My formal education is a degree in government from Cornell. After university, I discovered, to my profound disappointment, that my dream of someday opening a political philosophy store wasn’t going to happen. (”May Day sale! Communism, 70% off!”) Apparently there’s not much retail market for that sort of thing. As a result, I had to settle for the second (ok, maybe the third or fourth) best thing: Implementing some sort of political system into a game.

My original inspiration for Achaea (Iron Realms’ first game) came from a text MUD that opened in 1989 called Avalon. That’s where Daniel James and I became friends, in fact, as he was one of the founders of said game. Achaea’s original political system structures were taken pretty liberally from Avalon, though they’ve evolved over the years (and frankly, Avalon hasn’t changed much since Dan left over a decade ago). I gave up the lead design position on Achaea almost a year ago to the date, and what I’m including below is a couple, brief pages on some significant changes Achaea’s political systems, written by its current lead designer and producer, Minae Lee. I had started designing these changes before I passed the reins over last summer, but she and the other Achaea producer, Jay Sax, have taken them and run.

Minae writes:

Herein, I’ll attempt to summarize Achaea’s player-run political systems: their draw to players and their contexts within the game, the mechanics, and the recent updates to the systems that we have made. As in the real world, politics generally do not affect the average player on an immediate, day-to-day basis. For the higher echelon of players, on the other hand, it’s one of the most captivating arenas of play.

And no wonder. Forging and breaking treaties, pacts, and alliances; declaring war; drafting and enforcing virtual laws and policies; casting out traitors; running in popular elections; creating and maintaining a spy network; journeying to an enemy organization’s territory on negotiated diplomatic immunity only to be backstabbed and held hostage… It’s very immersive, and it drives quite a bit of the roleplaying in Achaea.

In Achaea, there are three main types of bodies of political power: six major city-states, 25 organizations called Houses (formerly called guilds), and a fluctuating number of active religious Orders, each of whom worship a different admin-roleplayed God and attempt to carry out His or Her aims. We’re just going to talk about city-states and Houses here, however, as religious Orders are fundamentally very different from the other two, and beyond the purview of this article.

City-states and Houses are player-run. This means players create and enforce their own laws and policies within them; players have control over who leads them; players set and follow each organization’s ideals and goals; players allow or forbid other players from joining; et cetera. The city-states and Houses are also officially supported by the administration, meaning that they can’t be shut down by one or even a group of players. They persist and are integrated within the ongoing development of the world fiction. Aside from the city-states and Houses, there are religious Orders dedicated to specific admin-roleplayed Gods that often exert cross-House and cross-city influence, but we’ll leave those aside for now.

Each of the six city-states is governed by a ruling council, which in turn elects a single member of the council to speak for them in certain matters, such as the appointment of other players to nine pre-set Ministerial positions. These include the Minister of War, the Ambassador, the Ministry of Security, the Minister of Cultural Affairs, and more. The Ministers each select a number of aides to assist them in duties which might include anything from planning cultural events to organizing city defense against foreign raiders to collecting the taxes on player-owned city shops. The ruling council itself creates and upholds laws and policies, represents the city in foreign affairs, and advises and leads the city at all times. Most of the cities have formal codes by which they are governed.

Until recently, each city-state ruling council was made up of five members, and each of these members were directly elected by the citizens. Recent changes have resulted in ruling councils of seven members each, with 4 of the council seats being appointed, rather than elected, by Houses that reside within the city. The three seats that remain are still open-election seats. (There is one exception: a smaller city-state which has 1 less appointed seat.) Which Houses have control over the council seats depends upon a systematic tracking of something called “House influence” within the city, which depends mainly upon House member activity within that city. Thus, the largest and most active Houses are likely to control more council seat appointments.

Our decision to move to this system was dually motivated. First, we wanted to give Houses more importance and control within cities. Second, this allowed for a number of intriguing political possibilities, including inter-House alliances and power struggles . Having more than one way to gain a seat on a council simply made politics more interesting.

Even more recently, the governments of the Houses of Achaea have undergone a major overhaul. Briefly, in the previous House government system, House members could elect a single leader, who could then be contested at any time for his or her position. That single leader could set up different ‘positions’, similar to Ministries for cities, and appoint other House members to them. Like a ruling council for a city, the House leader is responsible for creating and upholding House laws and policies, formally representing the House to outsiders, and advising and leading the House generally.

While this worked well overall, there were some problems with having a uniform government structure for all Houses. Since Achaea’s inception in 1996, different cultures and traditions have arisen within each House: individual members may come and go, but the roleplayed ideals, leadership styles, and overarching goals of each rarely shift dramatically, and differ from House to House, city to city. As a result, a challenge-on-demand officeholder system had started to seem like a stretch for some of the game cultures.

As an example, we have several highly militaristic Houses in which players have long enjoyed roleplaying dictatorship or divine-right-rule style governments. In these Houses, the concept of a popular-vote election is antithesis to their roleplay. They’ve worked around it and have generally been good sports about it, but we felt we needed to do something more to help them.

When you give players a system, and you find that they are inventing elaborate ways to work around your system to get what they want, and what they want isn’t unreasonable and adds to their enjoyment of your game, it’s probably time to rework your system. We wanted to give players more ways to customize their Houses to the leadership and government styles they felt worked best for them.

Recently, in support of this, we unveiled four ‘root’ forms of potential government styles for Houses: elected autocracy, triumvirate, dictatorship, and oligarchy. These are variations on two basic choices: leadership by election or by appointed successorship, and leadership by one or by several. Elected autocracy is the same system that we’ve had all along: an elected single-leader government. In a triumvirate, the leaders are also elected, but rather than a single leader, a council of three Triumvirs rule. In a dictatorship, the leader rules for a fixed term, then leadership passes to a successor that he or she designates. An oligarchy is similar, but with a three-member council as in the triumvirate.

Additionally, players may choose in elected government forms for fixed or indefinite terms (indefinite meaning until the leadership is contested and lost; appointed successorships must serve fixed terms only), and they may choose to disqualify any leader from running in an election consecutive to a served term. In any government form with a fixed-length term, the House initially chooses the length of the term.

As of this writing, nine of the 25 Houses have chosen to change to a drastically different root style of government - four to triumvirate, and five to dictatorship.

The tremendous amount of player control over these political organizations in Achaea lends to a sense of ownership that has proven crucial in establishing personal investment in what is a niche game. Although those directly involved in the political life in-game are the more experienced players, the energy and sense of possibility that the political systems generate trickle down to the younger players, giving them a goal for the future that extends beyond just leveling.