Game Mechanics, Parties and Partisanship
Day 779, 14:56
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Published in USA 
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by Socialist Freedom Org
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Game Mechanics, Parties and Partisanship
by
Osmany Ramon
The (new) Democratic Party has recently thrown in the towel. They claim it was because they had become the very evil they oppose in becoming another partisan group but that lets them off the hook too easy. This excuse for their failure to gain traction in the eUS on a platform of pure game mechanics does not get to the underlying problems with their dogma, which is the real reason they no longer exist as a party and will not much longer exist as a movement.
A False Dichotomy
The major flaw in a purely game mechanics platform lies within a false dichotomy, first laid out by then president scrabman and later taken up by Harrison Richardson and others, between game mechanics and role-playing (or partisanship as I guess it is now called). In the mind of a game mechanicist, those who disagree with their point of view are merely roleplaying or fettered by real world ideology. These “butthole hater trolls” care only about increasing their own power and therefore disregard game mechanics in order to be contrarians. Indeed, if you would just look at the game mechanics, the game-mechanicists say, you can see how there is only one real path to winning the game (a notion that deserves its own article).
This last sentiment is key to understanding where the game mechanicists go wrong. It comes down to a belief that the game mechanics will always provide a clear solution to any dilemma that citizens will encounter in this game.
There may be times when this holds true. There may be times when game mechanics clearly dictate a course of action but there are many instances where this notion is absurd, especially when it comes to decisions in zero-sum games, as they often are in economic decisions. If for example, the Federal Reserve believes it necessary to deflate the dollar from .025 Gold to .030 Gold, it is going to affect different citizens in different ways. Workers stand to gain initially since their wages will now be worth more relative to gold. Business owners stand to lose money because those wages they pay out will be worth more gold, cutting into profits. The long term effects of this decision are not at debate here. But we now have two different classes of people who are effected in opposite ways by the decision to change the exchange rate. They might have opposing viewpoints on whether or not such a tax change should be enacted. Which side here are the role players?
The following dialogue between a game-mechanicist (GM) and a reasonable person (RP) will hopefully shed some light on that question:
GM: Our movement seeks to attain victory for our nation by convincing all citizens to put aside partisan differences and work together in the national interest.
RP: Sounds great. How do we decide what the national interests are?
GM: Well, according to the game mechanics, the best approach would be for the US to first occupy all high iron regions in the New World, thus giving us a production advantage for our war machine. The rest of the world will fall to our mighty iron-fueled empire!
RP: Wait a minute! I can see how the game mechanics might make that the best strategy once we decided that conquest and domination was our definition of winning this game but who decided that conquest and domination was victory?
GM: War is a part of the game therefore this is a war game. This is basically a big game of RISK so victory is conquest and domination.
RP: War is indeed one aspect of the game but we also have 2k+ fellow citizens who may not agree that conquest wars are the key to victory. What about those who are interested in the political and economic modules? They might have different win-scenarios. It can be more difficult to build a multi-national business empire when everyone has declared war on one another and the best markets are embargoed. Won’t the tycoons of industry begin to oppose some of the wars you propose to wage?
GM: The political and economic modules are merely instruments of the war machine*. If you are into those aspects at the detriment of the American war effort then you are merely roleplaying. This is a war game!
RP: It sounds like you are taking a political stance based on more than just game-mechanics, such as real life beliefs, morality, bias or just your personal idea of what is fun… kind of like those people you accuse of being roleplayers. This must be true because your argument is like saying that in the real world, based on Newton’s law of gravity, we must invade China. The game mechanics give us a framework within which our actions must conform. But it is the people in this SOCIAL STRATEGY GAME that must provide the content. You have provided content but masked it in terms of laws of nature in a feeble attempt to make it look like your political stance is similarly a law of nature.
GM: Did I mention that we are O.K. with cheating as long as it’s within the game mechanics?**
*I’m merely trying to show how incoherent the idea of game-mechanicism is so it could just as easily be the case that our friends in the (new) Democratic Party would believe that it was Economic Module Uber Alles or Political Module Uber Alles but at the risk of evoking Godwin’s law, does this not sound like a textbook definition of fascism?
** They really believe this.
Partisanship and Parties
The so-called game mechanicist movement is no different than any other movement in the New World except that they have fooled themselves and some others into thinking they had a superior basis for their political beliefs. Now that the game mechanicists have been shown to have fallen short in their quest to provide a killing blow to partisanship, it would seem partisanship is here to stay. What role then does partisanship play in the eUSA and what other roles can/should/do parties play? The game mechanicists may still have a point in saying that political parties are little more than social clubs. Let’s look at this claim and how political parties function within the framework of our current game mechanics.
