[TRG] Ramblings of a Rambler

Day 3,571, 10:07 • Published in USA USA • by J.A. Lake
Talk About the Midnight Rambler


There is a ton of introspection in the media today. I'm a humble rambler, an on-and-off player. Some of you might know me, some others might not. It just so happens I'm passing through these parts again.

Let me throw some analysis in there that might or might not be outdated, in which case just call it philosophizing. My thesis? We played it too safe. I think I come down more on the "the community sank itself" side of the debate than I do the "malignant Plato is milking us for all the money he can" side. There's truth to both sides, which is a basic truth to all things in life (wise-sounding advice is free of charge).

Anyway, I remember the addition of dictatorship and the December Revolution. Quick history lesson: the Socialist Freedom Party, being socialists, thought that dictatorship was a blight on our country. In December of 2015 we decided to do something about it, and launched a rebellion. This had the predictable effect of infuriating the community at large, leading to a Congressional blacklist of SFP members and a lot of talk about taking over the SFP and dispersing it.

I think dictatorship is the best case in point insofar as my thesis is concerned. The module was meant to shake things up, to allow military units to enact coups or the likes. Our response? To coopt it, to codify how it should be used, and to install one permanently (at the time) to ward against other countries.

That whole sequence of events speaks volumes about the utter inertia of our "government" at the time, which had been running the show the same way with the same power players in charge for years (that isn't to say that's an inherently bad thing, Tyler Bubblar wrote an excellent article on that point). I know that's a long-dead horse and I don't intend to flog it here, but it has bearing on the conversation. We did not adapt to the game, we adapted the game to us. The changes we yearned for were there in some measure, but we twisted them to preserve the system rather than to let the system change and -gasp- react.

Were we expecting to have fun playing "Bureaucracy Simulator"? I was a member of Congress for eight months, and lucked into a position as Secretary of Media once. In a previous life (or account I had deleted) I was an ambassador, Director of Ambassador Affairs, an officer in the eUS Military, and I might've made it to Deputy Secretary of State by the end of it. This was years ago, so my memory is fuzzy. I've seen the wheels turn inside the bureaucratic beast here, and it's unexciting. There's a reason I ramble in and out. It's because despite the cool people in the community, playing this game could feel like a having a job that I don't get paid for (which is sort of like my real job, when I see my pay stub- but I digress). It was Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, composing and filing reports to superiors, handling and organizing underlings, sending out canned recruiting messages by the dozen... I had come for the browser gaming experience and somehow ended up in a virtual cubical with Dilbert comics pinned to the walls.



I think that's where we lost a lot of people. Wide-eyed people looking for an awesome community and maybe even some role-playing. Instead they were greeted by a canned message seeking to draw them into a spreadsheet, where they could hopefully be counted on to be dependable damage-producers that would be pointed someplace with less powerful damage-producers. Is it any wonder that every new spike of players is met with an equal and opposite mass die-off of new players (Source)?

A frequent criticism of my rambling articles in the past was that I didn't submit any real suggestions to change things for the better, I just pointed out flaws. That was true, I did enjoy being a gadfly (or trying to be, at any rate). This time I have a legitimate excuse, I've been away again. I don't see the dictatorship border, so I guess we got rid of that. Revolution: 1; Dictatorship: 0?

I guess if I had one suggestion it would be this: Have fun. What form does this take now, with the game a shadow of its former self? I don't know, only you can define fun for yourself. Let me wax philosophical on that, though, and maybe we can move forward together in a fun way.

1) Your fun can't stop others' fun.

Pretty basic rule. I think this one is the one we're guiltiest of breaking, though. See my rant above about "Bureaucracy Simulator"- it might've been fun for the Cabinet to have a functioning government and military, but the cost for that was that players got ground up in the gears of the aforementioned government. As a result, they left! Fun is like matter, and boredom like antimatter. If your fun is producing boredom, the fun and the boredom annihilate each other. It can't be like that, not any longer.

2) React, but in a fun way.

I think this is a pretty hard one to define. Going back to the dictatorship discussion, we played it wrong. If we'd reacted in a fun way, we'd have had more December Revolutions and fewer blacklists/Congressional inquisitions. Reacting in a fun way would've been more along the lines of marshalling resources so we could defend the eUSA from hostile mercenary units seeking to topple the government. I recall hearing people getting nostalgic about throwing out invaders during one of the old inter-alliance wars. It's as though the community decided we never wanted to do that again.

3) Organize fun community events!

Some of my fondest memories in SFP were the movie nights we did for a few weeks. Stuff like that would be a cool thing to do. Build a sense of community, focus on making what we've got thrive rather than lamenting what we've lost. Perhaps with careful stewardship and concerted effort our community will feel less like some empty thing and more like... community.

Then again, I'm just a rambler. I fell out of the game again nearly a year ago and somehow found my way back here. A lot's happened. Maybe my observations aren't worth anything anymore. I guess this is as much a postmortem as it is a thought of the future, kind of a contradiction in that sense.

I don't know how constructive it is to focus on the past. It is a useful guide for how we move forward, if we care to learn from it. If we can learn from it. I think we can, if we want to. I know from months of trying that the eUSA is an obdurate creature, and we need to want to change. Is change in you? Absolutely. Let's think outside the box and make it happen.