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Roger Campbell

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Blog Entries posted by Roger Campbell

  1. Roger Campbell
    I've been thinking a lot about the difference between my "home" community of NationStates, and other nation sims like this one.
     
    I want to start off by saying that they are very different games. NationStates is, at its core, a political game, with a focus on ideology and broad policy over micromanaging. It has no clearly defined goal, and there is no clear metric for success or failure. War is conducted either through role playing (of which there is a great deal) or through a complicated proxy system involving the administration of regions. This second system is really better regarded as an entirely different game, and has its own universe of politics and opposing communities. Even this, however, has a minimal effect on an individual's choices.
     
    NationStates is somewhat strange among popular nation sims, in that there is almost nothing to do with game mechanics after one has mastered the basics. Paradoxically, this lack of hardcoded goals seems to have spurred players to develop entire world's of things to do. By the admission of the game creator, who is an award-winning author in his own right, the rigid self-imposed standards of quality in the role playing community rival those of fully published works. The level of politics and intrigue which permeates both national roleplaying, and especially relations between regions, makes real-world diplomatic crises seem straightforward. As with any sufficiently large community, the level of activity and detail is nested fractally, and has no endpoint.
     
    In sharp contrast, P&W is based on the premise of tweaking numbers to perfection, and micromanaging until the cows come home. Nation scores, leaderboards, and wars provide a plethora of goals and ways to stack up players' efforts. Alliances take this one step further with data-oriented aid programs and additional tools to pinpoint the effects of player actions. Players who do well can bask in the glory of being ranked highly, and nations who fail will know as much in no uncertain terms. Even with these features, however, players are limited in how much detail they can put into their nations. Daily activity is limited by resources, and creativity in policies and spending is limited by the need to maintain defensive capabilities.
     
    These limits are not necessarily a bad thing. The more complex a game becomes, the steeper the learning curve for new nations becomes, and the more likely new players are to become overwhelmed and quit. A finite number of daily actions promotes long-term strategies, and player loyalty. There is also a certain realism in limiting the possibilities for players to enact fringe policies, and shepherding players towards a particularly successful model.
     
    In many ways, P&W and NationStates are opposites. P&W is geared towards developing one's nation along very specific lines, with the end goal always coming back to war and building infrastructure. NationStates is not so much a simulator, as a template for creating stories, whether those stories be enshrined in roleplay, factbooks, or fictional statistics. And yet, the politics between alliances and regions is almost the same. The same language, the same agendas, and the same (contextually justified) paranoia of other groups. After a great deal of thought, I have concluded that it is not so much that the engines are similar, it is that the players, and their actions and intentions when dealing with each other, are virtually the same.
     
    The purpose of such an online game is not to generate a set of statistics for one's ideal utopia, as such could be just as easily accomplished with a pencil and paper, and skip the period of building. Nor is it for the purpose of the raw stimulus of pushing buttons correctly; we make it far too difficult for that. What is really on display in these games is the interactions between players. We desire external validation of our achievements, and we choose to seek such validation through a system which mimics the familiar flow of international politics. It can come as no surprise, then, that similar demographics will join both games, or that similar themes and buzzwords will arise in both communities of players with similar taste in style, because the source and manner of human validation is the same.
     
    In conclusion, while the mechanics of NationStates and Politics & War may be presented as opposites, and indeed, there are substantial differences in the traditional methods of regular players, the demographics of the players, and the manner in which they address each other, are almost indistinguishable.
  2. Roger Campbell
    The story continues. Part 1 can be found here.
     
    Politics and War: A Story in Comic form
    Part 2
     

     
    About the Art:
    I ended up redoing this one after the second and third panels came out weird. There were a bunch of subtle tweaks that I think made a difference. Most of them focus on setting things out so that they will scan nicely. I've worked out a way to make the brightness and contrast a bit more consistent throughout the page at the expense of looking on the whole lighter.
    I reckon radio-speech-bubble thing came out nicely. It looks readable but still similar enough to the background that it doesn't distract from the actual narration/text.
     
