A Tale of Two Communities or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the I.G.N.O.R.E Cannon”.

(Nationstates vs Cybernations)

Nationstates is a free political web game created by Australian writer Max Barry in 2002 as an ad hoc method of promoting his new book at the time: “Jennifer Government” on which the game is said to be (loosely) based. It has a very simple premise – create a nation, fill out a brief survey political survey and then log in for a few minutes once or twice a week to answer a few multiple choice questions which represent issues that are raised in your nation. In return for doing this the game calculates what kind of ‘nationstate’ you are currently ruling and compares it to all the other countries in the player-created database. See? Simple.

Cybernations on the other hand is what you’d get if you took Nationstates and force fed it a jar full of steroids everyday for ten years straight. You see Cybernations is also a free political web game where you start by creating a nation however, instead of random issues gameplay in Cybernations means selecting a system of government, deciding your countries position on global issues, choosing a religion, building infrastructure – macro and micro – setting up trade agreements with other nations (the benefit of which varies depending on what exact combinations of commodities you receive from the trades… which are limited based on what buildings your nation has), building and upgrading weapons – including those of the nuclear variety, attacking and defending with said weapons – again, including those of the nuclear variety, forming alliances, non-aggression pacts, peace treaties, cease fires, vendettas, trade embargoes…
…and finally when your finished with all that you collect your taxes and wait for the turn to tick over to tomorrow whereby you start the process all over again.

Oh sorry, also forgot to mention you also have to deal with national happiness, set your tax rate and certain setting choices – i.e national government and religion type – can have a negative effect on said happiness if they don’t correlate with what your population considers to be the best. Which you have to guess based on hints… and which also can change from time to time.

Long story short: Cybernations has a very complex rule set.

But then I’m a strategy buff and I like complex rules. So why is it that after playing both games I abandoned my Cybernation to spend more time with my Nationstates?

Nationstates exhibits very strong emergent gameplay.

To explain this better I’ll add in a brief bit of history – in the beginning, Nationstates only had 30 issues to choose from which quickly became to be considered inadequate. So, in order to increase the number of issues players with nations of a certain age were permitted to draft and submit their own issues. This quickly created a community dedicated to issue drafting and submission. A United Nations (now called the ‘World Assembly’ after the real UN filed a cease and desist) added global issues which affected all nations came about and again a community was setup to see that said issues were created in a proper manner. While this was going on some players decided that they wanted their nations to go to war with each other. Yet how to do this with no actual game rules dictating the actions of war? Easy, role play it. Then someone figured how to draw out the base stats of the game and use them in a calculator to determine how much resources a country had. Then somehow decided they would create a shop of items where players could use said resources to buy weapons to go to war with. Then some players to issue with certain design flaws of said weapons so they formed design communities that would assess and criticise so that only well-thought out designs would be used… and on it goes. Basically because Nationstates as so few rules dictating how the game is played players have more freedom to play the game however they wish. Similar attempts at emergent play are often stifled in Cybernations because there is a rule for just about every situation.

Cybernations complex rule set also makes it prone to dominant strategy. This is one thing in particular that normally drives me away from MMO games – one way is the best way, and must be adhered to if you have any chance to succeed (in your career). This is apparent in Cybernations trading system, when to collect taxes, even how you setup and develop your nation.

Competition crushes freedom.