I wanna say that “equality” does NOT mean “one above all the other ones”, right? They are completely opposite. Although in animals (we can also say that they are just at aware stage), leader isn’t a kind of place or job to do or a way to show their social status. They are more like a kind of subspecies under the big “ant” kind.
I, for one, think it should be a three axis thing, like how NationStates did it, except they are sliders (i’m not sure if NationStates does this, honestly, they only seem to have 0, 0.5, and 1 values).
If you mean it in the sense that humans have never lived in communistic societies, that’s not true. Primitive human societies were communistic.
I dislike the idea of any kind of “political compass” in the game. There may be preset names for ideologies or society types, but the player should be the one who defines the boni and 
given by that type of society. (there probably could be some measures to encourage balance in the design of those societies). There also ought to be a way for the player to create their custom society types and possibly to share them with other humans. In that way we avoid the question of politics altogether and give players the freedom to play how they want to, without forcing our manner of viewing and understanding this world (shaped by our own culture, history and social-economic context) onto them.
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I dislike the idea of disliking political compasses. What’s wrong with them? They don’t have to be prescriptivist either. Some sliders can be used to design an ideology, or, in the end, we may look at the sliders to see what our ideology ended up being. Gaddafism 
named after a person? Maybe its just an 
authoritarian, economically 
left, and 
nationalist ideology influenced by 
Islam.
Here are some examples of sliders:
Some sliders can be used to design an ideology, or, in the end, we may look at the sliders to see what our ideology ended up being.
I don’t understand what you are suggesting. Are you saying the player moves some sliders and the game infers what society you want? Like the player chooses 0,7 on liberty, 0,65 in economy, 0,4 on lollipops and 0,1 on Heinz® ketchup and the game goes: «Aha! You want the real-world ideology of missing the bus and coming late to work, out of breath and stressed-ism or that weird feeling you get when you put something deep in your ear-ism.»
That won’t work because how we describe a society with terms like «free», «egalitarian», «progressive» etc. is entirely subjective and is most often very nuanced. Let’s take a contemporary real-world example for the former: It has been “in fashion” recently where I live to call China authoritarian, when the people living there disagree (Q71, Q251 of the 2018 World Values Survey on China)). Now whose idea of authoritarianism is the correct one? How do we decide it? If we choose one over the other, we are imposing our conception of the world onto the players.
I think it should be up to the player to choose the “traits” (ie. authoritarian, egalitarian, etc.) of the society (just for RP purposes, the actual modifiers are alsso decided separately by the players). In that case sliders make no sense. It should suffice for the player to call their society technocratic or an ethnostate, and not choosing that it is 67% of the former and 12 /¢ of the latter (especially because it also forces the player to make their society have a stance on that issue, when it could in their society simply be irrelevant).
this can be like the fossilisation feature
I ment being able to name the ideology whatever you want, but either creating it by moving the sliders or creating the ideology with your actions like in spore and reading what it corresponds to in each slider.
You are right. The terms should be defined objectively. And also the joke axises don’t have to be included.
Something being irrelevant corresponds to being at the center of the slider. New sliders can be unlocked as the game progresses, for example, anarcho primitivism doesn’t make sense before unlocking the tech editor
But distributing food equally after gathering nuts versus everyone keeps what they collected has economic meaning that can be shown with a slider.
These aren’t the polar opposites of each other. Technocracy is about how you chose the rulers and ethnostate is about what you do with the minorities in your country. The opposite of technocracy would be antitechnocracy, where you actively try to get people who don’t know how to rule in charge. Kleptocracy can slightly be closer to technocracy, since they need to know how the system works in order to efficiently steal. They could be high in the corruption slider. If you have a democracy where the people appoint their rulers and the rulers appoint a head of the central bank who studied economics, that leans towards technocracy. If you do this,
that is completly neutral in technocracy vs antitechnocracy scale or depends on average education. And if you researched artificial super intelligence, the slider becomes irrelevant, because you would never put a suboptimal program to govern the economy on purpose. If you are an ethnoststatist, what would you do with the minorities? Put them to gas chambers[1], enslave[2] them, expel them or assimilate them? All these options are xenophobic, but they can look different under different sliders, such as valuing human life. I noticed sliders can’t be directly edited because then you’d be able to chose an ideology and play like another ideology. But maybe that can also happen. Your supreme court sueing you if you try to do something your ideology bans.
