Red October Sets Sail

Day 1,046, 08:29 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Johnobrow

Comrades, Red October is seaborn! At its helm is myself but I welcome all to join its crew.

Accuse me of sensationalism if you must, but for me there is no denying that the eUK is in the midst of a crisis. It is a crisis brought on by a decadent and failed system, by the inability to progress. To be blunt, the political class of this country have for a long time vehemently opposed necessary change. Indeed, the very fact that there is such an established elite demonstrates the crisis we are in for it is a crisis of participation, democracy and player retention.

Ever quick to accuse game mechanics for their impotence in resolving this crisis (it is, I assure you, very resolvable), what is truly the cause is their own lack of imagination, and more importantly, their own self-interest in preserving a system of government that isolates the general population. You are an outsider in your own country. You may spectate, but not participate. You are allowed to fight for the country and apparently elect its government, but you're not allowed to run it.

Undoubtedly this will by many be denied and they shall cite all their rhetoric concerning player retention as evidence that they do care about the average eUK citizen. But talk without action is simply empty rhetoric - their failure to seriously address the crisis is evidence enough of their complicity in its creation. Indeed their hostile opposition to the emerging progressive movement in the euK is obvious, the repealment of the Democracy Act in particular being a clear manifestation of their true concerns.

Ours is a system born out of a small and inactive population. From this backwardness all the conditions which carried this form of organisation toward an unparticipatory form of organisation followed. The country was run by a minority and so it still is run by a minority - the necessary changes brought on by growth and development have not been made and thus we have begun to decline. Technical questions of organisation have turned out to be social questions.

The irony is that in order to maintain this system, the elite have isolated all others and in doing so alienated them and critically damaged player retention. They suck the life out of eRepublik when they say "only we can play the game and experience it to the full", they make all others quit. Hence then, the crisis, for what is an elite without an underclass to exploit, a bourgeoisie without a proletariat? It has gotten to the point where the collapse of the social order has caused even the elite to start quitting - the social hierarchy is crumbling in on itself without the base of ordinary players to exploit. Having gorged itself on the mass of the eUK, the elite finds itself starving and struggling to continue even to exist. As long as we have our current system, however, it may shrink but it shall never disappear altogether.

It is my solemn belief that if you want people to stick around you have to give them more than a bit of dull and dreary mass messaging to do. The key to keeping players present and active is to provide them with a system that includes rather than excludes, interests rather than disinterests and encourages participation rather than spectacle.

This is what I and others with me want to achieve. A system where power is distributed as much as possible from the outside in and from the bottom up, not because of some ideological dogma, but because we can't afford not to. Enough is enough.

There will be those who dismiss me and tell you not to vote for me because I am a "crazy commie", but I suggest that is exactly why you should vote for me - not because of communism or any alleged instability on my part, but because the elite are concerned that they may not exist tomorrow because it is time we did things differently around here. It's time for a bit of people power.

The elite have failed and failed spectacularly. Theirs is an old orthodoxy for an old age. The eUK is not made up of beta giants anymore. It is made up of young and mostly bored "two-clickers" who are craving something more than they are being offered not just by the game designers but by those who claim to run the country in the interests of the whole. I say nobody can uphold those interests better than the whole itself. The eUK does not belong to the government, it does not belong to the bureaucracy and it does not belong to the military - it belongs to you.

The elite are ventriloquists. They treat the country as a dummy and manipulate it to say whatever they wish. They do not speak for you, they need not speak for you when you can amply speak for yourselves.



I have asked the People's Communist Party to endorse my candidacy for Country President and I understand the party shall announce its official position within the next 24 hours. Detailed policy will follow shortly. In the meantime your participation, questions and feedback are not just welcome but actively encouraged.