Disputed Territories of Europe - Game Information

@Lilili:

I agree, Kosovo should've been on the map. I was able to add it in a round about way:

I took away another dot and made it "Kosovo (no dot)".

The dot I took was where two dots are essentially on top of one another: one for Prevlaka, and one for Veliki Školj & Mali Školj. That's a tiny bit awkward, because the former is a Croatia / Montenegro dispute and the latter is Croatia / Bosnia and Herzegovina dispute. Still, they are so close they can't be resolved on the map. (Would've needed an inset for that). Sometimes it seems that the Balkans exist in order to ensure employment for cartographers...

As for Rough's Tower, it is certainly an oddball, but you gotta sometimes put in the wierd ones, regardless of how wacko they seem. It makes the games more fun (at least for the maker). I'd never heard it referred to as "Roughs Tower" before, only as "Sealand". I have also changed that dot to have both names.

As for not including it: well, that's the nature of disputed territories: they are disputed: either who owns it or whether it exists as a territory at all. And as noted, it is kind of oddball, so just what I would include (politics notwithstanding). Besides: it was on the map I copied.

With regard to both Kosovo and Sealand (and politics in general) I regard these and other such considerations as being beyond the scope of what I'm doing when making games. (But certainly, I don't regard debates on those points as meaningless in the world beyond PurposeGames: some of them are quite important.)

Thanks for the comment.

It's kind of silly to include roughs tower, a self proclaimed state of one rich guy. I mean I could see the emphasis given to it by wikipedia, since it is owned by a follower of the right wing fanatic Ayn Rand. (One of Rand's main fantasies was about a separatist utopia for the rich and greedy.)
More suprising though is the absence of Kosovo, the ethnic Albanian separatist state, carved out through imperialist bombing and invasion of Serbia-Montenegro in 1999.
It's an interesting topic though some disputed territories are more interesting than others, some of these are really tiny and do not seem very historically significant, but some are relatively major and have had wars over them (all the blue dots on your map minus "sealand").

There is a much earlier game on the same general topic (but global in extent):

http://www.purposegames.com/game/765/info

Some time ago, mjkelly42 pointed out a missing dispute in that game. Of course, it was one of many: I could not have put them all in: the map would be too crowded (and it would have enough dots to freeze the game sometimes).

I semi-promised that I would revisit the topic on a continent-by continent basis. This is part of that.

A couple other notes:

A little bit of this map covers what most would say istechnically Asia, but it is only the Near-Europe areas: areas with strong cultural / historic ties to Europe.

The difference between pink and gray countries: the gray countries are not involved in any of the disputes shown.

More on the topic (and the map) here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disputed_territories

Map alone here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Territorial_disputes_Europe.svg

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