Free Canada Movement

[Yelnoc]

I support this movement. I've copied below what I said on the subject in the Game Moderation Abolition Amendment thread.

I cannot imagine a set of reforms which would fix all of the above problems. Let's take them one-by-one.

• GM Activity: When the GM is inactive, the system collapses. There are very few people willing to take on the position of GM to begin with, considering what a thankless job it is. Of that very small pool, few (if any) have the time, energy, and imagination to produce the various plot points needed to give the game it's "story" and worry about cost estimation and legislation consequences. That's a huge amount of drudgery to ask a person to do, which is why some of that work was farmed out to the SoEA and SoIA. But the same problems apply to those positions- no respect, no real ability to influence the game. Why bother with it?
• Story Consistency: Apparently we annexed Canada while I was gone? Under what circumstances, I don't know. I'm sure there are some helpful mod posts somewhere from that time, outlining how that happened and what the initial reactions were. Whether annexing Canada could possibly have been made to sound like a logical and not Germany-in-the-Sudetenland aggression I don't know. Has that plot point resurfaced to influence future 'foreign policy' story lines? I doubt it. This sort of one-off plot vomit is the stuff of nightmares for a dedicated GM who wants to figure out the 'in-game' or simulated situation in which Atlasia resides.
• Historical Understanding: Related to plot consistency is our understanding as players of plot. The lack of consistent story telling, coupled with the immense age of this game, makes it easy for confusion to arise as to what kind of debates should be taking place in government. To use an example from my time in the IDS, when creating the budget I found that past governments had passed various contradictory tax plans many many times without understanding that the previous governments had already covered that ground. This may be less a problem at the Federal level, due to the presence of players which preserve a very long institutional memory (looking at you North Carolina Yankee), but it is still a problem inherent to this system, which becomes particularly difficult when people refuse to acknowledge a shared understanding.
• Non-Cooperation: Oakvale's example of ephemeral policy fits here. Ultimately, we take our cues from the real world. When something interesting happens outside, we like to react to it, even if it contradicts the Atlasian version of history preserved by the GM. Another, particularly egregious form of non-cooperation is when elected officials refuse to interact with the story points created by GM's, either because they don't find them interesting, or they feel the plot does not fit with the (their understanding of) the game.

[Yelnoc]

Continuing to claim we did anything close to "annex" Canada, or did so in anything close to the manner you imply, speaks only to your ignorance.

Here is the text of the bill, for those interested.

This points to an interesting cleavage between the game and the fantasy world built by the game. The legislators went to great lengths to not "annex" Canada, driven no doubt by their own sense of plausibility; yet as far as the actual mechanics of this elections game goes, Canada has been annexed. The Canadian provinces have been added to our regions, allowing players to register and participate from there. In the real world, no common markets agreement would assign ex-pats to vote in specific internal subvisions of their home country based on the internal subdivision of the country in which they now reside (which just so happens to be contiguous to the aforementioned subdivision, and thus quite pretty on a map). The deviation from the conscientious (suffocating, even) realism of the rest of the bill in Section V highlights its importance. The rest of the legislation was window dressing, irrelevant but serious looking fluff which served to obfuscate the desire to expand the map, our only reliable tool with which to judge our relationship with the rest of the fantasy world.