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Shared Worlds : Nation Games
This article is about the subforum that opened in October 2011. For the game genre known as the nation(s) game, see here.
Nation Games is one of the three subfora of the Shared Worlds forum. Like Moderated Games, it is devoted to nation games, in which each player controls a country and determines its actions within an overall world.
The two subfora, despite dedicating themselves to similar pursuits, maintain distinct communities and exhibit substantial stylistic differences. For instance, Moderated Games generally represent in-game time as a contraction of real-life time, while Nation Games divide in-game time into turns which are advanced at moderator discretion.1)
The origins of Nation Games as distinct from Moderated Games can be traced to March 2009, when the Sandbox opened. Prior to that point, all nation games took place in the main Shared Worlds forum and, due to fear of drawing interest away from active games and killing them, were subject to strict limits on quantity. The Sandbox served as a home for, among others, the game ideas that exceeded those limits.
The Sandbox was abolished in October 2011 as part of a general redistribution of Shared Worlds. Nation Games was split off as its own subforum, and the main forum, which had maintained its structure and leadership with only gradual change, became Moderated Games.
In March 2015, the bulk of the Nation Games community, citing lack of software and administrative support from the AH.COM administration, decamped to a new forum on Sufficient Velocity. The only game to continue through the disruption was the long-running A Song of Ice and Fire Nation Game, but this has since died.
Since then, several new games have been run by Chaotic Brillance, Dragos Cel Mare, FPSlover, Ankh Von Hapsburg, The_Last_Plantagenet, Usilli and theDisciple all to moderate success. The most successful was the long running Vae Victis III, later renamed Divide et Impera, which lasted for a considerable part of 2016.
On 25OCT2016 Shared Worlds was reorganized, with all sub-forums (Nation Games, Moderated Games, Map Games) re-combined into the general Shared Worlds forum and the implementation of the genre-tag system. Complaints by notable NG players led to administrative action against some members, resulting in a number of users departing for SV or threatening to do so.
However since this “second migration” Nation Games has been partially repopulated with new and some returning players. By 2017 the Nation Games community had fully adopted an democratic (poll) system for selecting new games, with a semi-formal rule that only two games be run at one time (although this “rule” is not enforced by administration and has been challenged and broken at times).
From amongst those new players emerged the first “Chancellor” of the Nation Games community, jankmaster98. In his time as Chancellor, he has overseen the game proposal election system, created the NG community discord, and started the NG community podcast.
NG Discussion and Election Thread: Nation Games Proposal and Discussion Thread
Discord Channel: Royal Alternate History NG Server (if link expired, request invite in NG discussion thread)