by hundreds of millions of Earthlings at the dawn of the 21st century.


Ethics in a Universe of Complexity

Those of you who are philosophy majors may be familiar with the pioneering work of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. He was a bit of an eccentric, not hugely famous in his own time or even now, but his efforts laid the groundwork for much of what was good in the development of American pragmatism towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

He wrestled with many questions and is credited, among other things, with initiating investigations into linguistic representation that eventually grew into the fields of semiotics and symbolic logic, two areas of knowledge that resonate profoundly in our times. Although it's specious to think that discoveries by one scientist or philosopher would have never been found by another, we can perhaps give a little nod to Charles Pierce every time we use any software program since the ability to manipulate symbolic logic is, basically, their DNA.

Pierce picked up on David Hume's analysis of religious vs. scientific understandings of the world, arguing vocifierously against superstition and for an appreciation of the natural world that fully embraces the role of what we now refer to as complexity, but he simply called "chance". Pierce developed what has been called the pragmatic maxim:

"Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

Emphasizing, particularly towards the end of his career, that he had no intention of developing a world-view or a guide to action, only to find "a method of reflexion having for its purpose to render ideas clear", Pierce denounced many who took his work in directions he did not intend for it. In general, this type of pragmatism puts an emphasis on consequences, on ordinary language and on the effect of actions, preferring -- somewhat akin to Buddhist epistemology -- to leave most metaphysical questions unanswered as irrelevant, in any essential way, and therefore neither to be condemned nor embraced.

Which brings me to my final point...


Will This Kwazy Essay Ever End?

I pushed that digression on Pierce onto the end of this long Sunday-afternoon soliloquy because it seems to me that that kind of "old-school" pragmatism provides a useful perspective on finally coming to grips with the "meaning" or the "relationship to real life" of most of the eRepublik modules.

In short: it is pretty much irrelevant. None of those modules -- not even, for the most part (I would except cheating), the choice of how to embody ethics within your approach to the game's mechanics -- has any real effect on the real world. So it simply doesn't matter what you do.

Whether I support capitalist companies or collectivist communes within the game has no impact whatsoever on disambiguating capitalist inequalities in the real world.

While the game's war module and its nationalist orientation may well be based on a fascistic reading of modern history, participating in an e-Bulgarian invasion of e-Greece has no effect on the development of the tourist trade in Borovets.

Invading the e-United States will do nothing at all to influence either of the major parties in the (RL) USA with respect to their actions in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.

The only part of the game that can rationally be considered "real" is the part of it that builds off of that fundamentally deeply-rooted informal second person linguisitic representation: "thee", "tu", "buddy", "my friend". That's where we reach around the noise and fuss, the rock-and-roll, the cartoon war-and-politics, of the game's ludic constructs and in an very ordinary way (granted, using somewhat extraordinary means), connect with the desire for world-community, which (in my humble opinion) is the same spirit that drove all those millions of people out into the streets of the real world in February, 2003.

Why do I obssess about this? I think it's because, somewhat counter-intuitively, the "Add as a friend" option within the game is the one thing I can do that has no direct impact on any of the mechanics of the game. It just means I'll be able to see when my friend "shouts". In a fairly banal sense, it allows us to "hear" one another. And in that banal gesture, I see the kernel of Habermas' important, (perhaps, if we are to believe people like Žižek or Michael Eldred, even life-saving) distinction between really listening to each other and merely tolerating one another.

And that, my friends, seems to me to be what is most "real" in both worlds.