Being able to edit how much freedom you give to your citisens with just two options turns the slider into discrete options. Is that better? If the internal policy isn’t explored deeply in the game, I guess you can just say what it is. I think complexity is good.
This just creates two different sliders for the same dimension. The pr one, as I understand, is not related to the game. You choose democracy if your population likes democracy.
These aren’t the polar opposites of each other.
I never claimed that. They were just examples of society types. If the player wills it, the society may be both.
If the internal policy isn’t explored deeply in the game, I guess you can just say what it is. I think complexity is good.
My point was that the player shouldn’t need to say that the society is rated 34 % in terms of individual liberty (whatever quantifying such an abstract quality means), but rather that the players simply choose the key features of that society.
Do the players want a stateless society? Let the player pick the stateless trait among the many traits available!
Is tradition important in that society? The player doesn’t care? Then he doesn’t need to pick anything that touches that subject.
The pr one, as I understand, is not related to the game. You choose democracy if your population likes democracy.
I did not say pr, I said RP, as in role-play. The society traits would be only there for flavour and æsthetics. What would have an impact in the game is the modifiers the player defines, that they believe they should get as a result of playing that society type.
reading what it corresponds to in each slider.
What do you mean by that? Do you mean game modifiers (+2 to city productivity, -1 happines, 2 % more taxes, etc.)?
Will we always play as the government? What if I want to be the AI in that case and stage a revolution? (maybe if the player skips the cell stage etc. that can be the way of entering society stage). And would losing an election cause a game over?
Communism, socialism and capitalism are about the economics. Fascism does not represent an axis, but in normal day speech it may mean authoritarianism… Monarchism is about the exacutive branch of the government. Theocracy is about the relation between the state and religion. Centrism is about the overton window, doing only acceptable things in the political discourse.
Dictatorship is a monarchy with a low legitimacy.
Why have just a base and a modifier? There can be a communist monarchist theocratic dictatorship. Chose an economic policy, religious policy, choose how many people wield power, and try to get legitimacy for your goverment, which may be gained by doing elections or a farcical aquatic ceremony.
I misread it and thought it was public relations. I would say the same thing for role playing, except it now depends on what the player wants.
34% liberty, that sort of stuff
I think the player should chose an economic policy, religious policy etc. and that in turn results in the modifiers.
That would be creating an anarchist society.
There could be a government editor. For example, look at the power structure in Iran
The game can look at how your goverment is structured, and calculate from that things like how likely is there to be a rebellion.
An achievement for government editor:
Dance floor politics*: Bring all the feudal nobility to the capital to party meanwhile you fill the government jobs with people who don’t have secondary regional loyalties
Lets ask this question. What determines how much tax you can collect in an agrarian society?
- Biology: Can your species plow the fields? Do you have a domesticted creature?
- Technology: Have you invented the combine harvester? How good is the vehicle you created in the vehicle editor?
- Environment: How much sun does your planet receive? Are there monsoon winds?
- Policies: Do you do fallow*? Does your tax collectors steal some of the grain for themselves?
- Events in the game: Has an army pillaged the villages?
Different policies may be best in different circumstances. Some biologies may necessitate some policies, such as hiveminds and communism. It is said that stirrup made feudalism possible*. Everything can influence each other. I am speaking vague, there is a need for thinking of all the possibilities but the previous attempts were too simplistic and classified different things in the same category.
I agree entirely. Trying to infer or label the player’s government form based on like 20 sliders is going to end up really silly.
Hard disagree on this part of your post.
Despite what people who have been mislead by mainstream media in their country (this applies to sadly more and more countries) there is a reality that can be inspected to see if it matches the characteristics of whatever label that tries to be matched to that situation.
