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

[Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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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