Cyber Nations

Cyber Nations (also known as CyberNations and abbreviated as CN) is a massively multiplayer online geo-political simulator. Players assume the role of a national leader of a fictional nation they create and then run. Cyber Nations is composed of hundreds of groups, called alliances, each of which contain nations run by individual players. Cyber Nations also has one of the biggest IRC channels on the EsperNet and Coldfront servers. Cyber Nations was created by Kevin Marks, modelled on a game he invented as a child involving a world map and push pins.^[1] In 2003, Marks started a website for the game, although the domain sat idle for two years. On December 24, 2005, he began to code the game, and Cyber Nations was finally released to the public on January 6, 2006.

Gameplay

The Nation

When a player first creates a country, they choose a national name, a capital city name and location. The income tax percentage, and various other settings such as the structure of government and positions on various issues, are changeable after nation creation. Nations may collect taxes and pay bills daily, or wait for an update cycle (24 hours) to gain interest. Many factors affect the happiness of a nation's citizens, which in turn directly impacts that nation's income.^[2] By buying more infrastructure, a player can improve the economy and increase the population of their nation. Factors that affect a nation's income include the nation's technology level, infrastructure level, resources available, war readiness, position in color team, and inter color trading. Technology is very expensive but it improves one's combat odds, population happiness, and reduces infrastructure's maintenance costs. Land reduces population density and can improve one's environment. These items all affect a nation's strength level, which decides which nations that they may declare war upon and their world ranking within the game. Each nation starts with two resources, which benefit nations in many ways; they keep these for the duration of the game, as they cannot be changed. Nations can trade with others to acquire other resources as long as the trade lasts. These trades offer different bonuses depending on the resource, such as an increase of citizens, land, soldiers, or income. Nations may also send foreign aid: money, technology points, and soldiers may be transferred from one nation to another. Players can select a trading sphere, called teams within the game, for their nation. Teams allow nations to trade with other nations on their team to receive a happiness bonus. They also have three elected senate positions. Senators can stop trade and aid from their team to a specific nation through sanctions once they have received a minimum of 30 votes. A major feature of CyberNations is its warfare, where a nation can declare war on any nation that is within its strength range. Nations can currently declare upon others that are between half and twice their strength. For example, a nation of 10,000 strength may declare war upon nations from 5,000-20,000 strength. Nations fight battles against each other using soldiers and various war machinery that can be purchased such as tanks. In battles, one can destroy or steal particular items from that nation affecting their strength. Wars last for up to one week, during which a player can attack twice daily per front by land, cruise missiles, and aircraft. Nuclear weaponry can also be used, but only once daily. A rule had been introduced limiting nuclear weapons to the top 5 percent of nations. This was due to an outcry from the community, concerned that the game was too unrealistic with nuclear weapons so readily available and being used on a massive scale.^[1]

International Alliances

Alliances are player created groups managed outside the game that function similar to gaming clans. Alliances offer player protection during wars, organized strategies in game, increased player interaction, and often off-site forums and communities of their own. Many of the player created alliances identify with or, in the case of the New Pacific Order even control a color team. This gives the various alliances a common denominator and a happiness bonus to trade with each other. Inter- and intra-alliance communication leads to interesting forum-based politics. These in-game politics make up the bulk of the game sans the redundant, in comparison, point and click aspects. Cybernations has gained great surges of members from many popular websites on the Internet. These groups often join Cybernations en masse to create their own alliance. Among alliances established this way are some of the most popular and successful. Some of these are the New Pacific Order and the Orange Defense Network from NationStates, the Goon Order of Neutral Shoving from SomethingAwful, Farkistan from Fark.com, R&R from Americas Army, the FOK!-Alliance from the Dutch online community FOK!, and The Order of the Paradox from the forums of Paradox Interactive. LUEnited Nations from GameFAQs was also a fairly major alliance, but has since disbanded, and the Random Insanity Alliance, spouting from the RI board at GameFAQs has become the largest alliance from that site. General Mayhem had an alliance, but has disbanded with no current replacement alliance. Ebaum's World, and 4chan also produced alliances, yet they were poorly received from the community due to their intentions of griefing. The most notable of actions of griefing occurred when the alliance from 4chan, simply called "/b/" after the /b/ - Random message board on the site, abused the forums by posting extremely inappropriate posts, as well as taking the website down and stealing its source code.

Controversy

Due to the heavy factionalism, many alliances on Cyber Nations make recruitment and propaganda videos for Cyber Nations players and upload them onto YouTube. Among these, was the German nationalist alliance "Nordreich." One of the videos made by the Nordreich alliance used the Norwegian national anthem as background music.^[3] On January 2, 2007, Nordreich caused controversy when a Norwegian newspaper posted a story about a neo-Nazi group posting propaganda on YouTube, using the Norwegian national anthem. The Norwegian government and press did not check up on the story further, but were outraged over their national anthem being used in the background for a "neo-Nazi cell based in Germany" and requested YouTube to pull the video immediately.^[4] The Norwegian Foreign Ministry contacted YouTube about the video sometime prior to December 25, 2006, but YouTube did nothing at the time.^[5] The stated reason for the removal request was the "Nazi references and symbols" present in the video.^[6] The next day, after an official statement from Nordreich in which one of the leaders of Nordreich stated that they were not neo-Nazis and did not condone such behaviour, the incident was cleared up. The Norwegian papers which attacked Nordreich in print were also verbally reprimanded for their poor research and journalism.^[3] The video in question was later removed by YouTube on the grounds of copyright violation.^[7] The second Afterposten article's mention of Cyber Nations made Cyber Nations more popular - causing Fark to link Cyber Nations to their main page, as well as nearly doubling the number of people who signed up for the game daily.

See also

• Jennifer Government: NationStates

Notes

External links

• Official Site