I think this thread shows extremely well the problem of using real-world ideological labels in the game. I think purely for that reason we’ll want to decompose politics into either individual traits / degrees of traits or sliders with two extreme ends. That way the player is free to pick whatever they want and then if they want to use a specific label when talking to other players, they can do so. This has the benefit that we developers don’t need to make the decision so all misinformed people can just do mental gymnastics to disagree why a certain slider configuration doesn’t really match what their country is like in real life.
We can see all the the chemical reactions going on inside a cell, if we want. Isn’t this similar
The sliders can be named without negative connotations, such as “government control” instead of “authoritarianism”
I don’t think authoritarianism is the problem, I’m talking like if we call certain combination of sliders like communist or some-really-obscure-prefix-anarchy, people are going to endlessly complain to us that we got it wrong.
How do you see this as being the same? We can show easily all of the sliders to the player. To show an overall label of what those sliders represent like you have political ideology x. That’s the problematic part. I think this thread shows really well how many debates coming up with the algorithm to go from the slider values to the ideological label causes.
According to Machiavelli*, there are two ways a principality can be governed. (centralised/feudal?)
Turkish style state: A prince rules the land and his servants assist him as ministers.
French style state: Barons help the prince rule the land, they aren’t appointed by the prince, their positions may be hereditary.
Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. It isn’t easy to invade a turkish style state, because the ministers can’t be corrupted and the whole state will be united against the common enemy. Even if you can bribe one of them, their soldiers wouldn’t listen to you, they are loyal to the prince. But once they are defeated and the monarchy is usurped, they will be subservient to the new prince. Persia was a turkish style state, Alexander the great invaded the country with great difficulty, but once he did, there were no revolts against Alexander and his successors other than the ones they provoked. In contrast, in a french style state, the barons aren’t united against external threats. In fact, it was probably a baron who didn’t liked the current prince that invited a foreigner to be new prince. But once the monarchy is usurped, keeping it would be extremely hard, the barons would cause “infinite difficulties” for the prince, both the ones he helped and the ones he fought. It wouldn’t be possible to satisfy or exterminate them. Spain, France, and Greece were french style states because they had a lot of principalities (city states?) in the past. When the Romans invaded those lands, they kept rebeling as long as the memory of those past states endured. When a lot of time passed and all they could remember was that they were Romans, they stopped rebelling.
How would we classify modern countries? They are all centralised, they don’t have warlords and barons, except some third world countries that constantly have civil wars and also Russia where there are military companies like the wagner group. How would we classify ancient Rome? It was a democracy and the soldiers were loyal to the state, but after the Marian reforms, they became loyal to the generals, which allowed one of them, Caeser, to seize power and became the emperor. During times like the crisis of the third century, every general would raise his own army and there would be huge civil wars. But after the wars, the winning general would form his dynasty and the state would become centralised again, they didn’t have feudal lords yet. Ancient China is similar to Rome, the people supported the emperor as long as he had the mandate of heaven (there are no crop failures). When he lost it, the crown was up for grabs, there would be a warring states period followed by a new dynasty.
The question is, how do we represent civil wars in the game? Are all the factions a different country? If that is the case, feudalism would be an abundance of states with the prescence of a supranational head of authority. Or is feudalism a a type of governence? Does a centralised country turn its system to “feudalism with no head of state” when a civil war happens? What if a conflict is frozen and the country doesn’t unify like the Korean war?
why the game will have facism its a evil ideology
Simple, since fascism appeared on earth, it can appear on alien worlds, and since thrive aims to be as realistic as it can be, fascism will appear in the game
You might as well ask why any video game includes evil (or “evil”) choices the player can pick.
It’s because I ordered the game developpers to do so, and they all obey my orders out of fear.
Oh ok its because everytime i heard about facism i think its a evil ideology
Some of the forum users (or at least a lot of internet users) are not going to be happy to hear that…
There are a lot of right wing people who absolutely love (many, if not all) core pillars of fascism (even if they don’t know it). But these forums are not a place to debate about politics.
