How do we bring people to this game (and country)?

Day 531, 11:50 • Published in USA USA • by ligtreb

There are two main ways to make this country stronger:

1) Make our citizens more active
2) Grow our population

We still have a lot to improve, but we are getting better at #1. The efforts of organizations like Meals on Wheels and the National Guard, along with the voting up of the White House's newspaper and the shouts for it have helped us make more citizens transition from being 2-clickers to active parts of our society.

But what about #2? Is there a way we, as devoted citizens of this virtual country and fans of this game, can bring more people to eRepublik and eUSA?

To answer that question, it would help to find this out -- how did you hear about this game? What made you join it? I saw an ad for this game on fivethirtyeight.com, read the game's description and being a numbers and political geek in real life, thought I'd give it a try. I'm still here. What's your story?

I figure that people who play this game joined because they fit at least one of the following backgrounds:

1) Online gamers who play other MMORPGs
2) War/Military gamers
3) Political geeks
4) Business/Economy geeks
5) People drawn in by our society, like the forums, IRC and our newspapers.
6) People referred to by friends and family

So how do we attract those people? This is 2009, there are blogs and message boards for everything -- attracting the first four types of people shouldn't be too hard if we can identify places where those people congregate.

I don't play too many other online games, but know there has to be some gamer blogs and forums out there that are heavily read where we can post, asking for people to try this game out. We can compare eRepublik to whatever games are popular at the blog/message board and give our testimonials to why we love it.

Political blogs should be easy targets, there's liberal and conservative blogs out there with good readerships, and we can pitch them the angle that this game has political parties and ideological arguments, even if they're different from real life.

Groups #5 and #6 might be harder for us to target as a group, but if you have friends into this kind of game, it wouldn't hurt to ask 🙂

What do you all think? Anyone agree with me that reaching out on other blogs and message boards is a good way to help our country? Anyone interested in helping?

Thank you,

-- ligtreb
Department of Education member
Two-time congressional candidate
Proud member of the USWP