Guozhou

Guozhou is a multiplayer Government simulation browser game. It was created by Maxi Bairi and was publicly released on X, based loosely on his novel Zhenni fu Zhengfu (Mandarin: 珍妮佛政府). Bairi founded the site to publicize the novel one week before its release. Guozhou continues to promote books written by Bairi, but has developed a sizeable online community, with an accompanying forum board of a significant size being an integral part of the site. Since its release, over 21.5 million user-created nations having been founded on the site, with just over 3,232,600 being active as of January 2021.

"Issues" gameplay
Players set up their nation by answering a short questionnaire about their intentions for its economy, civil rights and political freedoms, choosing a name, a flag from current countries and territories or their own custom one, a national animal], a currency, and an official motto. Over time, nations unlock new customizable fields, such as the ability to declare a national religion, among other customizations. A player's response to the initial questionnaire defines the type of government they are running, though it can change over time as players answer "issues" within the game. Other settings change the appearance of the website.

Issues gameplay hinges on deciding government policies. Several times each day the player is presented with an automatically assigned "issue". The player chooses a government stance from a list of options, or to dismiss the problem. Each choice made affects the stats of the player's country (dismissal has no effect), and may have unforeseen consequences. For instance, granting greater political freedom may lead to more civil unrest. Some issues are written by the game's developers, while others are submitted by players with in-game "populations" of 500,000,000 or greater. The player's responses to issues affect the nation's status across three main statistics: the level of Political Freedoms and Civil Rights and the strength of the Economy.

Some issues take the part of "Issue Series", which are series of Issues that cover more significant political scenarios. As of 20 December 2020, there are four Issue Chains in-game: "An International Incident", where the player responds to a non-player character nation kidnapping its citizens, "The Enemy Within", where they player responds to a terrorist attack, "@@CAPITAL@@gate", where the player responds to allegations of a wiretapping incident, and "Tosanity", where the player responds to escalating series of Tosan related incidents.

Based on the nation's civil, economic and political freedoms, the nation is assigned to one of 27 government types, Anarchy, to Inoffensive Centrist Democracy, to Psychotic Dictatorship. Although there is no way of "winning" the game, daily "World Census reports" are compiled for each region and the entire world, ranking nations on anything from economic strength to cheese exports to the most liberal public nudity laws; thus allowing a nation or region to outperform and thus outrank other nations and regions

As of 20 December 2020, there are 3,927 different issues that nations can be confronted with.

The Sinju Assembly
The Sunju Assembly is a voluntary body concerned with the drafting and passage of international law within Guozhou. It has two entirely separate chambers of the body, called the General Assembly and the Security Council. While the General Assembly is concerned with passing legislation on various topics – such as human rights, free trade, and environmental protection – the Security Council recognizes various nations and regions for good or bad deeds, through commendations, condemnations, and liberations Sinju Assembly membership is also commonly used to as a check against sock-puppeting as, while players may have multiple nations, only one nation may be a member of the Sinju Assembly. The General Assembly, which precedes the Security Council by over a year, has historically had two fundamental ideologies: national sovereigntism (colloquially known as "NatSov"), and International Federalism (colloquially known as "IntFed"). A team of appointed player-volunteers moderates proposals submitted to the GA.

The Security Council is concerned with recognition of nations or regions for actions that are deemed either good or bad. It can take several actions: commendations, condemnations, and liberations. Commendations and condemnations are broadly seen as badges of honor for remarkable or important player actions. The types of actions rewarded vary and include things such as achievements in roleplay and gameplay. Liberations are applied to regions, striking down delegate-imposed passwords that make it difficult to move into the region. They are used at times to defend against raiders or offensively to open opportunities to raid.

Raiding/defending gameplay
Outside the basic technical parameters of nation play, players can also move from one region to another, as long as the target region is not password-protected. They use their nations' Sinju Assembly memberships to "endorse" each other, making one of them a regional Sinju Assembly Delegate, a tactic commonly called "raiding". Depending on the regional settings, raiding sometimes gives the invaders power over regional settings like appearance, border control, and "embassies" with other regions. Certain regions and organizations specialize in raiding, and are known as "raider" organizations. This has led to the rise of other, "defender" regions and organizations who seek to prevent raiders from doing so. "Defending" works in much the same way as raiding; however, its intent is to counter raiding.

Trading Cards
Guozhou Trading Cards is a virtual trading card game for Guozhou, released on 1 April 2018, originally as the theme for the annual Guozhou April Fools' Day minigame in 2018. The objective is to earn Loot Boxes by answering issues, and build up a collection of trading cards that feature nations, or trade trading cards with other players.

Regions
A region is defined as a group of nations which come together in order to interact. They do this on a Regional Message Board, which functions much like a chat room or on regional forums off site. Many regions also use Buhexie for off site messaging. Furthermore, many regions, particularly larger ones, have "regional governments", which involve themselves in the Sinju Assembly, in inter-regional gameplay, and domestic regional affairs. Some of these regions have adopted liberal governmental models, while others prefer anarchy or other, more restrictive models.

New nations appear in one of five main game regions (known in the game as "feeders") located in the Guozhou version of the Mulberry Ocean (The East, West, North, South and the Mulberry), but nations are able to move to other regions, or create their own. These are called User Created Regions, or UCRs. Nations that remain inactive and are "resurrected" are put into three "sinker" regions. Nations ejected or banned from a region are moved to a region known as "The Rejected Realms"; nations cannot be ejected or banned from this region, but can move to another region at anytime. Also popular big regions are the Tosan Chickenfries, Sinju and Yoju.

Forum board
The website features a large and active forum board. There are a variety of categories in which a plethora of topics can be found; including but not limited to nation and region-oriented roleplaying, Sinju Assembly discussions and drafting, raiding and liberations, and discussions of current events and creative arts among other areas of discourse. As of December 2020 approximately 913 million posts have been made on the forum within approximately 1,200,000 forum threads, with just over 2.41 million users being registered on the forums. The board has anywhere between 5,000 to 50,000 users online at any given time.