Still fascism is a thing that has happened on Earth and I think it would be a huge oversight if we didn’t model government types / policies well enough for it to be possible to play as a fascist government in Thrive industrial stage.
But even though we depict it, we don’t endorse it, right? I have 3 ideas on how it can be shown as a bad thing. But first, lets define facism.
I checked wikipedia and it seems to be a very specific ideology with a lot of defining features. This is not very useful. So I am going to give it a more general meaning. In the game, there can be a facism slider when making a new ideology just like authoriterianism/freedom or communism/capitalism sliders. These can be named differently.
The word facism comes from the word fascio, which means a bundle of sticks.
I will use this analogy to define a meaning for this word. First of all, it seems like facism tries to achieve strength. Secondly, it compares individuals with sticks. So we can say that it tries to create a standardised citisen who tries to contribute to the goals of the state the same way all the other citisens do.
Facism: Valueing group cohesion at the expense of personal differences
Facism has two different opposites, which are also opposite of each other. The first is hierarchism and the second one is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism tries to keep the society together without assimilating anyone (and removing the risk of hierarchy formation). There are different “classes”, but all the classes are equal to each other. This 3 way distinction doesn’t apply to anarchism because it has no government.
Facism and hierarchies: Facism wants to end or reduce all hierarchies and create a society where everyone is equal in all ways.
Facism and economy: Specialisation is necessary so there would be jobs in every society (unless either expertise can be transferred between brains or everyone can be educated in all the subjects). Facism tries to reduce this neccesary difference. In socialism, workers are in charge and the state tries to make the workers have higher wages and better living conditions. In capitalism, the corporations are in charge(economicly), they try to increse their profits even though this may mean that workers would need to work harder and receive less compensation. This may create a shareholder class that receives all the wealth. The shareholder class can then start using their influence to make the companies make decisions that go against the market forces, which would make them a nobility that controls the economy just like socialism or state capitalism does. A nobility means a ruling class that keeps being a ruler class without having to do anything. The ruler class can also have jobs, for example, the job of the clergy is to study ancient scriptures and to cast spells on glaciers*. Facism prioritises neither the companies, nor the workers or any other class/job. Because everyone should be equal and this should also benefit the state. Facist economics is called corparatism. It is based on compromise. The workers say what they want, the companies say what they need and they collectively decide on what to do. Note that you can be culturally facist and economicly something else or vice verca. So you can say all humans should be equal and you can remove all the barriers to equality while at the same time letting the poor starve to death.
Facism and xenophobia: Facism can be expansionist or isolationist, but justifying expansion is easy in facism, it doesn’t even need to be profitable. Expansionist facism wants to capture foreign citisens(and also territory), naturalise them and assimilate them because foreign is different and different is bad.
Facism and conservatism: Facism wants to assimilate all its citisens into a single culture and class. But facism doesn’t need to be conservative and seek pureness. It can appropriate foreign concepts and reform itself as long as this change applies to all the citisens equally.
Facism and authoriterianism: In order to assimilate people, facism needs to use force, so it is authoriterian. Note that this doesn’t always mean orwellian level thought police. Most facist states weren’t that facist due to practical reasons.
Facism and democracy: Facism can only exist in democracies and democracies are likely to become facist. Hierarchical democracies tend to lose all hierarchies(think of the abolition of slavery in america), and since multiculturalism is hard to maintain and wants to turn into hierarchism, the only option remaining for democracies is facism. Monarchies or oligarchies can also try to assimilate different cultures and classes into a single class but since they aren’t democracies, they would have a ruling class seperate from the main class, which means they aren’t facism. Facist states in history include revolutionary France[1] and facist Italy. Ancient Athens had a democracy so it didn’t have a nobility, but it had slaves so it wasn’t a classless facism. A defining feature of facism is the relationship between happiness and loyalty. If you had a peasent class and they become unhappy, they may revolt. But in a facist state, revolts would never happen because the people would already be the ones in charge. Since there are no classes, classes can’t have demands and expectations from each other. An absolute monarchy has never existed in history. First of all, the monarch needs a bureaucracy, so no person can single handedly rule a country. The only difference between a monarchy and an oligarchy is that this bureaucracy doesn’t have an infighting in monarchy (most of the time). In hierarchical societies, the ruling class doesn’t have an absolute power over the peasent class. The peasents can revolt, this is how classes communicate. The total power is shared between the classes. A facist democracy can either be a monarchy or a oligarchy. In monarchy, the president has the power and in an oligarchy the senetors have more power so there can be infighting like what happened in Rome.
