Daniel Lepage on 22 Jun 2003 05:07:01 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] The time has come, the Walrus said...


1. Are we sticking with the game?

I've been a little burned out on actually coming up with stuff and arguing it out (Wonko knew better...he wouldn't argue with Mr. in a Spacesuit; he'd let me do that and burn myself out on it, then just undo everything that was done), so I'm bordering on drone status. Is everyone else up for continuing?

I am. This is the first online nomic game I've ever played, and I'd hate to see it die so young.

2. What sort of administration processing time delay is acceptable?

Dave is worried that his life won't allow him to continue in the administrative capacity at all...that it's not a question of how long it'd take to complete processing a turn as much as that his real-life demands/options would impede the game to the point of non-functionality. If someone other than Dave were to attempt to do the job, what sort of wait-time would be considered acceptable and non-excessive? My view on admin wait-time has been, "Take however long it takes, as long as we can rest assured it'll eventually get done." On the other hand, we had that one miscreant who was willing to drag our name through the mud because of wait-time. How long is too long?

Who dragged our name through the mud because of wait-time? I mean, dude, we're one of the fastest moving nomics out there. Most nomics only get a few proposals every week... we get periodic entire-ruleset rewrites. Given how much happens, I think we've got an incredibly small lag.

But I wouldn't mind slowing down a bit... give me some time to finish other projects and whatnot.

3. How necessary is it to separate administrative duties from playerness?

We've already got ministers for a bunch of things. What's left that absolutely requires a central administrator, and what about that which is left requires or begs a non-player admin? I still think automation would go a long way, but I'll acknowledge that won't solve everything.

The Admin is only really necessary for the keeping of secret information. Things like private votes, Bonus box locations, etc. can't be trusted to any normal player because they'd give so much of an advantage to em.

This about cover it?

Well, the first question that comes to my mind is, what exactly is the most time consuming part of being Admin? I.e., what could be cut to make the job easier to handle?

I have a few suggestions:
1) Proposal Scripting
A simple scripting language is devised to essentially automate the implementation of rule-changes in proposals. Nothing fancy, just forces people to use a format like,
{{
__<proposal name>__

CREATE RULE
{{
__<rule name>__

<rule text>
}};

REPEAL RULE {{ <rule number> }};

AMEND RULE {{ <rule number>}} REPLACE {{ <<text>> }} {{ <new text> }};

AMEND RULE {{ <rule number>}} REPLACE ALL {{ <new text> }};
}}
Then, a simple perl/python/even c++ script can handle all the rule changes in proposals.

2) Personal Record-Keeping
Every player is given a small account on Nomic.net. Every player gains access to the props database, but only privileges to create/alter proposals with them as the proponent. Thus, the duty of updating 10 props in an nweek falls to the player who busted two nweeks worth of bandwidth to make them. Policing could be done by the Admin, or by the vigilante system described next.

3) Vigilanteism
A lot of ministries could be operated not by a set person, who tends to disappear and go on vacation, but instead by whoever gets there first. For example, updating the weather could be optional - it only happens if somebody decides, within the first day or two of an nweek, to update the weather. Whoever decides to do it rolls the dice for it and posts the results, gaining some bonus from it, say, 10 points plus the option to set any one weather attribute to any legal value of their choosing. Also, things like making sure that everyone's personal records are accurate could be policed by the other players - a player caught misrepresenting eir props would have to pay points to whoever caught em, and perhaps would lose that prop, and the bandwidth associated with it.

4) Vote scripting
Similar to proposal scripting, vote scripting involves the creation of a special voting syntax to allow a counter program to have the text of messages pasted in. Things like bonus votes would be easy to add:
P1634 YES + PROXY_YES + UIN_HAND_YES
or maybe just: P1634 YES x 3

5) Communal Recordkeeping
Using something like a Wiki site, records like the Grid page could be maintained by everyone - if you decide to run across the grid grabbing objects and blowing things up, it's up to you to update the page. Since all changes to wiki sites can be logged, and usually are for sites like nomicwiki, it would be easy to see what people had done that they shouldn't have, and punish 'em for it.

6) Email-based Records
Agora basically runs the entire game on email. They have three lists - business, discussion, and official. The first two function like ours. The third is for posting game records. Periodically, the various Officers post whatever records they're responsible for tracking, including things like all active proposals and the entire ruleset. We could do that for a lot of things - it's easy to have ministers do things like Weather updates when all they need to do is post a message to the OFF forum. In fact, I think the official Jedi Roster page is far out of date now; I'm basically using the forum now already.


That's about all I've got right now... general automation is always good, too... systems for shutting off sections that can't be maintained... etc...

Anyone else got any game-resuscitation ideas?

--
Wonko

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