Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Orcish Alcohol Tolerance

[Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 02:11  AM, Christopher Bartlett wrote:

> It comes down to competing visions of what the world should be.  I 
> would like to see entropy have vicious effects and am slowly putting 
> together a proposal to bring that about.  I have purposely failed to 
> participate in the grid game because I am waiting for it to matter, so 
> that it is worth the extra time it takes me to track everything.  I'm 
> all in favor of complexity in the grid if it serves an over-arching 
> purpose, but complexity for its own sake is anathema to me.

If you disapprove of complexity for complexity's sake, then why do you 
play the game at all? Why play any game? The fundamental basis of any 
game is the idea that vying with others in a complicated arena is fun 
and entertaining.

You say you're in favor of the grid having some 'over-arching purpose'; 
but the game as a whole has no 'over-arching purpose' save to be played 
itself, therefore it is impossible for any subgame of the game to have 
any purpose beyond the playing of the game.

I think of the grid as a subgame; we play the game of the grid as a 
game in and of itself, regardless of its effects on the outer game of 
proposals and voting; the outer game largely ignores the inner game, 
except inasmuch as the inner game was written by the outer game.

We could attempt to tie the two together more strongly; discussions 
were made once, long, long ago, about the possibility of awarding 
people extra voting power based on Grid status, or of granting extra 
bandwidth/bandwidth penalties based on gathering Chits on the Grid, but 
nobody seemed to like these ideas. So the Grid grew separately, and is 
distinct from the rest of the game.

If you want the grid to really matter, I would suggest moving all 
Victory conditions to Grid-based things. If, for example, the only way 
to win was to build a fortress and from it invade the rest of the Grid 
and defeat everyone else, then the Grid would be the Primary game, and 
the Nomic would be but a means of obtaining Grid Power.

So I put forth the following suggestion:
Glotmorf once spoke of the idea of different Rules being like 
companies, spread throughout a city. Players would have extra control 
over certain rules if they owned the buildings associated with them; if 
you could break into an enemy company's offices, you could capture 
their rules and take them to your own buildings.

This would require a lot of crazy rewriting of the Grid, and I think we 
dismissed the idea as being a great premise for a new game of nomic, 
but not something that would fit into this one (although it was the 
inspiration for the carryable insta-rules idea).

But what about a modified version of it?

What if rules were Grid objects?

They wouldn't *all* have to be on the Grid, but perhaps there could be 
a separate class of rules (the Levels system would be good for this), 
where these rules, call them 'Physical' rules, or maybe 'Supermutable' 
rules, occupied various Grid Squares. Players could claim them and drag 
them together, building fortresses to protect them, and armies to 
obtain them.

Ministers could gain additional powers when they neared their rules; 
Rules defining unpleasant effects - Death, Curses, etc. could 
occasionally leak and curse/kill nearby players... but could be 
channeled at other players to inflict things upon them.

Then a fight to repeal Rule 10 would not be merely an argument and some 
votes; it could be an actual fight, as the Voice's troops battle the 
armies of the pro-10ers at the gates of the 10th Fortress...

Even better... what if rules were creatures? They'd wander around, 
eating, getting old, dying; you could herd them in pens or hunt them in 
the wild... captured rules could be sold on the black market... wait a 
sec... idea coming...

What if we could capture rules and sell them to *other games*?!?

Maybe that would just be *too* weird.

--
Wonko

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