    For any eagle-eyes that notice the pixel weirdness in panel four, this was due to me recognizing a glaring typo in the text only seconds before I was actually going to post it. I managed to correct it, but it required a great deal of cutting and camouflaging.
  3. Roger Campbell
    I had been thinking of doing an in character, news/propaganda blog category for some time. However, it would seem that while I was thinking this over, the whole format has become widespread. While this isn't by any means a bad thing, I simply cannot bare being thought of as 'jumping on the bandwagon' and so decided that I must do something different. This morning I came up with an idea for a comic layout illustration, and it seems to have turned out acceptably. So I'm going with that.
     
    I've got an idea for a short little story arc that I think is both interesting and mostly within my current artistic capabilities. If people enjoy it, I may post more.
     
    Our story begins in the Campbell Nation, a burgeoning federation (Officially "Neosituationist People's Federation") following a peculiar variant of democratic socialism, and a proud member of the alliance Rose. It is late May, and although the alliance is at peace, it looks as if it will not remain so for long. (We'll meet our protagonist over the next few strips.)
     
    Politics and War: A Story in Comic form
    Part 1


     
     
    About the art:
    I draw things by hand, with a regular old pencil and sketchpad, and occasionally some colored pencils. For this comic, I drew the pictures on a page, then fought with the scanner to give me an acceptable likeness, and chopped that up and put it back together again in MS Paint. I am well aware that better options exist, but at the moment I like focusing on the paper drawings. This process will probably stay the same for the story arc, though I may tweak a few specifics.
     
    The first panel shows three flags; they are, from left to right: the Campbell Nation's official flag, the Rose alliance flag, and the hammer and sickle used by my nation in game. The seal in the second panel is the official pencil-and-compass emblem of the National Neosituationist Party, which represents the Campbell Nation's official ideology. The third panel is a close up of the Grand Senate of the Federation. All of these symbols are very prominent, and likely to come up again.
  4. Roger Campbell
    Foreword: This has nothing to do with P&W. This is just my own opinions on the world. After all, that's what blogs are for, right?
     
    On the Judging of Books by Covers
    By Roger Campbell
     
     
    "Never judge a book by its cover." The old saying goes. This was one of the oldest and most oft-repeated lessons of my childhood. It was repeated by my parents, my teachers, my television shows, my films, and my nursery rhymes. It appeared countless times as the moral of my stories, and functioned as a summary of the vast majority of the curriculum of my preschool. My comrades on the schoolyard, and indeed even my most bitter playground rivals, acknowledged this ancient saying as a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Most of the time this axiom was interpreted as a general message of acceptance towards those we deem as superficially different from ourselves. We applaud the diversity of appearance, background, and culture as a thing of beauty, and appraise the goal of living in harmony as amongst the greatest dreams of mankind. Despite making undeniable progress towards this goal, I fear we may have failed to understand this saying in a simpler, more literal meaning.
     
    Between the construction of these cultural lessons of my and my compatriots' collective childhood and the present day, society has undergone a massive shift in the primary means for the dissemination of information, and thus culture. Gone are the days when childhood lore, and indeed all information, was collected in physical libraries of paper and magnetic tapes. No longer can the intelligence of a given region be approximated by the breadth of topics and modernity of materials at the local library. Today every individual with an Internet connection has his or her own infinite library updated to the second, and with a truly unlimited variety of topics, in every language and attuned to every background and culture. Patrons of the digital age hold in their hands a wealth of material unparalleled in human history. Today, every citizen of a developed country can know, and can be expected to know any piece of information in existence within a handful of seconds.
     
    And even so, we are not all knowing. Despite having harnessed powers attributed only to gods a few centuries ago, modern humans are not omnipotent. With all of our digital hubris, we are just as mortal, and just as fallible as our predecessors. Rather than upgrade our physical forms to accommodate an increased capacity for thought, we have outsourced facts previously memorized to mechanical minds working in virtual libraries. While this might not be a problem if the Internet operated in a similar manner to physical libraries, with rigid structuring, order, and a central authority moderating contents for standards of accuracy, at present our digital library has no such standards. Instead, individuals are left to their own devices, and it is the choice of each user to determine which media is valuable and accurate.
     
