Jennifer Government: NationStates is a multiplayer nation simulation browser game. It was created by Max Barry and was publicly released on 13 November 2002, based loosely on his novel Jennifer Government.The game has hosted over 3 million nations.The game is expanded by users using off-site forums to construct centres of learning, discussion and play.
Gameplay hinges on deciding government policies: the player is presented with automatically assigned “issues” and chooses a response from a list of options. Players can ignore issues by dismissing them, which has no effect on the nation. [4]
The player sets the frequency with which new issues arise (from five to fourteen issues per week). After the original thirty issues written by Barry were found to be too few for the game to develop satisfactorily, players with national populations of over 500 million have been allowed to propose new issues since 15 July 2003.
All issues have a peculiar characteristic, and no option is the “correct” one. Each usually has a positive and a negative aspect, although the latter is usually highlighted, and both are always exaggerated. Many issues are posed in terms of radical or extremist beliefs, and the accompanying opinions are rarely well-founded. This is for both humorous and didactic reasons: many opinions are extremely funny or ridiculous, and the player learns that there are no perfect ideas which will work in every case. As gameplay progresses, the user learns that each of the options provided for the proposed issues become more ridiculous and offer no stability to the nationstate. Although this is a simulation game of creating your own nation, the responses are often unrealistic and do not provide any middle-ground options to resolve the issues. Instead, the issues are used to drastically change your nation’s economic, political, or social beliefs. As a whole, the issues do not directly relate to real-life situations but rather a more Barry-like nationstate as presented in Jennifer Government.
There are occasional “Easter Egg” issues, such as one that dealt with piracy on the high seas, released to everyone on International Talk Like a Pirate Day.