Political parties in eRepublik perform their nominal role of being political parties. They are necessary for running as a candidate for office and they are roughly organized around political principles (again, something that requires its own article). Partisanship, as it does in real life, serves the purpose of bringing issues into the public sphere for debate. Parties can present their platform, win voters over to their cause, win offices and then implement their platform. Partisanship gives citizens a reason to join a party beyond sheer numbers. Opposition parties provide a check on the ruling party when they bring policies into the spotlight for public debate. Partisanship produces multiple solutions to the problems that face the nation and allows us to make informed decisions. But beyond this first nominal role, parties do other things.
We are all players in what the admins call a “social strategy game” yet we do not have many ways to organize ourselves as citizens within the game outside of political parties and companies. That is to say, we don’t belong to military units, clubs or even national alliances except where they exist in the ether; we don’t have badges on our citizen bios to signify that we belong to one social group or another except for party, company and nation. Most have added badges to their avatars to signify our belonging to the out-of-game superstructure we built on top of the game mechanics but there’s no way to stop an imposter. Parties have filled this niche within the game to an extent. You can join a party, it shows up in your profile and in turn there is a counter for the numbers. Your group is bigger or smaller than another group and to a lesser or greater extent, your group’s members all have things in common. Social club is the second function of political parties in eRepublik.
After national forums which are necessarily busy because they are the center of civic life in this game, party forums are some of the more active forums because if you are going to discuss things that interest you, it might as well be with someone you have something in common with and national forums are filled with trolls with ops. From these party forums, culture arises as citizens get to know one another and share ideas. This culture affects the game in powerful ways. The third function of political parties in eRepublik is the creation of culture.
Sometimes the culture a particular party creates will lead to other endeavors that typically have fallen outside of the role of parties. I know the Federalist Party and SFP best so I will stick to those. The federalists were one of the first to create a partisan militia during World War III under the belief that parties should take on this role and to fill a hole left by an ill-organized and overburdened US military. The Socialist Freedom Party started a partisan commune in May on the principle of non-exploitation, we followed the Federalists in forming a militia based on the principle of opposition to imperialism and we formed the SFP Young Socialists to perform the tasks of the US Department of Education. The fourth function of political parties in eRepublik is organizational body.
There may be more functions than I have outlined here but the point is that given our game mechanics, parties function differently than they do in real life primarily because they are useful in more aspects of eLife than parties are in real life. So if they resemble social clubs from certain perspectives, I would agree. But I, unlike the game-mechanicists, don’t see this as being an illegitimate use of parties in this game. Political parties qua social club, qua creators of culture, qua organizational bodies and of course qua political parties are all key aspects of this game and make it more enjoyable. Don't like it? Organize against it politically (which does not mean as a party, necessarily) and stop hiding behind the facade game mechanics. Either that or wait for the game mechanics to change so that they can't continue to exist in all of those roles.
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Comments
Excellent article. I wasn't aware there was such a deep philosophical debate about the game-mechanism and what's the correct path to follow!
- M. Chuikov
I agree with your assessment of the game mechanics crowd.
Hah. That was the best game mechanics burn I've ever seen. 😃
I would not call your Reasonable Person(tm) a true reasonable person, and I would also say that your Game Mechanics(tm) guy is maligned and himself a role-playing armchair general.
Game mechanics as a strategy has already won, as we see many players young and old eschewing rl ideas and values that do not translate into this game.
Technically, socialism in any form does not exist in this game, but you have found a way to use the rules of the game in order to make it a vague reality. Players can now join communes and whatnot. Congratulations, you have used the essence of game mechanics theory to create your own reality.
Mechanists will not die or recede, because it is at the core of what makes this game a game. A set of unmutable rules that we must play by to stay in the game, and learn to use to our advantage to keep the winning edge.
Speaking as one of the "butthole hater trolls" Scrabman mocked, I can tell you, it was never to be contrarian on my part, but rather, to point out what I felt were flaws in the policies his administration was cranking out. Only weeks after Scrabman left office, PEACE attacked the US and Canada from several angles at once, and if you talked to the UK, they'd be happy to tell you, it was because of the arrogance of the US, specifically the USWP and the Scrabman administration.
Dissension is rarely tolerated by any government in this world, at best it is mocked. Far too typical, around the world, but especially in the US, instead of addressing criticism with professionalism and maturity, our very leaders turn into mouthy brats, calling critics names, encouraging the chant of traitor.
The current President of the United States is a prime example.
Mechanicism is not a political movement, it is an educational strategy meant to scrub newbs of RL prejudices. The reason the Mechanicist Democrats failed is because they tried to parlay that important concept into the political arena while simultaneously claiming to be apolitical.
Still, to say economics or politics are an 'end game' in the same way as war is false. The entire economy is based around wellness and damage, both of which are ultimately expended in war. The political system is designed to grant or deny the powers of war. That is the end of the mechanicist means. You can choose to be 'imperialist' or 'anti-imperialist' but you are always FIGHTING.
