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

["David E. Smith" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Joel Uckelman wrote:

> b. Require that in order to vote, propose, etc., a player must have held
> office during some period in the past. Idealy, if there are n players in
> the game, every player would do 1/nth of the work to keep the game going.

That just spreads the burnout around a bit. Orc was running the Grid,
which is probably the most time-consuming thing these days (made so by all
of Orc's bizarre "hey, let's make Nomic look like Warcraft" props), but
then Orc disappeared. As much as anything, the role of Administrator in
this Nomic seems to be "the guy who does stuff that has to be done when
nobody else is around to do it".

I'm dreading the moment when someone decides to actually go back onto the
Grid and starts actually DOING stuff again...

A lot of things work better, at least for me, when I can process them in
"batches". Proposals are great for that; someone can propose something,
and while it's not yet on the Web site, people can still debate the
relative merits of the proposal. (The current form of the Grid, which
requires players' movements to be processed every nday, definitely does
not fall into this category.)

To dredge up an idea that I vaguely remember floating around a LONG time
ago: maybe Grid movements should be simplified down to 'checkpoints'.
Three per nweek, give or take. Everyone gets one move (by which I mean
moving to one single adjacent Grid square, modified ever so slightly for
things like Speeders which give you two moves), and that's pretty much it.
If you don't make a move, you simply lose that move, but you'll get
another one in a couple ndays.

(This has the convenient side effect of keeping players somewhat active.
You can't just phone in your moves for a couple nweeks in advance; you
have to be paying at least a little bit of attention.)

Have a Grid turn occur at the end of ndays 3, 7, and 10 of every nweek.
Anyone who submits a move has it take effect at the end of the Grid turn.
In the event of a conflict, whoever submitted their move first takes
priority. (i.e. if BvS and Wonko are both adjacent to a Bonus Box, whoever
first declares they're moving to that square can claim it) Also, get rid
of that "two players can't occupy the same square" nonsense. Cosmic
Godlike Body Odor, my ass.

The end-of-nweek stuff is alright too, relatively speaking. I can sit down
and say "I'll be working on Nomic stuff for an hour" and get most of it
done. (Or at least it used to be this way. There's a LOT of stuff that
should be done on a per-nweek basis, so much so that I'm not even sure
I've got all of it covered.)


> c. Prohibit anyone from holding the same office for consecutive terms.

I'm not sure about the merits of this idea. If someone is actually doing
their job and doing it well, why? (Hi, BvS, Gnome Minister for a long
time!)


The other notion, that of having a dedicated B Nomic machine, is alright,
but it requires that someone take the time to set everything up. Hell, if
I had a couple days with nothing better to do, I could hack out quick Web
interfaces for just about every major game action. (I work at a small ISP
and have plenty of IP addresses to play with, and could easily scrounge
up enough hardware to have an extra server. The hard part is writing all
the necessary game-specific software to go with it, though.)

...dave
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