Join the new world

Some time ago, wandering around the vast plains of eRepublik I met a tall player named Jonny from the Village of Minho, which is located in the borderlands between the legendary e-provinces of Chuy and Pepe. In ancient times it was an independent territory called Jinn, but it's since been absorbed into the modern Province of Hoo in the State of Yah, which, along with an update introducing mayoral and gubernatorial elections at the municipal and provincial levels is expected to be implemented as a new e-country. My understanding is that such improvemennts are all going to happen some time shortly after pigs fly.

Jonny loved nothing better than a good chaotic e-uprising. The messier the better. What especially got him going was lots of property damage. When I ran into him, he was also partial to exotic riot porn and had a dog named Cinammon, who enjoyed barking at cops and pissing on radical relativists. Last I heard of him, Jonny was running a small anarchist thought-smuggling operation out of Varna, supplying Ukrainian skeptics who are trapped behind enemy lines in lands temporarily occupied by Muscovite phenomenologists with lists of hermeneutic problem statements written in invisible ink and disguised as packs of "GD Red".





Jonny was fascinated by a rare bird named Lucy.

She'd been around the game lands even longer than Jonny. Lucy'd had a minor success in the early days having published an obscure guide on the way to play the game without getting too obsessed about it, or too upset at its many annoying features and glitches. Subsequent commentators edited it many times over the e-centuries, adding in so many analytical deconstructions and weird takes that the heart has gone out of it. The version of it now available on the wiki is a sad shadow of the original, which can now be found now only by doing a deep search of the Wayback Machine, or by taking a dangerous trip to the SFP's vast undersea library far beneath the Great Barrier Reef.

_{(If interested in the latter, kindly visit the SFP party page and post a comment there noting your philosophical point of view regarding postmodern textual analytics, then request to book a trip on the party's yellow submarine. Unless your application is rejected for vulgarized junior hegelianism, a representative will soon contact you via raven with instructions on where to meet up with the sub.)}





Early critics of Lucy's work, penned by insipid opponents of vastness and traveling afar, compared it to a monstrous ugly useless tree. When Jonny came to her defense, one of those critics, a old fart named Evryman, started to refer to him as "The Madman of Chuy".

In a stinging retort, Jonny announced to the entire New World that not only would he henceforth perform as "Madman Jonny", but he was also naming his guitar Lucille in honor of Lucy. He went on to produce the epic blues song "Wildcats and Weasels", which describes how the virtues of these critters lead to their own downfall. The gist of it is that they are small, sleek and extraordinarily fast, which makes them experts at catching rodents. For this reason they're generally considered to be extremely useful players. The song goes on to relate that this same "skill" leads to their downfall: getting caught in traps designed just for them.

In a surprising lyrical twist heard only during the turnaround of the last verse, Jonny sings that the giant yak, on the other hand, is entirely useless but nearly impossible to trap.





As I read eRepublik, I try to keep the story of Jonny and Lucy in mind. It helps me to focus on the important question: what are the criteria by which we may judge one interpretation of the game to be better or worse than another?


It is always possible to choose criteria which I can appeal to in order to justify whatever judgments I've made. I mean criteria regarding things like historical sensitivities, aesthetic preferences, linguistic sympathies, a feeling of closeness to the text, general coherence of a storyline, and so on and so forth. These criteria arise inevitably from our situatedness and our individuality. We interpret and we evaluate interpretations. Yet these criteria are not necessarily themselves clear or well-defined and they may not be internally consistent.

Our interpretation of the eRepublican text is itself a language game, a yakkity-yak, that we learn to play by total immersion. Even the most radical skeptic ends up having to communicate if they wish to succeed in sharing their devastating disapproval of established procedures. And even the most extreme relativist will not be understood by anyone if they don't express themselves in a prevalent mode of discourse, however arbitrary the sounds may actually be.





One day Lucy flew away to another land. She and Jonny never actually met. But a hermeneutic analysis of their tale leads me to believe there's enough signs to assert that he always remembered her original text rather fondly.





Next time: More.