Join the new world

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When you really stop to think about this game, it can be pretty incredible what we've created here. With a bare-bones economy, a one-way political module, and a positively boring military module we've crafted society. It's impressive. I thought about this while conversing with some friends on the discord server
, and I thought about it by way of my own journey through the game. It occurred to me that I've actually encountered quite a lot in my years playing this game.

We start back in 2011 or so. This part of the story is the most sparse, my memory generally fails after about twenty-four hours so recalling six years ago is definitely a strain. This was the era of wars fought on maps covered in a hexagonal grid, when you moved yourself across the map and there was a semblance of strategy to the game. I was an artillerist, a new recruit in the military.

I fought in several battles, but the biggest and most consequential was the eUSA's invasion of Far Eastern Russia. My unit entered the battlefield and took up positions around a bridge, keeping the eRussians from crossing the river. As an artillerist, I concerned myself primarily with their aircraft and held the bridge against all aerial comers. It was an entertaining fight, we won as I recall.

At the same time I'd become an Ambassador. Stealing my attention from the battlefield, the duties of an Ambassador were far more intellectually stimulating. For a time I was Ambassador to India. It was a cool job, many hours were spent getting to know my counterparts in India and Being enthusiastic as I was, I recall a promotion to Director of Ambassador Affairs, with the potential to climb through the State Department there before me. Unfortunately, real life intervened. I fell out of the game for a long time, several years. By the time I'd returned V2 had been banished and I'd forgotten my username and password. I was reborn.

Upon my return I learned that a lot had transpired. The eUS Military had splintered away from the eUS Government, becoming a private organization. I joined them and rapidly became an officer in the Training Corps before falling out about as fast. As it turned out, sending messages and checking boxes didn't stimulate me as Ambassadorial work had. Sadly, by this point the Ambassador program was essentially gone. It was without a purpose that I turned to party politics, examining several of the Top 5 parties before deciding on America's longest-lived Sixth Party, the Socialist Freedom Party.

There were a lot of cool people there, many of whom have regrettably moved on. The SFP got me into media, encouraging me to write. From there my career as a writer took off, and I became the editor of the SFP Official Media for several issues. I wrote a few pretty good articles in this time, but no masterpiece.

Real Life intervened again, and I suddenly disappeared again. My absence lasted only a few months this time, and I returned and continued to write and to (in my mind) agitate. By now it was getting close to 2016, probably the zenith of my eRepublik career. It was in 2015 and 2016 that I began to get into Congress. I never enjoyed Congress as much as some, but it was important experience. By now I have been in Congress for eight terms (not consecutively).

After the end of my time as Secretary of Media I had to take a few months off, and came back toward the end of 2015. I witnessed Jude Connors' run for the Presidency, which I opposed. It regrettably drove a wedge between Jude and I, and he left the game before that could be repaired. Following that the SFP launched the December Revolution, which lead to a lot of consequences for the Party.

I got a pet cause, though, which was fighting the Congressional blacklist and the rules by which Congress governed itself. As someone who hung around with a lot of malcontents and miscreants (love you all), fighting the man came easily.



Unfortunately, it didn't bear much fruit. A cursory search of the forums shows me that some SFPers remain on the blacklist, actual years later. So go politics, really. Sometimes you win, other times you lose.

Around midway through 2016 (May, according to my bio) I became Secretary of Media. That was my first foray into Cabinet-level politics, at least my first time getting my profile picture pasted into a cabinet announcement article. Publishing the White House Press Release was fun and challenging, and I like to think I did a decent job getting it out on time with informative content. After this I had to take another hiatus, lasting for several months.

When I returned I found SFP in the midst of a PTO. Some players had lucked into an electoral victory, having utilized one player's honor to convince him to leave the election and handing it over to them. We struggled against this for some time, and eventually the PTO got beaten. The camaraderie we had as SFPers never beat that moment, in my opinion. We worked hard to maintain our identity as a party and to regain control of it.

At this point in my life I was a senior in university, so I checked out of the game for a year- which brings me to now.

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Reflecting on this, the society we created is kind of awesome (in the literal sense of the word, not the colloquial usage). In probably three or so years of steady gameplay (with RL-compelled breaks and periods of burnout) I was an artillerist, an officer in the Training Corps, a Congressman, a writer, a revolutionary, an Ambassador, and a Secretary of the Media. We created a society that supported all of that. Sure there are problems with it, a look at my article history could tell you that I've made a career out of pointing those flaws out. What is laudable is that it existed and in some form continues to exist. It's a testament to humanity, really, that in such barren conditions as these we come together and build something far larger than ourselves out of it.

I think we can still do it. We suffer from a community-wide melancholia that we shouldn't. Instead of looking at the past eras of the eUnited States like some lost civilization destroyed by time and scattered like sand on the wind, we should look to them like a goal. We should strive to create organizations like we had, to rebuild that which attracted and retained us all to begin with. The theme in the media today is that the community shares responsibility for the shrinking of the community with Plato. So be it.

That also means the community has within itself the capability to grow. We are our own stewards. The game has always been only a fraction of why we stick together. I think we must reexamine how we govern ourselves, reorganize, and build a society that is appropriate for our goals as a society. I think of it as a broken windows argument. As it is, we are as a community in a state of depression. Many people talk at length about what was, how many fewer people we have here than we did eight years ago, and so on.

Perhaps the key to fixing things is to stop throwing rocks through the windows and to start covering up the graffiti. Our community could be depressed because that's how we act- we all are holding a vigil, it feels. That's not going to draw in new players or retain the players we have. It might just be that by changing our attitudes and reorganizing our society we could see positive change in our community at last. We can be the shining city standing upon the hill.

That's how I see it, at least. As the cliché goes, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.