Peace has no purpose in a game without suffering.
let me get this straight, according to arjay, PEACE attacked because they hated the USWP. OH GOD THAT'S RICH
I am not an aspiring politician, and I can't stand politics. I've never joined a party, and never will because of the way people act because of it. The S storm stirred up before the latest election is a prime example of how bad it was, and how bad it will get.
I thought this article was a little self-righteous in regards to your cause. All the parties are guilty of partisanship. Even your own party is guilty of this, so drop the holier-than-thou BS, and just accept that politics is meant to be a dog eat dog world.
@Johnpauljones: Its not necessarily us scolding them for being partisan, its us scolding them for being partisan when their direct message is against it. The SFP never claimed we were partisan, and in many ways we're not. But we don't openly come out saying "no partisanship, just winning" and then contradict that theory.
@system: Its always going to be a little bit biased because it was written by a person in favor of the anti-mechanist point. However, it holds some merit as to the message it is portraying. Game mechanics as a strategy has not won, because if it had won then the eUs would have conquered the world, or at least begun the process. Thats not our goal at the moment. Therefore, we're not purely game mechanist, we have some ideals that we tend to stick to. Whether it be anti-imperialism, duty to allies, ect. If we were purely game mechanists, we would disregard every aspect of the game but war and simply attempt to conquer the world, regardless of the current owner.
@sydiot: An incredibly practical use of the game mechanics theory. If that were the only extent that it was raised, then you could prevent some idiotic theory that only causes hardship in the game, ex. Bruno and abortion.
Saying economics and politics are equal to war on the value of winning the game may not be true, but denying the fact that they can be end games is incorrect. Say Eden got every country to sign into the alliance. That would be a political endgame with a war backdrop in some circumstances. If one country were to become so economically powerful that it could outproduce every other, then that country theoretically wins by economics. There are multiple outlooks of how one can win this game, simply because there are so many options with which to play the game.
@system0101: What he's arguing against is the game mechanicism as an ideology, not game mechanics as in the rules in which we play this game. Those are two hugely different things.
@sydiot: The game mechanist movement has always been political as far back as I can remember the Democrats were just the most concentrated and most developed group of game mechanists. I also have to disagree that economies are for wellness and damage, for example in Denmark you rarely fight, which means you rarely ever buy guns for damage(Which means you rarely buy guns)
@johnpauljones:
We never say were are not partisan, we are criticizing the game mechanists because their plan was to create basically an apolitical America and instead became partisan, which directly contradicts exactly what they were against. Osmany Ramon tries to explain why it occurred. On a side note we have been very bi-partisan on many many occasions.
Voted! please vote this comrades, http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/ecommunism1-1132322/1/20" target="_blank">http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/ecom[..]1/20
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@Reinlander Von Phalz,
You are obviously a roleplayer yourself since you tend to revert to that term quite often and I don't believe it is because of how you interpreted Osmany's meaning, I think it is because of how you interpret your existance in this game. I don't believe we have any "role players" in the SFP. I believe we are a bunch of "people/players", who have decided to play this game in the way we find the funnest way to experience it. I think ultimately that is winning. People say this is a war game but they forget that there are so many different kinds of people playing this game with so many different opinions and beliefs. Sydiot called Mechanism a way to scrub newbies of real life agendas. That to me sounds like a form of brain washing to push your personal view of "winning". Furthermore, since your defintition of partisanship is different than Osmany's, that makes your argument null and void in the context of this article. Lastly, the commune system is not about winning. You once again leak your mind set. Socialism in eRepublik is our way of "playing" We saw a very narrow minded game and sought to change it. Socialism's existance in this game is amazing. It shows that players come to this game for more reasons than just to click and fight. It shows that people play this game to fraternize and challenge themselves. I like Osmany's definition of one of the 'roles' of the political parties as a cultural catalyst. Socialism is a culture in eRepublik. And most of us could care less about "winning" We just want to play.
What I find fascinating is that this party is one of the more game mechanics savvy when it comes to politics. You guys are the best at domestically PTOing smaller parties and using that to further your own cause and beliefs. Some would consider that highly partisan, no?
The fundamental difference is some people play this as a game. All games have winners and losers. How winning and losing is defined is really up to the individual because whole countries can't win, but they can lose. Players have goals they want to achieve, and when they achieve all their goals, they have "won" the game for themselves. Of course, if that's how someone sees this - there is very little pretending, and consequently no role-playing. The role-players see this as social experience where they can pretend to be something that they aren't, and this is some sort of escape from reality. Of course, if that's how someone sees this - there is no game, and consequently no winning or losing.
Neither side can convince the other to change their ways.
Finally, where were the game mechanist partisan? I missed that.