Currency survey

This article is somewhat unusual for NSWiki in the sense that it does not neatly fit in any NSWiki category and only sensibly links to a small number of other pages. However, is does have lasting value for statisticians, future survey takers and people who would like to laugh at the work of an armchair expert.

What follows is the entire life cycle of the survey Sober Thought conducted on national currencies as used in the game of NationStates.

Conception

The idea for this survey came about when I discovered that although there was an NSWiki entry for currency, it was just an automatic redirect to Wikipedia proper. I felt that the topic warranted more than that, especially since I went to the trouble of making a nice article on my own Denkmark of Sober Thought, so I wrote a proper article and make the redirect a see also link.

And it was while writing the “Currency” article it became clear no empirical field research had been done, like the fine statistics and colour 3D graphics illustrating the concept of UN Category. So I decided to jump in the fray myself and collect, categorise and analyze my own statistics on this matter.

Unfortunately, it is not quite as simple and easy to execute as the one for the "UN Category" article. There are only 27 possible values in the game-generated UN Category field. Sober Thought, for instance, usually registers Inoffensive Centrist Democracy or Democratic Socialists). Furthermore, while these categories appear to be subjective, they are in fact objective in the sense that the computer takes your responses to the daily issues and computes the effect on several key variables which also include economy and human rights.

In contrast, I estimate the Currency field contains millions of potentially meaningful values (ignoring capitalisation, spelling conventions and mistakes, symbols, abbreviations, etc.) and at least (128x127x126...x106x105x104).

Although I read a lot and know a lot, my formal education in most subjects, and the last mathematics class attended was 1981 when I was in grade 8. Nevertheless, I think the survey will be interesting and tolerably scientific to be useful. I invite statisticians read this to leave suggestions on how to improve any future surveys.

Imagining a representative sample

I decided that between two and five hundred pseudo-respondents were all I was willing to deal with. During the months I've played, the universe of nations has ranged between about 100,000 and 150,000, and regions 6,000 to 7,000. This makes for a sample rate of roughly 0.1-0.5%, but given that the response rate is effectively 100% since it is not an interview survey but a sample taken from publicly available documents, I'm sure it's big enough to suffice.

When designing my sample, I tried to account for some easily discernable and probably important variables. Based on personal and shared experience, I can confidently state that players in each of the regions or groups of regions listed below collectively behave differently than those in other groups or regions. Furthermore, these behaviour differences might reasonably be expected to carry over into the naming of national currencies. I will retain the content of this sub-section for demonstrative purposes and it is my de facto list of hypotheses.

Real life regions

Most if not all sensible persons would conclude one's real world country of residence or birth is likely to have a measurable and probably the strongest causal relationship with one's NationStates currency. Certainly, many currencies are widely known outside their (former) home countries (dollar, yen, pound, ruble) and might reasonably be adopted by foreigners and thus be over-represented in returns. However, it is a safe bet in any currency that few New Zealanders would choose "lek" as their money or Eritreans "bhat."

However, I know of no reliable (or for that matter, unreliable) census or survey of players' RL homes. Even if I were to find such a thing, the existence of puppet nations and their probable uneven distribution in the real world (for instance, because of language difficulties, the scarcity of computers or internet connect fees) probably makes this moot.

Unless I find something that's better, I'll go with my own guesstimate that the RL origins of NS nations (not players) are:

• 65% United States and Canada
• 10% Continental Europe
• 10% United Kingdom and Eire
• 10% Australia and New Zealand
• 4% Latin America (chiefly Mexico and Brazil)
• 1% elsewhere

The best proxy measure I can think of to capture this crucial variable is membership in NS regions based on RL locations. Halve the estimated percentage above of the entire universe, and that will be the approximate percentage of the total sample. See Regions with 50+ members below for details.

