Every now and then I think about playing #nationstates again, which is a the silly browser based game where you run a country and every decision you make turns extreme and things go comically wrong.
The best part of it is really the roleplaying - because there's not a way for countries to fight with each other, people playing the game just decided to do forum based RPs where they play as characters from their countries, fight wars, and write elaborate guides to their imaginary countries.
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.
I saw the same thing in other browser-based MMO war games - even if there was roleplaying or other creative potential, most players focused on the gameplay and anyone doing creative writing was doing so in a bubble.
So I think nationstates not having a built-in competitive engine is what forced people to use their imagination.
While sometimes I still want to go back to nationstates, the present real-life political environment kind of makes me not want to - I'm getting too much political drama from the news already.
Also, I don't really want to rub online shoulders with hard-right people in a political game anymore - if someone want me and my friends dead in real life I don't exactly want to hang out with them on the internet and write a pretend story together.
Maybe I'm tempted to do a play by post game because I'm using #4thewords (a game/app/thing that encourages you to type words every day), and I think play-by-post is an ideal case for that. In a play-by-post you should ideally respond to the stuff other people type quickly, and even if you're waiting on replies there's always more worldbuilding to do.
Anyone know any good play-by-post arenas or cooperative #worldbuilding projects that are popular in this present epoch?
Floaty Birb