As some of you may already know, one of my main interests in OGF has to do with the interaction between nations, international relations, collaboration as a whole. So, considering the rule of verisimilitude much discussed around our numerous forum posts, I'd like to propose a new question: is the international politics of OGF realistic?
Maybe most users are not concerned about that issue, but I am. So, I'd like to propose a few topics for discussion on issues that have always annoyed me on the global level lack of realism:
- Number of Nation-States
So far, half of OGF is open for mapping. On a quick look, I could count around 400 nation-states (areas separated by administrative borders level 2). Sure, most of those nation-states don't have an owner and even a lot of those that do, lack a present, participating owner. Nevertheless, my first question would be: Is that number realistic? A world that expects to copy the current configuration of our real life Earth would ever have 800 nation-states? My short answer would be "no". I understand some regions of Earth are overly divided into countries, like the Caribbean and Central Europe, but those are exceptions. Of course I also understand the need for OGF to have always open green states for potential users, but to which extent that would still be possible? Wouldn't that lead to a world with a thousand micro-countries? That leads to the second observation:
- Size and power structure
Every time we think about a competition like the Geolympiad, we see something like this: "Your country cannot host such a large event, it is too small". Well, from my perspective today, every active country in OGF is too small, with the exception of Pretany and maybe some other. Small countries like those wouldn't have resources to develop and expand their influence abroad. Three or four countries, again, exceptions, had large colonies in the past of OGF, but most of the other didn't. Today, in the real world, big players are physically large countries and countries that have had a large colonial territory, the USA, China, India, Russia, the UK, France, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc. I understand big countries are difficult to edit and some users may abandon them, but we could have experienced users mapping those. My country, Neo Delta, which is quite active and I see it as an important player in international affairs, is half the size of Portugal. Sure, small countries can be big players internationally, but those are rare exceptions. I have asked the admin team to make my country bigger, so that it could act as a regional power in Astrasia/Archanta, but never got a response.
For now those are the two aspects I'd like to focus. I'd like very much for the world we are building to follow similar verisimilitude rules we are expected when building countries, but that doesn't seem to be the case to me. My first suggestion would be to allow experienced owners to have larger countries and make more larger colaborative countries that, contrary to Commonia, ARE NOT open to free editing of new users. Other large countries could be open to new users, some could be responsible for different regions inside the same nation. Those countries would work as regional and global powers and make the world of OGF more realistic, in my point of view.
Thank you for your attention!