NationState region

Pacific residents ~25% Newly created nations are randomly assigned to one of the five birth regions: The Pacific, The North Pacific, The East Pacific, The South Pacific or The West Pacific. Such a high concentration of noobs and people who never bothered to change the region in which they were born would seem to skew the results towards unimaginative and perhaps even offensive names.

Rejected Realms residents ~5% The Rejected Realms is a unique region because no nation can be ejected from there since it is the destination for existing nations which have been ejected from other regions. Of course a nation may leave TRR immediately upon arrival, but some remain by default or preference, and some even arrive by a regular move rather than ejection. This tends to favour an anarchic atmosphere in both its positive and negative connotations, which I speculate will translate in a larger portion of unique or artistic currencies than elsewhere.

Lazarus residents ~5% Nations which have ceased to exist but have subsequently been raised from the dead naturally appear in Lazarus. They are inactive for long periods (which is why they CTE'd) but remain emotionally attached to their nations (which is why they didn't just create a new nation from scratch). I conjecture they will produce similar but less pronounced results than TRR.

Player created region residents ~65% cumulative About two thirds of NS nations reside by conscious choice in player created regions. This choice may come through self-referral (as it was in my case), recruiting telegram, adspam or by creating one's own region. Each of these four routes represents a potentially distinct group of players, but I can think of no easy way to sort them on this basis.

However, the population of a region is much easier to establish. Taking the total number of nations in the NS world, subtracting the roughly one third who live in game created regions, dividing by the total number of NS regions (or if you're really picky, subtracting 7 from the divisor first), one comes up with a mean of about 8-15 nations per region. I'm practically certain the mode is 1, and I'm guessing the median is lower than the mean. I think the following tripartite division is helpful:

• Regions with one nation ~5% People fly solo for diverse reasons, including sanctuary, puppet storage, raider trophy, pathological hostility, extreme introversion, unpopularity, recent creation, etc. Nevertheless, most of these seem skewed to unique currencies so I have chose to under-represent them.

• Regions with 2-49 nations ~5%. Probably underrepresented, but presumed to be well-covered elsewhere in the sample.

• Regions with 50+ nations ~55%. On one forum or another, I have seen semi-regularly compiled lists of regions ordered by number of resident nations, and they use 50 for the cutoff so I do too. Almost all of these will be same ones counted under #Real life regions, preferably coming from the most populous ones with NS names most closely reflecting the RL one, a proxy for the age and respectability of a region. Take the remaining ~5% from gaps in the list ordered by regional population.

Alphabetical order

Appearance of regions and nations in alphabetical order can significantly skew the sample. Ones with lead characters that file before "A" (such as zero, hyphen or space) is highly suggestive of a spurious, placeholding or otherwise extremely atypical region or nation, so I will treat them as non-responses and keep all of them from the sample.

Nations beginning with "N" are substantially more likely to skew the results towards a greater frequency of RL currency adoptions since they will include names beginning with "New," "Nouveau," "Neu," "Nuevo," "Nieuw," "Nova," etc. A country called "New Queensland" is much more likely to adopt the "Australian dollar" than one called "Pleasantville" or even "Nieuwe Nederlands."

Nations beginning with "J," "Q," "X," "Y" and "Z" (sorry Zambia!) are substantially more likely to skew the results towards a greater frequency of NS-only currency adoptions since they are more likely to begin with or consist entirely of unique, rare, bizarre or truly fictitious placenames. "Zyglor" is much more likely to adopt the "Glaxxyg" than "Beerland."

Besides these six, I can think of no cases where the leading letter could consistently and significantly skew the sample and impair its validity. Provided there are equal numbers of nations from the N and high-scoring Scrabble letters, the rest can be chosen in the approximate order of their actual incidence.

Imagining a taxonomy

Except when I was writing recruiting telegrams for the International Democratic Union, I paid no attention to any currencies besides my own. However, after sending about 100 customised if not entirely written from scratch telegrams per week for maybe 15 weeks in 10 months, I have probably as good a handle as any on how to categorise them. Here's how I imagine them to be sensibly divided, sub-divided and sub-sub-divided.

