A Barbarian at the Gate

Wars are won or lost before they are fought. The preparation, attitude, strategy, and the selection of proper allies.
-Delenn (Babylon 5)

eRepublik is a social strategy game. So say the designers.

But what makes it so? What makes a game that many seem to view at best a text based Call of Duty spinoff, and at base, a global game of Risk, into a social strategy game?

I answer that question with a question. How do you make a player more active? You can’t order him to be more active. He will just resent it. You can’t threaten him, he will just quit playing. Call him a two clicker, fill his inbox with PM’s, send him tickets to move out of his home state, tell him he isn’t important unless he’s playing your version of the game, all will fail.

You must offer him more. You must make him want to be more active. He must seek out the game outside of the game. You must reach out to him on a level that he starts to think about the game when he isn’t in front of the screen.

He must think “I wonder what’s going to happen today? Will there be a war? How is my business doing? I wonder what my friends are talking about today on the forums.”

To do this, you must get him to care. Get him to care about the country, his eFriends, his place in the eSociety. You must give him a place where he belongs, and more than that, a place where his actions and opinions matter. That is the social strategy aspect of the game. That’s why politics and newspapers and forums matter every bit as much as damage output.

The war was successful in gaining greater participation from the eUS citizens as far as it went. But constant war is impractical, and will not sustain players for the long term. You must make players care about the world and all of its parts. Your strategy must be used to make it “their” society.