ERepublic s a browser-based massively multiplayer strategy game. Its creators set out with a mission to create strategy games for adults to pursue when professional and family demands make playing traditional strategy games, of the Civilization
sort, without compromising experience nor social demands. Casual games are fun but inadequate for the strategy game player. The company hopes to offer similar depth as Civilization or Risk but with a smaller time and commitment footprint.
The approach is unusual: a browser-based environment, even a text environment, would be satisfactory, the designers concluded, in contrast to the game industry's focus on expensive, massively multiplayer 3D worlds. Worldwide play could also be facilitated by low-bandwidth demands of text and images. Social interaction online offers competition and collaboration instead of AI-based games of the RTS genre.
ERepublik's creators figured that the fact that most games are fantasy, not related to the real world, represented both a market- and social opportunity. A chat-world of the Second Life or Habbo sort wasn't the aim; rather a set of challenges and rewards. The company bills the game as a casual strategy game, to be played over several months but for 15 minutes per day.
You start as a "citizen" and can choose among four careers: politics, the corporate world, journalism, and the military. Other careers have also been added by citizens, although the process by which this takes place is not yet clear to me. Players can rewrite history and change things, by making their community and country different. According to the creators, sme want to make the game very different from real life, while others want to make it very similar (libertarians are apparently very popular among US players... apparently control tastes best to those who argue against it).
There are 13,000 newspapers in the game, intended as "self-expression tools" for citizens. Players cover events in Erepublik, either at the level of the game (political ideas) or the metagame (cheating, etc.). Some use it for adverising and promotion for their company. The media component is much more active than the corporate one; for example, a Swedish newspaper has around 800 readers and generates a hundred comments per article, about the same as a reasonably popular blog.
The ERepublik press seems to waver between "real" journalism and self-promotion and publicity. The following offers an example of the latter sort, albeit an interesting one:
For those who are pondering - I am giving weapons away for several reasons. For one, I have a large inventory and wish to rid some of my lower-quality weapons. For another, I have a couple a weapons company that is going to upgrade to Q3 soon. Why not give away some weapons? Also for the lulz and the wimminz.
And here's an example of the former, albeit in the weird journo-fusion of a game where the President might also run a newspaper.
Secondly, Military Pay is a soap opera in and of itself. We are aware of the struggles of paying. When the payment plan started, there were 300 citizens total in America. Now, we have 300 citizens requesting payment every week. That is 300 names to search, 300 names to click, 300 profiles to donate to. For one person, it is a daunting task. For more people, we will assuredly have failures because of the nature of online world. Someone decides not to get online for one weekend, forgetting that they have responsibilites online. That causes one hitch in the system. Another person loses their internet access. Two hitches. A third person has a family problem. Three hitches. Suddenly, we go from a perfect system and everyone paid to an imperfect one and 100 citizens missing pay. It's a darned if you do, darned if you don't scenario. We're going to try a happy medium, with less officers paying but one person not handling all responsibilites. It may work and it may not, but we, as a government, will throw it against the wall and hope it sticks. If it doesn't, we'll keep trying, because even through failures I am dedicated to getting citizens the payment they deserve, backpay included. I make no guarantees, only ask you have patience as we try to institute a new program.
More often than not, the line between jouranlism and policymaking is very thin.
It is for this reason that I propose a two-part plan for our government's consideration to help alleviate this problem. The first is the institution of a Better Business Bureau - which would process reports of deceptive business practices of all types and compile a list of these reports. Additionally, such a program could be used to publically promote those businesses that are honest in their hiring and sales practices.
Yet, more familiar journalistic practices seem also to take place in ERepublik. The developers report that a lot of presidents steal from the country treasury, and in-game impeachments have occurred when these events are reported in the press. In one related example, in Spain, a bank housed most of the funds collected from state taxation. An influx of new Spanish players changed the political climate. The player running the Spanish bank before the transfer embezzled all the tax money from the bank before handing over power. The press, driven by popular interests and against the rogue government, supported the act. In one example, 1,800 comments were posted on a single article during the upheaval.
The result is a rough-round-the-edges, yet very real example of a game in which players seem to do something like journalism as a part of play itself. And unlike games like Beyond Good and Evil or Global Conflicts: Palestine (both of which we will cover here soon), ERepublik does so by encouraging players to write, and about the play of the game itself.
I'll return to ERepublik soon, taking a look at its virtual economy and labor market.
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