A couple years ago, I was pretty big into a web game that some  may have heard of called eRepublik. It’s an interesting simulation of economy and politics which allows anyone to try their hand at running a company or running for political office, all the way up to country president.

Finding a job, going to work, but still fun!

You start the game with practically nothing but a few bucks in your pocket. First stop has to be the job market where you look through the job offers available for your skill level. All jobs you see are for companies that are run by other players. When you find a job, you’ll want to click the “work” button to do your day’s work for your employer, and then with the money you’ve earned go buy some food on the marketplace. You always want to keep your wellness (or health) as close to 100 as possible. Working at less than 100 wellness comes with penalties to your productivity, and employers wont put up with low wellness for long. The markets  for everything you can buy or sell, and all job offers are one of the more pure examples of capitalism. All prices are determined by simple market forces of supply and demand.

The two things you want to be sure to do each day are work at whatever your job is, and train up your strength for fights. And there are always fights. Whatever alliances and cultures exist for countries in the real world are nonexistant, and country boundaries will probably not be exactly what you might expect.

When I last played the game, the United States had narrowly avoided annihilation through a peace treaty. At one point we were down to only Florida remaining unconquered. After we were put into recovery mode, real life got swirled around for me and I had to give it up. Just this past week I decided to take a look at how things were going, as the game was updated with “v2″ a couple months ago. Thankfully I was able to remember all my login information and so recovered all the money and assets I had before. From the few days perspective I’ve had since being back, things are quite different, but not recognizably so. I’ve learned it’s a bad time to start my weapons company back up, so I’m sitting on that for the time being and working in market speculation for a bit instead. I also have gotten my data aggregator scripts working on the API again so that I can watch trends and start reporting on my in-game economic newspaper again.

If you happen to think the game  looks interesting, I’d really appreciate you signing up with my referrer link for the game. It just gets me a small production bonus, but I’d do the same for you if I could!