@saustrup I used to play online political roleplaying games - specifically something called #CyberNations - and we had so much fun on IRC.

Everyone organized themselves in alliances and used IRC for daily comms. Haven't used it since, probably, 2006.

Similar games that had built-in war engines (like #cybernations) , never really nurtured the creativity that nationstates did.

I could see that some cybernations players wanted to do nationstates-like roleplaying and worldbuilding, but that was always drowned out by the majority of players who focused on alliance building, inter-guild politics and all the gameplay ways of making their country's Lines Go Up.