    It is, of course, impossible for any mere mortal to search the entirety of our digital archives and determine alone what is important and what is interesting. It would be equally impossible to artificially structure the Internet with the standards of accuracy we have come to expect from libraries and academic institutions, without infringing on the freedom of the user to investigate and add to ongoing discussion. Instead, to bridge the gap, we have begun to rely increasingly on corporate-built platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter to serve as free and public forums and as a means of aggregating the daily influx of new content. These platforms allow us to restrict content to what is relevant and interesting to us, with the occasional interjection of reliable and relevant news and advertising. In return for our trust in handling our personal information and acting as the stage for our personal dramas, these platforms have provided us with a way to navigate this grand nexus of information.
     
    The problem arises when our interests diverge from those of the corporations. The primary goal of these corporations is to maximize user involvement in their platform, in order to provide paying advertisers the most prominent access to users' attention. Note that this does not require that the content be relevant, or indeed at all beneficial to the user. Take note also of the fact that this content need not have any standards of factual accuracy. If the goal of a platform is to extract attention, it is vastly more important for media to be personally engaging than accurate or helpful. This is dangerous in itself, but is made even more dangerous by the fact that the vast majority are unaware of this bias most of the time. When we expect our platforms to aggregate the reams of incoming material to find what is relevant to us, we tend to expect the result to be a concise summary of the state of the world. In fact, the result is a narrow perspective carefully calibrated to fit in with what we already believe.
     
    Already we have seen the result of this bias. Anyone who has witnessed any sort of online debate, especially those which arise from everyday comments where no sources are provided, has witnessed the polarization and fervor with which each side believes their viewpoint to be the obvious conclusion of clearly stated facts. To these people, the singularity of all modern evidence reaffirms what is already known. After all, if nine out of ten comments in my news feed support a particular point, what reason is there for me to look further? Any opposing comments which may slip by will only represent the fringes, which will further inflame and reinforce the original beliefs.
     
    In conditioning our platforms to play for our attention rather than present useful and balanced perspectives, we have taught them to judge for us. We have taught these computers to judge books solely by the covers before the humans so much as hear the titles, and we have led the humans to believe that these books represent the entirety of literature. We have rewarded extreme and unfounded media and tuned out balanced and well researched materials. Can it be any surprise then, that we are moving towards extremism in favor of moderation? Should we be surprised when ordinary people begin to believe that their views represent the only available conclusion? We are judging the whole story of humanity based on a few brief snapshots because they are more idly amusing, and because they fit in nicely with our existing biases, against all the childhood wisdom of our forefathers. If we continue this trend of rewarding the judging of books based on their covers, then we should expect a resurgence of the same thing happening to people within a few generations.
  5. Roger Campbell
    More colors, more characters, and more panels!
     
    Politics and War: A story in comic form
    Part 4: Selective Service Scheme

     
    In peacetime, they have too many volunteers, and so have to do a similar reverse where they fail anyone who reacts for not holding still as instructed. God forbid anyone should ever threaten the Capitol, the federation government would be handing out guns to everyone who could stand.
     
    The guard in panel one is rolling his eyes. He sees this kind of showing off a lot during wars.
     
    The uniforms were supposed to be based on the east german Nationale Volksarmee, but ended up with more of a blue-ish redcoats kinda vibe. Extra bonus points to anyone who can figure out where the jokes came from.
     
    Previous strips can be found below:
    Part 1: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-97-politics-and-war-the-comic/
    Part 2: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-101-pnw-comic-part-2/
    Part 3: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-112-pnw-comic-part-3/
  6. Roger Campbell
    Today's comic has just a splash of color, which I think came out quite nicely. I've also made a few changes to the drawing process that will hopefully make better quality scans. Let me know what you think!
     
    Politics and War: A Story in Comic Form
    Part 3: Artistic Ambitions

    Previous strips can be found below:
    Part 1: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-97-politics-and-war-the-comic/
    Part 2: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-101-pnw-comic-part-2/
     
    For anyone who can't quite make out my writing in the image, the seal says Lingua latina mortua est.
  7. Roger Campbell
    Important Disclaimer: This post is born out of a first draft written while semi-delirious with fever and pestilence, and may or may not be readable to human beings. I make no guarantee of factual or grammatical accuracy of the events recorded. Prolonged exposure to feverish writings may result in a dramatic change in vocabulary and/or sanity. Proceed at own risk and with skepticism.
     
