Jennifer Government: NationStates
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Jennifer Government: NationStates is a nation simulation game playable on the World Wide Web. It was created by Max Barry in late 2002, based loosely on his novel Jennifer Government.
Play
In the game, a player has charge of a "nation", deciding government policies on automatically-presented issues from a list of options. These decisions affect the character of the nation's status in the areas of Civil Rights, Economy, and Political Freedoms. Based on criteria closely related to these areas, nations range from 27 categories like Scandinavian Liberal Paradise and New York Times Democracy to Compulsory Consumerist State and Psychotic Dictatorship. Players can also dismiss issues: this has no effect.As well as Civil Rights, Economy, and Political Freedoms, a nation is rated on other variables, such as crime rate, industry size and public sector spending. These variables are affected by the options chosen on issues. These are also used to compile the game's daily UN reports, which is a list of every nation in the game in order of how high they are that day's variable.
Players may also join the so-called United Nations, making their nations automatically affected by the decisions of that body, although various players role-play disobedience. Discussions on proposed resolutions take place on the forums, often home to all manner of political debate. A dedicated team of volunteers moderates the forums; most of them also moderate the game to keep it free from vandalism.
Group play
Groups of nations form regions. All players begin in one of five Pacific regions and may move their nations into any other region at any time, or set up a new region. Many regions have an elected leader and some participate in complex regional governments, though some contain only a handful of nations. Players commonly attempt to collectively "invade" another region by entering it and seizing control. Some regions have password-protection to stave off such attacks.Many multi-regional organisations have formed - either to organise invasions or to organise those who defend against raider play.
Invading, or "region crashing," first became prominent with a group of players calling themselves the Farkers, who all arrived due to links between the game and the website Fark.com.
Recently, steps have been taken to reduce region-crashing and griefing. Based mainly on the time a nation has spent in a region, each nation is given an amount of "Regional Influence." In order for a nation, such as the UN Delegate, to eject another from the region, they must have a specific amount of influence, depending on the other nation's influence level. This helps ensure that invaders do not flood a region, install one of their own as UN Delegate, then eject the original members from the region.
Roleplaying
NationStates' relatively simple simulation has given rise to more in-depth and freeform role-playing, with players using their nations' statistics to measure how their nations would fare in international trade, diplomacy, and war. Some players have even developed complex statistical calculators. Part of the appeal of NationStates lies in the ability to create an unrealistic utopia (or dystopia) as the subject of conversation and political philosophy, without needing to worry about practical matters, like national defense, that might become factors in a more comprehensive simulation.Technical history
Due to the unreliability of the NationStates server, which commonly led to slow or inaccessible forums, January 2004 saw the announcement that the British gaming company [Jolt] would take over hosting of the site as well as the development of NationStates-2. On 28 June, 2004, after several delays, the game switched to the new servers; however, continued programming issues compounded by the death of Max Barry's father caused the forums to remain down until July 13. Flag size increased from 6k to 10k approximately around August 15.A second version of the game, currently in development and called "NationStates 2", may include complex functions for war, trade, diplomacy, and customization. Rumors about the sequel to NationStates have existed since the summer of 2003, and the release date has been postponed since.
Statistics
As of June 20 2006, players had set up over 1,600,000 individual nations since NationStates premiered in late 2002. At any time fewer than 150,000 remain in existence as a result of the deletion of nations due to various rule infractions and to inactivity. Though the specific time has varied greatly over the years on-line, NationStates has a current inactivity limit of 28 days (or 60 days if nation-owners enable "Vacation Mode"), after which the system automatically deletes the quiescent nation. However, the Moderators can resurrect nations deleted for inactivity (though not for rule-violations, unless circumstances warrant a repeal of the deletion) on the request of the nation's original owner.See also
External links
- [Official Website]
- [Jennifer Government webpage]
- [Jennifer Government: NationStates Forum]
- [List of websites and forums] for the various regions of NationStates
- [NSwiki], a wiki encyclopedia about NationStates
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