States of Mind

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

A few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks on America, the satirical website the Onion ran an article that was, by any standard, pretty freaking funny. The piece, “Area Man Acts Like He Was Interested in Afghanistan All Along,” skewered a fictitious 30-year-old named Michael Schloegel, who bragged to his friends that he had studied that country’s beleaguered politics long before the U.S. government announced that al-Qaeda was headquartered there. In case the joke was lost on anyone, the story went on to suggest that Schloegel had a history of this sort of know-it-all-ism: “Last November,” it read, “he spontaneously became an expert in ballot-counting procedure and election law, and earlier this year, he ‘wouldn't shut up’ about global warming and the history of the Kyoto Protocol.”

For real-life know-it-alls – and anyone, really, who has ever glowered at a newspaper and sworn they could run the world better than the leaders who actually have to do it – a certain kind of relief was about a year away. Late in 2002, an Australian novelist named Max Barry launched a free online game called NationStates. Barry conceived the game as a marketing tool to drive interest in his novel Jennifer Government, a darkly comic look into a corporatist dystopia. (The book, a cult classic in some circles, is currently being adapted for the screen by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the writing duo behind 2000’s Sexy Beast, which starred Ben Kingsley as a brutal gangster.) NationStates, though, evolved into so much more than that: it has become a vibrant, virtual town hall, where hordes of users gather to play pretend prime minister, president or dictator.

The moment the game blinked on, it was a hit. With thousands of users signing up to play in the first few weeks, it became clear that NationStates held a special place in the hearts of policy wonks everywhere who seek to engage in politics by any means necessary – or at least, whatever means are available from an armchair. The game recently reached a milestone that Barry wouldn’t have predicted in his most optimistic dreams: NationStates’ one-millionth nation was created in December. Of these, more than 100,000 are active, controlled by users from every corner of the world.

At a time when nearly every political election raises the bugaboo of overwhelming apathy – and in particular, among young people who like to play video games – those are surprising numbers. On many levels, though, it often seems that interest in global affairs is surging. The popularity of NationStates is indicative of the same inquisitive tendency that has people swarming the internet for the latest updates on the war in Iraq, and, for comic relief, smirking at the latest zingers from popular political satirists like Jon Stewart or Rick Mercer, or those found in the pages of the Onion. In this information age, more and more people fancy themselves global policy experts. NationStates gives them a venue to test – and argue about – their grand theories.

The NationStates logo. Courtesy Max Barry.

To get started, you visit www.NationStates.net, choose a country name, unit of currency, national motto and, in an absurdist quirk typical of the game, national animal. Once established, your fictitious nation demands decisions on a wide array of important issues: as leader, you’re asked to take positions on things like defence spending, uranium mining and public nudity. The game then generates a daily ranking – both within your region and on a global scale – on everything from largest information-technology sector to rudest citizens to, well, nudest citizens. Leaders always have the option to dismiss issues as well, but avoiding a decision altogether, of course, is a decision in its own right, and it has consequences. Whatever path you follow, it is implemented into the game within 24 hours. Each day, leaders around the world wake up to changed nations.

In an e-mail, Barry explains his rationale behind some of the quirkier aspects of the game: “The novel and the game both came out of my interest in weird political systems – the idea that you can change a few laws or morals and suddenly you have a very different society. In Jennifer Government it’s ultra-libertarianism. In NationStates it’s whatever the hell you want.” He ain’t kidding. Barry’s game encourages idiosyncratic behaviour from the get-go; its league of nations currently includes the Dominion of Complete Bastards (“We Don’t Want the World, We Just Want Your Half”), the Hateful Hating Haters of Hatred (“We Hate You! Go Away!”) and the Ancient Empire of Plumbers Union (“We will definitely be there by nine on Monday”). Depending upon your leadership, your country may be given a designation of, among others, Corporate Police State, Civil Rights Lovefest, Psychotic Dictatorship or Inoffensive Centrist Democracy. My own nation, Gernistan, is currently a Scandinavian Liberal Paradise.

Played at its most basic level, NationStates is fun, if unsophisticated. You make one or two decisions a day – today, my government ruled on whether tariffs should be imposed on cheap foreign imports and whether religious groups should ever pay taxes. Your country will follow predictable patterns, measured in terms of the game’s three major freedom scales: civil, economic and political. Yet despite its simplicity – or maybe precisely because of it – NationStates is strangely addictive. And as with so many things in life, the more you participate, the greater the rewards. As a carrot to encourage more active involvement, Barry devised a United Nations, where members can have a direct impact on gameplay by proposing issues, debating them in the NationStates message boards, and ultimately, either adopting or rejecting them as international law. Recently, the game’s fictitious assembly has passed resolutions banning legalized prostitution and calling for the establishment of a global tsunami warning system.

As with the real UN, the discussions in NationStates can get heated, and sometimes member nations simply resign to protest a decision. At that point, they’re still allowed to play, but lose certain benefits and privileges. And although it’s easy to join the game’s UN, fewer than one-third of nations registered on the site choose to do so. Many of the largest and most powerful have either resigned or never bothered to join. To Barry, that pattern follows a law-of-the-jungle logic. “The small players want rules,” he says, “so they don’t get squashed or ignored. But if you’re stronger than everybody else, rules just restrict you, so you try to find ways around them.” Barry isn’t shy about suggesting that in this regard, the power dynamic inherent in the UN of NationStates is pretty similar to the one that’s been discussed regarding Iran and Syria lately.

In the wake of the game’s continued success, Barry is seriously considering the option of creating a souped-up pay-for-play version. He initially imagined that NationStates would appeal only to hardcore gamers, plus a smattering of political wonks. “Originally, I thought it would be fun, and unpopular,” he says, “But I grossly underestimated people’s interest in running their own countries.”

Ultimately, Barry suggests that for many players, the desire to found a country in your own likeness emerges not from a lust for power, however imaginary, but as the expression of a certain kind of earnest altruism. “Everybody wants to fix the world,” says Barry. “But in entirely different ways.” In that sense, the world of NationStates is no less frustrating, and no more absurd, than its real-world counterpart.

Greg Bolton is a Toronto writer.

Letters:

I've been playing NationStates for about four months. While, Mr. Bolton's review is both fair and accurate, I would stress on additional point. With only one or two exceptions, there are no other "massive multiplayer online games" out there that do not involve warfare or some other form of organized violence. The fact that NationStates keeps around 100,000 people a day happy without blowing anything up is rather encouraging to me. Gary Chilcote Laurel, Maryland