Rhetoric, Ideology and Propaganda: the Good, the Fun, and the Ugly
By: Soramra (A Bloodred Moon); Published 2024
Over the years, there have been a couple things that keep me coming back to NationStates. I think NS Gameplay, for all of its faults and generally poor reputation with the other sub-communities of the game, has a unique charm to it. And at the core of this charm, to my mind, is the ideological struggle that informs the actions and rhetoric of the in-game factions. There are a great many games that contain a similar model as NS: player-led factions and coalitions compete against one another to gain an advantage. In fact, there are arguably a great many games that do this better, with more layered mechanics, explicit mechanisms for war and a scarce pool of resources to motivate those wars. What sets NS apart from these games and what provides it with identity are the ideologies, rhetoric and political narratives that both define and fuel the factions. This is what makes NS unique, but it is also what the game relies on and an element of the game that has been slowly decaying. In the essay below, I’ll lay out three different types of propaganda that I perceive, defined as the Good (what is effective at mobilising people), the Fun (the over-the-top propaganda that is just fun to write and read), and the Ugly (the rhetoric that crosses the line into out-of-character attacks - I’ll probably catch some flak for this one, but I’m beyond caring). I’d like to denote these three are not exclusive categories - the best propaganda for the game both rallies your side and is fun to write, while some of the worst is very effective at rallying people in real, genuine anger.
As is natural in a political simulator, rhetoric and propaganda have been in the game since the start of the invasion game. Early invaders like the Atlantic Alliance and the Defenders that rose to combat them utilised it extensively, and to some extent it is a necessity on NS: with the nature of R/D, you need as many players as possible on your side to turn out, as smart utilisation of mechanics will only get you so far compared to raw numbers. Early Defenders in this regard were especially strong, as it is easy to appeal to nations that similarly could have their homes invaded to combat invaders and look out for each other. On top of that, it was not overly difficult to paint the other side as griefers and trolls, especially when the early invader groups like the Farkers, let us be honest, arguably were. This was, at least for a time, very convincing propaganda, and arguably what I’d refer to as “the Good”, not so much for being better in quality than other works but for its effectiveness.
The Atlantic Alliance was a bit different from the Farkers, as they were structured more like an early imperialist organisation than an invader group, and when Francos Spain rose to combat the Alliance Defence Network and took over the Pacific, a number of Atlantic Alliance invaders were among those who flocked to take up prominent positions in his new regime. As a raider ideologue who has spent most of his time in Lone Wolves United, a region that certain Francoists absolutely despised, it will suffice to say I have never been a Francoist. But as a player and someone interested in narratives and propaganda, I have to admire the old NPO. When Unlimited inherited the NPO in the wake of the failed conquest of the North Pacific and the full might of the ADN working against him, a large number of modern gameplayers especially would have immediately disavowed Francos Spain, distanced themselves and tried to rebuild the failed ties. A short-lived rebrand as the People’s Republic of the Pacific aside, Unlimited instead embraced the infamy that the NPO enjoyed and began to work on the mythification of Francos Spain and the government he’d headed. Francos Spain didn’t coup the Pacific, he spearheaded the August Revolution. The players that made up his inner circle weren’t a flock of invaders capitalising on an opportunity, they were a revolutionary vanguard at the head of a class struggle. This narrative solidified and became best known when Unlimited, with input from other NPO leaders, wrote Proper Francoist Thought. Proper Francoist Thought is not an inherently good piece. It is well-written, but also inherently silly on a real-life level. But it is fun, it is fun to read, to echo, one can admire the effort put in and it isn’t even inherently ineffective - the over-the-top nature of the rhetoric and the vision of the game it lays out make it clear that it is a game and that they’re having fun with it. No one should ever say the NPO is no good at getting their people to turn out, and they need not take it too far to achieve this.
And now we have to inevitably turn to the last category, the Ugly. I recently saw an EBC article complaining about the Communist Bloc’s attempts to paint Defenders as some sort conservative movement outside of the game based on Defenders’ protection of regions TCB judges as unacceptable. As a player with an interest in keeping the game fun, I might think Defenders do defend people I would not shield personally, but I think it is a step too far to attach real life ideological labels over a browser game. That is frankly sh*tty behaviour. NS has always had a strong tribalist culture about ‘our side’ and ‘the enemy’, and in any propaganda or rhetoric care must be taken that one doesn’t turn this tribalist culture into a toxic cesspool that smears other players’ names over in-game disagreements. Defenders themselves have frequently been on the wrong side of that line, with TITO’s infamous cyberbully rhetoric standing out as an example. Effective though it may be, these implications should be avoided for the health of the game. Back-and-forth smear campaigns don’t make the game fun for anyone.
There is a quote by Dilber that I have always liked. “NationStates is a game of stories”, was the gist of the quote, and I think it is an apt summary of NS’ core. I started out as a roleplayer, but ended up immersed in Gameplay as a new player witnessing the tail end of the Lazarene civil war, the constant warfare between raiders and defenders, the looming shadow of the Rahls and the battle of St Abbaddon. At its best, NS Gameplay is the story of competing factions and players doing their best to advance their cause, sway others to their side and defeat their enemies. It is a long history marked by a dynamic and ever-shifting playing field of competing factions and players. There’s a second layer to that story, though, and it’s why there’s hardly any unified view on NS’ history. It is also the story of the winning narratives, the mythification of great victories and obfuscation of harsh defeats that a given region or broader faction tells to motivate their members and build alliances with others. And without ideological justifications, rhetoric and propaganda to back it up, the game falls apart.
Ideologies have far from disappeared from NS, but there are fewer of them and their use in propaganda is more and more limited to internal echo chambers rather than a vision for the game that is pushed through narratives and rhetoric. Raiders and Defenders still clash, but raider ideological pieces have never been too common, and Defenders have instead retreated inward, sustaining themselves on “hype” for a victory against raiders rather than any internally consistent reasoning. Their leaders look down on justifying their actions to the public and mock the natives they are supposed to defend behind not-so-closed doors, which is why no one likes them, including some of those actually sympathetic to their cause that might be swayed to materially support them. Imperialists are dead, Francoism serves its final role as a specter the NPO has left behind as a sign of reform. The North Pacific is the only Independent region left, and their laws ban them from adhering to half of the document they still revere.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Frontierism might have lost its driving force with the demise of Community, and before that had begun to fall into the trap of falling in line along traditional R/D paths due to a lack of hard power of their own, but promising Frontiers like Carcassonne and Talonia are but a step away from leading the charge in Gameplay’s newest and most dynamic area with an ideological base and propaganda already built and ready to go, if they are willing to be loud, make enemies and challenge the status quo. The conflict BoM has reignited that had been missing for so long has resulted in the North Pacific utilising strong regionalist sentiment to fuel their newly found purpose of waging war. For all that I make fun of Europeia, its strong media culture is a very impressive internal propaganda machine. The Mystical Council is a great recent example of an at-the-time resurgent invader movement turning a victory into a rallying cry and passing down the tale of that victory to newer generations as the example of what modern raiders are capable of. Perhaps, at long last, the Frontier change, dissatisfaction with the cynical realpolitik and dislike of the forums that dominated certain spheres from 2019-2022 and the era of conflict that the game supposedly is currently gripped by will make the conditions right for a return to NS as a political simulation game, rather than the Discord backrooms and echo chambers that comprise its current politics.