    So, after discovering this (new?) blog feature, I decided that I might as well try it myself. And what better way to break it in by explaining my (tragic?) backstory?
     
    The story of my involvement in Nation Sims is very much intertwined with my life story. This started, as many of my stories do, in a hospital. At the tender age of nine and a half, I underwent a very dramatic hospitalization which resulted in my being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. This was far from the first time that I had been hospitalized in a dramatic fashion, but it stands out because I was initially in such critical condition that I had to be transferred by critical care ambulance from our local private hospital to the Children's Hospital at Westmead in order to be admitted to the pediatric ICU under the care of several of the best doctors in the country. I will save the gory details for a later post with a longer disclaimer, but needless to say, it was bad, and there was a time when the doctors were unsure of whether I would survive.
     
    At any rate, after I was stable enough to be put in a regular room on the endocrine ward, I quickly discovered that in order to make up for the incredible boredom which permeates through hospital corridors, each ward was equipped with a "Starlight Children's Foundation Fun Center", a mobile omni-console gaming platform which I affectionately called the Purple Egg for its shape and hue. I discovered a game called Age of Empires II. This would become the first game where I developed my own nation and lore. I was discharged a few days later.
     
    It was not until roughly a year after, when I was readmitted and placed under prolonged isolation for an unknown ailment which manifested flu-like symptoms and encephalitis that I really had a chance to delve into the world of nation-building. (Interestingly, the cause of the encephalitis remains unknown, despite endless tests and regular visits from literally every specialty except oncology and the burns unit. To this day it is listed as "presumed viral", which I have been reliably informed is doctor-code for "we've no idea, but it went away like viruses do". This is pretty much par for the course as far as my health goes, which probably says a lot about my life.) With a month in quarantine, I began to develop the background for my imagined world, and what would later become the Campbell Nation.
     
    For a time, I was content with building scenarios on Age of Empires. The Internet, as we were taught in Australia, was a daunting and dangerous place, full of distasteful and degenerate characters. Several factors, including a change in continent, kept me occupied for a time. Several years later, a fellow classmate mentioned a social studies project where students created nations and acted out diplomacy and war and such. Intrigued by the idea, I signed up for NationStates. They say NS is structured so that one can participate as much or as little as one desired, and that with no clear metric of success, players could receive satisfaction proportionate to energy input. I certainly found this to be true.
     
    About the same time, I tried to join CyberNations. I say "tried" because I became quickly overwhelmed by the level of micromanagement (compared to NationStates, you see) and, after flunking the admittance test for the first alliance I tried to join, decided (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) was too much for me at that moment. Instead, I doubled down on NationStates, and joined some communities for roleplaying, and the Raiding/Defending sub-game. I met some nice people, and took up some responsibilities running a region with a few other players.
     
    Some time later, I was persuaded by an old and trusted member of an NS region I was in to join the revamped Project Terra, which was still early enough in (re)development that I managed to get the hang of it. After getting bored with the slow pace of development from inactive admins, I joined P&W in open beta. About the same week I joined another similar game, but then there was an advertising scandal with their admin and TAC (which I was in at the time), and I decided it was in my best interests to leave quickly and quietly.
     
    On P&W, I joined the United Independent Nations in beta, where I was quickly promoted to second in command, mostly because I was active and willing to engage/negotiate with raiders. After speed round ended, I joined The Atlas Confederacy, and stood by them during their darkest hours, as they transformed into Rose. I have stuck with them since, and I generally like the vibe they bring to the game. I have participated far more on the Rose forums than the P&W forums. Large communities kinda freak me out, especially those that have been around long enough to form a sort of unspoken hierarchy. I've always been one to take my own path first and possibly meet others along the way if things go well, although Rose has somewhat reshaped my view on this.
     
    I currently reside within nuclear fallout distance of New York City. I have a multitude of part-hobby, part-jobs, including coaching fencing, Type 1 Diabetes advocacy and research, and consulting. My health situation prevents me from doing anything full time, including studies, so I have a tendency to go full-on 250% for a short period, and then take a long time recuperating. I am acutely aware that this method isn't exactly normal or healthy in the traditional sense, but it seems to be working for the time being.
     
    So there you have it; my backstory. I hope to use this blog more, but if nothing else, there's this.
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