Daniel Lepage on 21 Nov 2003 04:44:33 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Stone Swapping 


On Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 11:03 PM, Baron von Skippy wrote:


The big problem with backstabbing is that people will remember.
Theoretically, I could backstab all my allies, stated or undeclared,
whenever I wanted, but then I'd have very little chance of ever
entering into an alliance with anyone again, as nobody would trust me
not to stab them too.
-Well, I don't trust anyone in this game (the old guard, at least) farther than I can throw them, but that's just me. That, and I believe strongly in "Do unto others."-
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? Or just "Do unto others as they do to you"? 


What we could perhaps make use of is some sort of alias mailing
system... each player could be assigned an alias from a given set, such as {"Red","Green","Blue","Mauve", etc.}; a script could then be devised 
that, upon receiving an email from me with subject PGo:Blue:Wanna
Backstab Turquoise?, would look me up in its table to discover that I'm 
Green, lookup whoever happens to be Blue, say, Sagitta, and Sagitta
would get a message from the script with the subject PGo:Green:Wanna
Backstab Turquoise?; e'd know it came from Green and talked about
Turquoise, and the PGo map would show stones owned by Green, Blue, and
Turquoise, but e and I would never know which player was behind each
color.

A few modifications would allow this to hold multiple sets of aliases
at once, so one subgame might be using {Red, Green, Blue, etc.} while
another used {France, Italy, New Zealand, etc.} and another had
{Falcon, Eagle, Hawk, Titmouse, etc.}.
And then some subgames could allow things like grey and black press (to steal some Diplomacy terms), where messages can be sent anonymously, or 
even with faked senders or fake recipient lists.
-Oh, now this could be /very/ interesting... note, though, that someone would have to know who sent all the messages, so if someone grey-press spammed everyone, their ass could be beaten... privately, so as not to reveal their identity.-
It wouldn't be hard to track how many messages have come from each player... in fact, you could even restrict how many messages one could send in a given period, or something like that.
(This is an idea that originated a while ago during a conversation with 
another player about how a game like Diplomacy could be made into a
subgame; I also got some ideas from reading about various online
Diplomacy hosting tools, like the DPjudge at www.diplom.org, which has
all these features built in to the games themselves)
-Now that is a sweet game. I like how you can't do anything without some alliances. That makes for a lot of fun in this game.-
In fact, if we wanted to, we could just start a private game on the DPJudge; it doesn't cost anything. All we'd need to do is agree on how the events of the game would influence our game. 


There are two big problems that I can see with this sort of anonymity:
1) New players - if a new player joins B Nomic, and then joins PGo, and 
at the same time off-yellow pieces appear for the first time, it won't
be too hard to guess who's off-yellow
-No new players until the game ends, then. And no quitting, either - if you stop doing anything, you'll just get beaten out of the game, I suppose, and that's like quitting sort of.-
The other possibility I can see is a game where who's who changes periodically, so after a personality shuffle, the green player might now be blue, blue might be lavender, etc.; this obviously wouldn't work in a game like PGo, but in a game where the full state of the game isn't public, it could get interesting... 


2) Victory - if Chartreuse wins the subgame and suddenly bd is 200
points richer, it is again not too difficult to deduce the identity of
Chartreuse.
-Secondary accounts for points. Dave knows which is which. When your player account and your secondary account added together are > 1000, you win.-
And if twelve subgames all decide to make use of this system? I'd prefer to keep Dave's involvement minimal in terms of brute force tracking and updating. 


OTOH, grudges and inherent mistrust can make things more interesting,
so perhaps this sort of system isn't needed just for backstabbing; but
I'd still love to see a subgame with Black Press.
-It can be done... it might not be the easiest thing ever, but it can be done.-
I'll bet a modified version of the system could be built for specific subgames, too, to restrict communication; for example, if Glotmorf ever finishes making Tunnelers automated, players might only be allowed to communicate with players they can see, or to broadcast anonymously through the surrounding tunnels. 

--
Wonko

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