So. What is this all about?

[afleitch]

I don't mean to be a big puffy rain cloud, and I signed up to this in the first week, but what actually isthis? I am genuinely confused as to what this is supposed to be.

Is this an election sim with a small number of participants? If it is, and you're outside of parliament, what are you to do with your time here? Atlasia was an election sim with about a million posts you could run for or be nominated into. Which was a good thing, in it's way. A game with one single body and a smaller number of people signed onto it might elicit boredom after a very short while

Is this a parliament sim? If it is, you already have your political makeup in registered voters without the need for formal elections (makeup shifts as parties shift, people leave, people join etc) You can have a game that's a giant parliament and actually is more challenging because you have a high number of participants to get to vote a certain way. Anyone not playing in parliament can essentially be part of the government in other ways, or a civil service.

I'm confused as to what the goal is. I had assumed it was to be a parliament sim so my apologies if it's moved in another way through consensus.

[afleitch]

Thanks for the explanation

The problem I have is that it was decided what the game would be, based on a provisional parliament made up of x number of players based solely on the order in which they joined. So they essentially got to decide what the game was going to be. It’s not surprising that an exclusive group ended up designing an exclusive parliament! I don’t mean you’ve done a ‘bad job’, quite the contrary but you can see why it might raise a few eyebrows.

You said that the ‘parliament should be a cluster of active schemers.’ I don’t disagree, but what makes you think those that have signed on here aren’t active schemers? Why else would they have signed up?

So as I mentioned before; you’ve stripped the game of most offices. You’ve established it so that ‘the most committed players lead the narrative’. What is everyone else supposed to do if you’ve left them nothing to do?

If you’ve left them nothing to do, and as Sjoyce says hope that there will be newspapers, pressure groups then you’ll find everyone else essentially ‘rabble rousing’ and doing nothing else. Those in the parliament can essentially ignore that, as there’s no established mechanism for what everyone else does impacting on the parliament. You’re re-creating a situation like Atlasia where a huge proportion of participants are outside of the game. Yet unlike Atlasia there’s not really much else for them to do as of yet. If you’re running a parliament sim and not a government/elections sim, I think you need to be a lot broader than that.

I think you already have all your parliamentarians already. Parliaments are supposed to have lazy bastards as well as active schemers. It makes sense at least to start out, in having a universal parliament. Then you can cut it back if it grows too large and once everyone gets used to it.

[afleitch]

It's worth noting that there's a party list system of elections where each person get's one vote. Assuming people will vote for their own parties, the political makeup of the parliament will end up reflecting the political makeup of registered voters who turnout to vote. So therefore, what's the point of having the elections

[afleitch]

We're not going to add meaningless and low-activity regional governments. All they do in Atlasia is act as a boring stepping stone to higher office. Start a newspaper. Yell abuse from the gallery. Do some analysis. Become a lawyer once we've set up the courts. Try to get into Parliament next time.

I think the point is, no one has defined what everyone else is supposed to do. We have a Mock Parliament. So, if you leave everyone not in it do other things, then they really can do what on earth they want. It's South America. They could stage a coup.

Obviously, that's not what people want, but it does leave a significant number of people with not much to do.

Why wasn't interest in this game enough to confirm that those who signed up were pretty keen on actually playing a parliamentary sim, rather than 'a rest of the country' sim, which is what Atlasia essentially is.

[afleitch]

So.

What do those not in parliament do now? You've adopted a constitution without consultation which might have kept people busy and there's no other established bodies that parliament is constitutionally obliged to listen to (press, unions etc) So what are we to do?