Facism in eusocial species: Eusocial species can evolve sapience in two different ways. Either only the queens become sentient or the workers become sentient too. If only the queens are sentient, the thinking population would be way less (but the working population would be the same). Since there would be less minds around, assimilating all of them would be easier and facism would be easier to achieve. If the workers are also sapient, facism can either be easy or it may be hard like in non eusocial species, depending on how much influence the queens have over their workers.
Facism and hive minds: A hive mind is the most facist thing that can exist.
Facism and internet: Internet allows fast communication between all the minds on a planet but it doesn’t merge the minds into a hive mind. Echo chambers can prevent consensus formation and reduce assimilation. But internet can also be used for propaganda which increases likemindedness and increase facism. But attempting propaganda and succeeding it are two different things. It may backfire and the citisens can become even more interested in the ideologies that were attemoted to be censored.
Here is how multiculturalism can be presented as a better ideology than facism.
- It is more advantageous
The difference in opinions can give a boost to science and resistance to propaganda (both from other states and from the player)
- It isn’t more advantageous but it is presented as more ethical way to play the game.
A picture is shown every time you send a minority group to residential schools showing them unhappy.
- Anti facist coalitions
Facism can be given a military advantage, but multicultural and hierarchical countries can always fight against facist countries when they appear.
the monarchies didn’t used to try to change the culture. when the french revolution happened, their ideology was the enlightenment principles. they wanted to spread these ideas and assimilate people into enlightenmentism. and although they didnt forced people to denounce christianity, they changed calenders and stuff, which caused uprisings of the pro monarchist people(class) which were violently supressed. when napoleon became the emperor, the democracy was over and facism had ended, the old calender was back ↩︎
Or you know… Use the actual fascism instead of creating an ideology that has beliefs that are both contradictory and not part of fascism.
No, quite the contrary, fascism wants to enforce hierarchies, why did you think that fascism is statalist and nationalist?
Fascism is extremely nationalist and authoritarian, which means it tends to form ideas of national purity since different things are more difficult to control, as such this is unfeasable.
Seriously? I won’t even explain why these two things contradict eachother for it is obvious.
Same as above.
Same as above.
You know what? Belgium it, you clearly need to be spoken the obvious since you wrote it.
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by a controlling government and the rejection of democracy, human rights, and political plurality. It involves the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military.
Do you understand? In authoritarianism there is a clear division between the ruling class and other classes, and the ruling class has absolute powers over the other classes.
An authoritarian state will enforce its hierarchies because that’s literally what the ruling class uses to rule, also, fascism is authoritarian, as such it can’t “only exist in democracies”.
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by a controlling government and the rejection of democracy, human rights, and political plurality. It involves the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military.
Do you understand? In authoritarianism there is a clear division between the ruling class and other classes, and the ruling class has absolute powers over the other classes.
Literally quoting myself.
Fascist theory still wasn’t invented as such it couldn’t have been fascist.
First of all, this is completely irrelevant.
Second of all, an absolute monarchy is a government in which the monarch has unrestrained control over the three powers of the state.
“But bureaucracy!” ok and?
Where is in the definition of absolute monarchy the absence of a bureaucracy mentioned? Do you think that bureaucrats always have a saying in the decisions of the ruler? They don’t.
Come on even the whole phrase:
Is a contradiction, I literally could ignore everything else and this phrase would still contradict itself.
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