Power and Where It Lies

[Manson]

Written by Venico for NationStates World Fair 2. Original source is here.

Power and Where It Lies
by Venico
Power is what drives NationStates. Power is the ability to influence others and events. Whether you subscribe to the thought that this is a game or that this is a political simulator, both are driven by power. In the game, you are seeking for your side to hold more power, to control the situations, to come out of the scrap on top. And there's only one way to come out on top, power. Politics parallels this but with more subtlety. You are no longer in outright combat and the sides are a bit less defined. But ultimately you want to control the most situations and position yourself to come out on top whenever a struggle erupts. As stated before, there is only one way to come out on top.

In NationStates, however, we have to ask where the power lies. How does one obtain this mythical substance that we all crave and need? Being a man of science and democracy, I decided to ask my fellow players. I asked a handful of people who they thought held the most power over them and I found three patterns. Three distinct schools of thought.

The most common answer I was given to my inquiries was that of the most physical form of power. I asked Cormac A. Stark, a person who has dabbled in raiding, defending, and politics, who held the most power over him? He answered Ballotonia. His reasoning was that he is the Game Administrator who was the most directly involved in gameplay and thus influenced Cormac the most. This category represents the relatively isolated nation who thinks that the founder of his region holds the most power. Or in GCR (Game Created Region) politics the person who holds the delegacy. Or the root admin of the forum.

Next I asked my brother in crime, Ambroscus Koth, the same question on power. Now anyone who knows Koth should realize that he holds almost no emotional attachment to this game that we play. Of the people I asked, he is by far the person with the least amount of emotional investment. He answered simply and told me that either me or Cormac held the most power. Why? Because we hold the most information about him. We know almost everything about him. This is where the second school of thought comes into play. The power of information. I used to heavily believe in this and went to such lengths as to gather all the information I had on people into a folder with their name on it. This helped me blackmail a few people and when passed along to the right places even got some players pushed out of positions. On the game side, this managed to hold a few raids and sabotage a few. While delegacies and adminships are more of a solid, physical power, information is volatile and fluid. It easily slips around and spreads itself out when dropped or mishandled.

The last thought process I ran into was represented by founder of the UDL, Unibot. I asked the same question that I posed to everyone else, and after some banter he came to the conclusion that it wasn't a "who" but a "what". He believed that what held the most power over him was the Scarlet Pledge that he has sworn to. This is something that is solely in his hands, no one elses's. This pledge that he devotes himself to is about defending the innocent natives and such. No person holds Uni to that but himself and his conscience. This is the obligation thought pattern and it is the rarest one that I found.

Now you might be wondering why I of all people am qualified to speak on power. Well I recently found myself in the delegate seat of a GCR and started wondering about how much power I really held. I soon started realizing that I was gauging my answer on a person to person basis. There was no blanket answer. There was no absolute. There was no solution that applied to everyone. So this led me to my own theory and the very reason why (I hope you've gotten this far anyway) you're reading today. Where power truly lies.

The amount of power someone has over you in NationStates is completely based on how much power you let them have over you. If you look at the three examples I provided above, you'll notice that it's not a question of people being higher up on the chain than others. Rather, this is a difference in where people are invested. Let us look at how much power a founder has over a nation in its region. The founder can ban and eject that nation from the region. But can you answer how much that influences that nation? There are some who will rage, others who will shrug and move on. If you take any situation in NationStates you will find that you can define the physical consequences of an action, but not the effect that they have. That is where the power lies. Think about who (or what) has the most power over you. It is easy to discover that you can change that relationship. You can vary how much a person can influence you, by varying the amount of emotion invested. There are some things in this game that will make me scream. There are other things that I decide don't affect me.

NationStates is unique in the aspect that you sit down and plunge yourself as deep as you want to. No one can force you to go any further than you'd like. The person who logs on just to answer issues and shape his nation isn't affected by the founder who ejects him. He isn't affected by the people who know about him. He isn't affected by an imposed morality code. Because he has decided to only put himself into the surface of NationStates and not be affected by the rest. So here's a tip of advice for anyone out there who finds themselves on the wrong end of a power struggle. Who really holds the power in that deal? Where does it truly lie? The answer is wherever you let it, friend.