Out of curiosity, what's your position on NPC elections?
I liked 'em, although as the player with probably the highest word count I don't think anyone doubted that, but I wouldn't bring them back unless there was widespread demand for them. We saw how much of a chore it was to keep up when people were invested, never mind when it was down to essentially three players.
Is the Russia-Ukraine war storyline a priority for you as a member of the GM Team? As it was my major storyline as a member of the team, I would like to know if you have any ideas on how it could continue or wrap up.
If I am not mistaken the story hasn't progressed since that update about the commissar order repeal. Ukraine is receiving substantially less aid ITTL so I would expect that to break at some point, but that could plausibly happen anywhere from days to years from now.
I don't have
detailed plans on how it might play out but that will certainly be interesting to discuss with the rest of the team.
1. How will you deal with impartiality and objectiveness? Party influence, own ideology considerations in GM stories etc. . As a sidenote, I do not a GM should be impartial when it comes to voting (but i'm talking about the duties and stories as a GM).
For the ideology question I will direct you to Talk Elections user khuzifenq, who has interacted with me for three years and
still does not know what my actual political opinions are. I am very capable of keeping ideology out of what I do, don't worry.
Most GMs have successfully kept their party bias out of their official duties and I’m not going to start pushing a heavily Federalist angle on anything, people who have interacted with me are presumably also aware of my capacity for that.
2. To what extent should actions by people taken in the game, have an effect in the stories of the GM?
It's not fun if the GM team just does their own thing. And anyone who remembers my first campaign for president is aware that I want people to be invested in what they do, that does nothing but help the game. I think you will see the team continue to react to major events with followup stories, ideally more of those if (a) people do stuff and (b) we come up with good ideas for pursuing them.
3. What is your view on foreign policy events/stories as a GM? Sometimes it feels like the world in Atlasia outside Atlasia is an utopia.
Even with the apparently widespread accord on international climate change cooperation and things like that it's not exactly a utopia, no, plenty of butterflies in the other direction exist. Marine Le Pen is president. And that is limited to the areas we have historically cared enough about to change. Plenty of issues pertaining to Africa/South America/the subcontinent etc. that are still playing out as badly as IRL.
There are many opportunities outside Atlasia for butterflying (something something mentega terbang) – we have created some of our most distinctive stories by reaching out there, so we should continue looking for new storylines in this vein and I’m looking forward to that.
1. What is your overall philosophy on retconning? We've had multiple instances where the GM Department has put out questionable stories (Nazis running Ukraine and the PRC being position to take over Taiwan).
Which leads me to this. What I liked about things like Paflagonia was their plausibility and I don't intend to write stories implausible enough that they might be retconned down the line. I suppose that might count as an additional level of quality control if people want to see it that way. I would support it if for some reason a story is found to contradict what we already had earlier, but probably not in situations beyond that.
As far as I am aware we haven't touched the Taiwan storyline either since China retreated.
2. Do you intend to account for cultural sensitivities in stories, so that we don't see a repeat of the Ukraine situation as presented?
To the best of my ability, yes. To my knowledge the Ukraine story was written that way to spice things up for their own sake, and that is not exactly my driving goal here. If there is spice I will certainly try to be sure there is a good reason for it.
3. Lastly, due to certain stories, realism has become a concern to some. How would you balance making fun and interesting scenarios with maintaining some level of realism?
I think that also partially answers this one. “Realism” is pretty easy to pursue with the amount of RL information to riff off of, like most of the actual GM team stories have been to date, but those happen to be about issues that most people don't find interesting. So to me “fun” will be an indicator to focus on.
Among other things I want to write about issues that are
of interest to people's current concerns, maybe followups to what is happening in this region or that country that will be directly relevant. Early last year I toyed with the idea of writing stories about things like the human impact of Wulfric’s attempted salt tax, give the issues a bit of color if they need it and that sort of thing. If it stands a chance of provoking interesting reactions and not just “hey this story is unrealistic” then that's all to the good.