Real world or real world-inspired

I expect the dollar to be the hands down winner in this survey. What is more, there is certain to be enough dollars to subdivide into unspecified, RL specified (maybe with actual percentages for each of the US$, A$, C$ and NZ$), NS specified and unambiguous nickname (e.g., Buck or Greenback but not Clam or Skins). Possibly other currencies I expect to make a strong showing (pound/punt, mark, franc, euro, yen and ruble) will warrant similar sub-categories.

I will include here currencies and coins known to me to be real world historical ones. This includes currencies of extinct or aspirant countries and regions (Yugoslav dinar, Hispano-American dubloon, Biafran schilling CHECK THIS, N.E.I. guilder, etc.), obsolete currencies of still-existing countries or regions (Bolivian peso, South African krugerrand, Japanese koku, Austrian thaler, etc.), or units of any of the above. While my knowledge is pretty broad, I'm sure I'll misclassify a small number elsewhere. Mea culpa.

Real world fanciful

There are many colloquialisms or nicknames for real coins or currencies (fufi = 50 pfennige German coin, loonie = Canadian dollar coin, bob = 12 British d. or 5 n.p.). These would appear under their RL inspirations mark, dollar and pound (and as nicknames if such sub-categories existed).

However, the real world often provides a list of fanciful but widely understood and dictionary-defined words or names. Think of numbers like jillion, zillion or gazillion; places like Easy Street, Boonieville and Skid Row; forces ranks like Grofaz, Bedpan Commando and Sky Pilot; people like Joe Bloggs, John Barleycorn and Baby Jane Doe. They are not real, but they are real world.

While I am aware of many fewer equivalents in the field of currencies, I would consider ones like semoles, clams and big ones as part of this class. Of course, many supposedly fanciful money words are more archaic than truly fictional, such as piastre, two bits (two of a Spanish piece of eight) or shekels (although Israel revived the currency in modern times).

NationStates only

I expect this will be a somewhat amorphous category until I can actually work with the raw data.

Precious metals, gemstones and similar items like pearls will probably make up the bulk of this section. There might even be enough to warrant two or three sub-divisions, and for gold, maybe even sub-sub-divisions.

I expect to find some (formerly) living creatures, plants, edibles and other products of nature. Some off course will be accidents -- I'll count them anyway -- because of the proximity of national currency and national. Many others, however, will be intentional and perhaps inspired by unusual natural currencies used in the real world like cowrie shells, salt and giant round rocks.

Significant numbers of scatological, pharmaceutical, procreational, anatomical, risque and just plain disgusting currencies are also likely to show up. Clearly illegal names might be reported to mods, especially if they evoke or are part of a wider Nazi, Communist, totalitarian, authoritarian or similar theme in the NS country.

Small numbers of phrases rather than nouns and adjectives may also crop up. I remember reading something "little bits of shiny things" once, and at the time I thought that was a good one.

There might even be a few "none" -- either using the word, leaving it blank, using invisible characters. Should one interpret " " as "Space," "Six Spaces," "Sickspaces," "Blank," "Null" or something else entirely?

And frankly, I think a few will just defy classification because they use ambiguous symbols or characters lacking apparent literary meaning. How would I classify ")("? Is an "X," "Ex," "Brackets," "Parentheses," "Close parenthesis, open parenthesis," or just the product of crazed chimpanzee loosed on a keyboard?

Even ones that appear simple on the surface could prove troublesome. Does "#" represent "Number," "Pound (avoirdupois)," "Pound (sterling)" or "Hash(mark)" -- all of which are in common circulation? Or what about "Y": "Why," "YMCA," "YWCA, "YMHA," "Yen," to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a "Y" is just a "Y."

Truthfully, I look forward to these puzzlers. Wish me luck, because if I weren't raving mad before I surely am now.Cateogry:Gameplay