Steve wrote:As for the third, it would play a part in that, for newer players, it tells us what kind of player you'd be. Declaring you're going to have a centralized surveillance state where everyone is genuinely okay with police powers like nationwide CCTVs and mandatory DNA and fingerprint databases and that your military's personnel are perfectly competent and cool-headed and professional is, for instance, is not going to endear us...
Well, what if I
want to explore something of that nature?
The Technocracy of Umeria, re-imagined for a 2010-ish setting (we're allowed to invoke 2010-2015 level technology, right?) is... kind of inspired by the present state of China. Developing nation, with a government dominated by a quasi-academic meritocracy and a political structure that enables this.
The population has flirted with democracy, but it was kind of a one night stand that Did Not End Well. It exists on the local level but is functionally meaningless on the national level.
They don't have nationwide CCTV or DNA profiling, but only because they can't afford it; they probably DO have a national fingerprint database but a lot of the records are still on paper, not electronic. They'd be working on that.
At the same time, the government is basically good-natured and civil. Seniors are expected to take their duty of care to juniors dead seriously; if they fail to do so heads may literally roll. It is possible to get sent to a labor camp for being a bad boss, if you try hard enough. The secret police spend most of their time ferreting out incompetence and poor management rather than political dissent.
The military is moderate in size relative to the population, and mostly defensive in character.
It's all functioned so far. Somehow. BUT...
Being a modern republican democracy with opposing political influences, or an almost-anarchic corporatocracy with entire sections of its capital full of squalor and violence that is openly admitted to and is a clear con? That's showing you're making a realistic state, not just your ideal state where everything goes well.
It is entirely possible that the wheels will come off
during play. There is still a lot of relative poverty- literacy and electrification have gone well, telecommunications are spreading, but getting mass consumer goods to the populace is a serious weak spot as in the Soviet system. The only thing keeping it from being as bad as the Soviets had it is that the Umerians have started shamelessly pandering to the export market (as did China).
There are several readily identifiable failure modes for the Council of Technarchs, and in SDNW6 (just a name I made up) there is no magic box picking the leaders. It's worked for about... two long generations, or three middling-short ones. There is little guarantee it will work indefinitely.
Edit: To make it clear, if you want a country that's a surveillance state, that's not the issue. Declaring that every single one of your citizens has no problem with the government going Big Brother on them and that you have no domestic opposition to your policies? That your nation is entirely perfect and nothing ever goes wrong internally? That's an issue. Being a munchkin, in short. That's not what we want to see.
See, the main thing I want to preserve is that we have some freedom to imagine a society that does not exist in precise form on this Earth,
but still works. To some extent that requires us to rethink the social 'truths' that everyone in this world accepts and takes for granted. For example, it's an article of faith that central planning of economies does not work.
But to what extent is that true because of incidental factors, like the poster children for a state-planned economy
also trying to enforce military dominance and authority over a large block of territory, and thus maintaining a deliberately inflated military force? Perhaps someone who pays more attention to "butter" (and drill presses) and less to "guns" would enjoy more success. Perhaps figures more like Lenin, Khrushchev, and Xiaoping would do a better job and make it more functional than figures like Stalin, Brezhnev, and Mao- if the system were so configured that it tended to select for the former over the latter.
And again, we can answer with more truisms: "that shouldn't work because X."
But at some point, nation-creation becomes far less interesting if we lose the ability to say, "
but what if X isn't a law of the universe?"
Otherwise I might as well just drop in alt-France or something and call it a day, which is boring.
.
