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“When you want to win a game, you have to teach, when you lose a game, you have to learn.”
-Tom Landry

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you. Nevertheless, to the degree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us be of the same mind.”
-Phillipians 3:12-16

You've met him (or her before). You’re playing Risk, and you’ve just cashed in your cards. You’re ready to roll. And he gets pathetic, just begs you not to attack him and take him out of the game. It goes on for a half an hour, before you finally pick up the dice and start rolling. Every roll until the final inevitable outcome is an adventure in drama. And then it is over. Another sore loser meets his fate.

Or he is a dungeon master. You go into a pickup game, but his antics take all the fun of it away. It is all about him, about his need to control the game, taunt and harass the players, and make you feel small. Inevitably, someone gets angry. The game ends abruptly with no one feeling very happy about it.

Then there is the rules lawyer. If you are like me, a universal gamer who plays just about anything and everything, she is your worst nightmare. Everything you do is illegal and wrong. But if this is your first game, not so bad, because you learned something – but the rules lawyer hoards her knowledge and uses it as a weapon. If this is a game you have not played in sometime, it gets worse, because now you have no excuse. You feel abused as she crushes you at the last second, citing rule number 1115.22 to explain what you overlooked.

Then there is the know-it-all miniatures player who predicts the final outcome on the second move. The battle is not yet joined. You haven’t even lost a single man – and he’s proclaiming your inevitable doom.

Perhaps then, it is natural that all sorts of poor sportsmanship and bad behavior should manifest themselves in a “social strategy” game. For if the “game” is not actually about the game itself, but about the table talk around the game, isn’t this sort of malignant and antisocial conduct to be expected ?

One speaks of eRepublik, a game whose “rules” are minimal at best. And yet, there are those players who seem to feel that it is not just appropriate, but in fact the highest and best form of gamesmanship to win the game through nothing but gamesmanship. So, when having an election, there is no virtue in working hard, seeking out the voters, asking their desires, integrating their opinions into a representative whole – No, one must bully, cajole, trick, and cheat one’s way to success. And this is regarded, more and more, as not just normal, but the very focus of elections. Any vote that is not a deciding vote is regarded as a waste.

Over and over, we are reminded that the game is not the real world, so that real world analogies do not matter. And yet, that begs the question: what does matter ?

Most games end with a clear winner, and with clear losers. eRepublik has none of that, it just has scores. Let me explain. This newspaper, which has existed for eight months now, has 64 subscribers, In terms of rankings we are 493d in the eUSA out of a total of 7129 newspapers. I could chose to feel bad for having this few subscribers, although most of the articles in this newspaper get voted up regularly at about ten or so votes per article. I really don’t know if that is a good or bad number. (Ironically, just as I was getting ready to publish this article, I got a PM from someone who was giving away Q1 bread for free to bump up his subcription count – it stood at 226.)

Given the relatively unique positions taken by this paper, and its sometimes highbrow and esoteric content, I probably ought to content myself with the numbers we get. We certainly outproduce other journals with many, many more subscribers. I do get notes from time to time from persons who like what gets done here, as well as the brickbats when something controversial is published. Is this enough, or isn’t it ?

As St. Paul writes: “we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Someday I shall know as I am known”. (I Corinthians 13:12). In many respects, one cannot know or gauge one’s “success” in a social strategy game, if the goal is to change other people’s minds or to influence their behavior. I would suggest humbly that this is why plays fail, why parties fail, why enations fail. None of us receives enough feedback to understand what are the effects of what we do in the game….and so there is a temptation to just order people around – and expect them to follow orders. But that is certainly no way to play a “social strategy” game.

When one plays face-to-face, a certain level of civility prevails unless, as the conditions I mentioned previously take hold and ruin that sense of sportsmanship. I have to confess that I sometimes let my frustrations get the best of me here. One does see intelligence and insight among some of the players. Even in the worst and most notorious cases, among the multi-mongers and cheaters, there is a human being, living on the other side of that avatar, with needs for friendship and respect and communion with his or her fellow man. What we do not have in eRepublik, and probably cannot have, is an etiquette, a set of social rules that must be abided to be accepted in society. Certainly those rules would not be an extorted and politically correct compliance with the community’s will. Rather they would, and should be the comaradery of players, of friends and enemies alike, who adhere to a common code of honor and a mutual respect that is the highest recognition and the sign of virtue.

Let it be so. Amen.