And furthermore, I had to interrupt the finale of "Spooks" season 3 to read through this and respond. Lives are in danger and it looks like they are going to kill more main characters
and the PM of England.
Sounds like a good cause. Where do I donate?
...oh hey.
Also, I could've sworn there was a time when I was far ahead of Iggy. This is wake up call if I've ever seen one.
Iggy's bad enough, but he was practically neck and neck with you by mid-2006 anyway because of Civ IV and LINES; think about how awful it is that
I'm so far past you right now.
NESers tend to have pretty good knowledge of history, and use that to inform how they do diplomacy (that and video games, at least.) and economic policy in their nations. Thing is, how diplomacy works these days is a very different to how it worked one hundred or even fifty years ago, and the geopolitical face of the world is pretty different too - Great Power politics, for example, aren't exactly relevant. But NESers are used to playing with Great Power politics or just aligning into two or three blocs. There's a good reason for that - NESers tend not to worry about their populations like actual leaders do, and countries aren't as huge on aligning into two blocs stuck in a cold war and haven't since 1989 because thats a fast route to nuclear war and nobody wants that. But NESers tend not to care, so they do that and other kind of unrealistic things.
TL;DR NESers understand history as it happened and kind of operate like that, because they don't have to deal with the concerns that actual modern leaders have to deal with on a daily basis. As such a realistic 2012 NES wouldn't go very far since NESers are gamey warmongering b*******s and haven't been conditioned to worry about their populations.
I would argue, actually, that most NESers don't have a very good idea about academic understandings of how anything has worked historically. Outside of a smattering of grade-school notions about various events, plus a reasonably accurate understanding of the Second World War - something that's awfully hard to get
wrong these days to be honest - there really isn't much there that isn't ripped from Wikipedia, or, if one is lucky, an Osprey or
Jane's book. Any more systematic historical knowledge is either highly uneven or simply not engaged with NESing at all. Out of all the NESes that are being run right now, I can't really say that
any of them make a particularly serious effort towards being historically accurate.
This isn't a particularly bad thing. The people who've attempted to create reasonably accurate - by, I suppose, my standards - NESes have stumbled. I can't speak to the reasons why, for instance, das dropped his 1000 BC project, but I know that my own efforts frequently sputter out due to an internal sort of paralysis in the face of choosing precisely how much realism I want to inject into a game anyway, among other things. It's probably better to have limited historical knowledge, because it can impart a certain insouciance about the sort of things you can get away with in running a NES. NESers aren't, for the most part, historians, and if they don't feel like playing at being them that's fine.
So I don't think the problem is that NESers are incapable of thinking outside old paradigms, whatever those might be, simply because all too often they're unaware of what those old paradigms even are, and don't really care to find out. I think that it has more to do with what they believe is fun. And frankly, a significant part of the fun of pretending to run a fake country is the pretend wars you can get yourself into. NESes are in significant part a wargame (admittedly, a wargame played by people who could be outgeneraled by Douglas Haig), and the wars that a lot of NESers tend to prefer don't match up well with the wars that are most likely to occur in a modern sort of setting, so either they or the mod shoehorn them in. I mean, hell, I mostly NESed for the wars, back when I actually played, and the reason I never played a modern game is
because I couldn't fight a war I thought would be interesting in that sort of setting without feeling like I was either participating in something oddly violating or in something that was just badly run.
Yeah, there's a problem with acting in character, too, although I would argue that it's less an issue of acting in character and more of an issue of acting in an unrealistic character. Most NESers, regardless of their opinions and abilities about plausibility, are very capable of creating a character that is internally consistent and who makes consistent actions in the context they create for him or her. It's just that the character itself is frequently constructed in such a way that it rarely refers to the actual historical context. And this happens all the time. Iggy's ultrapacifist would-be alchemist eccentric-loon princes are just as ridiculous in their own way as some of the more generally-agreed-to-be-absurd characters from NESing's past (King Ryan?).
In my opinion, the things that you see as problems with the NESing community's ability and/or desire to act in a way you perceive to be realistic are relatively easy to solve: tighten up modding controls on what they can and cannot do, especially by having
everybody else in the world react realistically to what the players choose to do. If a NESer wants his whole country to go out in a blaze of glory and tries to fight everybody with little to no chance of survival, then people in his country and others should do something about that. Coups and assassinations happen. They happen all too frequently about things considerably
less vital to national security than attempted
Götterdämmerung. And if the NESer can come up with a plausible reason for him to hold onto power in the face of this sort of thing - probably by cribbing extensively from the works of Ian Kershaw - then more power to him. At least he's making things interesting. Or impose costs on fighting commensurate with the, I dunno, actual costs of fighting. Warfare was and is an extremely pricey business, and if you think that keeping up massive armies from a tiny population and economic base is ridiculous and would not be able to happen in the real world, then impose constraints on a player's ability to actually maintain such an army. Players will only do what the mod permits them to get away with by definition. And a mod can channel their behavior in certain ways by judicious application of incentivizing rules and events.
I like that WWW can be a repository of srs bzNES and random inanities. I mean, just because it's awkward and a little melodramatic doesn't mean it's not important for people to argue about or get off their chest.
A lack of change we can believe in.
