A new Mock Parliament

[TNF]

Hey guys,

Now that Atlasia is dead (beyond a reasonable doubt, tbh), the question of what comes next is before the lot of us who are interested in doing something different. After some preliminary discussions on the IRC that seem to indicate a bit of interest in a renewed Mock Parliament project, I think that its worth trying out. Dallasfan65 and Flo have both made maps (based on the United States) with proposed constituencies for such a game, and I think it would be great to get a look at both and discuss the merits of them and of doing something like a renewed effort at a Mock Parliament game.

Personally I think the biggest problem with Atlasia was that we had too many offices and not enough active or interested players to man them. In any parliamentary situation, I think it would be wise to limit the total number of offices. We can go ahead and skip the idea of regional governments, as they were more or less centers were inactivity could grow and fester in the old game. With maybe twenty constituencies, we could have a functioning parliament that would be able to elect a majority government and enact policy. Likewise, with the use of constituencies, the often boring kinds of elections we had with PR-STV won't be an issue.

As for an executive, I would personally rather us not have a Presidency with the ability to influence policy to the degree that the Atlasian president had. I think, however, we more or less have to have an executive, and in our case, perhaps a President elected by a 2/3rds majority of the parliament or something or another would be a good idea. The President would be a kind of ceremonial figurehead for the fictional government, representing the forum 'as a whole', or something to that effect. Court justices would likewise be approved by the Parliament, and would absolutely not serve life terms (a completely retarded idea for an Internet game), but would be limited to a term of six months, which could then be renewed, if they so chose.

Or something like that. I'm open to ideas. But I think that now is the time to pursue the project we want to replace Atlasia, and I honestly think a parliamentary-style game is the way to go.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Consider me in!

[retromike22]

x retromike

[SWE]

I'm in

[Ban my account ffs!]

x snowguy716

[rpryor03]

In. Could we see those maps, please?

[Bacon King]

I'm in of course

[Foucaulf]

Reviving Mock Parliament has been thrown around in IRC for the past few weeks. What TNF has said is surprisingly close to what was talked about with Dallasfan, Flo, Lumine and me. I think we will agree on the following:

- A 20-member parliament, likely FPTP. (I would think you need to enforce strict residency rules, as strong as the ones Atlasia has now)
- A small cabinet of a few people, and a three-member court.
- Limited GM powers.

Past attempts at mock parliament usually stalled due to excessive focus on worldbuilding, party formation or constitutional fixtures. This is where I would suggest we start things up the British way, with no written constitution and getting straight into the issues. We'll see what parties and policies form on the way.

x Foucaulf I suppose.

[Türkisblau]

x Turkisblau

[Lumine]

Well, why not? A parliamentary game would certainly be an interesting idea.

I would like to advocate for having a strong moderation team to simulate results and, specially, elections. One way to avoid stagnation is not having all elections depend on the limited number of players, and having those results simulated (as it was discussed in the conversation Foucaulf cited) would probably solve that issue.

[Foucaulf]

Let me flesh out two electoral system ideas I had thought about:

FPTP with constituencies. Most people are going in this direction but there is cause for alarm: if this game had Atlasia levels of participation, it would still amount to at most 8.5 players on average per constituency. I'm thinking of a situation where elections don't really happen and instead anyone who wants to play the game will just wait for another MP to resign. Then we look more like "mock corrupt city council" than "mock parliament." Either we accept this, or we can have a system where one player can cast multiple votes across 2-3 constituencies.

Closed-list PR. Atlasia always operated on an open-list PR system, which gave proportional representation a bad rap. We could, however, run an election across the game involving lists. Players figure out the list order among them and then submit it to a registrar general. Based on the "national vote" for the lists, those at the top get elected and those on the bottom do not.

[TNF]

We could also always do a combination of both. Perhaps ten seats are allocated by FPTP with constituencies and ten are chosen by closed-list PR?

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

We could also always do a combination of both. Perhaps ten seats are allocated by FPTP with constituencies and ten are chosen by closed-list PR?

We really ought to start out with maybe ten seats at first until we reach Atlas numbers. Just thoughts on the matter.

[TNF]

Well for starters, we could all be members of Parliament, and we could serve as a kind of provisional parliament until we all agree on basic governing structures, constituencies, etc.

[Murica!]

Count me in.(unless I lose interest that is)

[retromike22]

Well for starters, we could all be members of Parliament, and we could serve as a kind of provisional parliament until we all agree on basic governing structures, constituencies, etc.

Yes.

[Simfan34]

x Simfan34

[PPT Spiral]

X Spiral

[JerryArkansas]

I would love to do this.

[Leinad]

X Leinad

I'm not quitting Atlasia, but I have more than enough spare time to do both, and it's not like I'll save Atlasia by abstaining from this seemingly promising activity.

I'd support some sort of combination of FPTP and PR. Just not pure FPTP.

[Potus]

xPotus2036

[afleitch]

I would like to assist.

[afleitch]

May I interject with some advice (ignore at will!)

Part of the reason why we tried to set this up, but were left wanting, was because we were looking for an alternative to Atlasia when it was still strong. That is no longer the case. We were also looking for an alternative to America. Looking at the platform for the Pioneers for example, we have ‘marriage and abortion’ which aren’t really politicised matters outside of the USA. You risk covering the same ground.

If you want to start things up ‘the British way’ you can’t really talk about ‘rights’ in a US constitutional sense if you don’t have a constitution to refer to. You simply have to start the game in a ‘status quo’ either the USA is it is now (in which marriage is now a settled issue), or perhaps the US as it was in any given year. That makes it historic and a little different.

The only way to operate a game like this is for the person moderating it to make ‘assumptions’. So for example, you don’t know what the medical system is. There’s no constitution, there’s no history of parliamentary precedent to fall back on. The moderator has to assume it’s say ‘single payer’ so you therefore have a jumping off point for discussion.

Or you build a world and then have the parliament start up. Which can be time consuming. The only reason this didn’t work in the past is that we have a tenth of the activity of Atlasia, while it was still functioning. That wouldn’t be the case now.

[Blair]

x Blair, I've always thought a parliament game if it worked would be much better

[Foucaulf]

May I interject with some advice (ignore at will!)

As acting GM I should try to answer these questions.

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This is an artifact of when we had conversations about mock parliament on IRC: usually evenings in the US. There's a tradeoff here: do we stick with an American political system so new players can jump in faster, or do we move to a different country? The focus may have been more to the former, since we really thought of this as an alternative to Atlasia.

I'm assuming we're starting with a historical US scenario, but parliamentary supremacy rules. I don't see why parliament can't just order a GM to write a new scenario if the need arises.

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Exactly what I thought. I'm taking requests for policy research over in the other thread!

We can delve into the intricacies of this, but getting used to parliamentary supremacy means getting used to there being no giant hurdle to establish rights or lack thereof. If we're successful certain rights will be set as precedent, and keeping track of said precedent will probably be the judges' main duty.