Daniel Lepage on Wed, 2 Jun 2004 22:44:38 -0500 (CDT)


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Re: [spoon-discuss] Redundant rules 


On May 30, 2004, at 11.15 PM, Zarpint wrote:


1) Unterumwelts
As far as I can tell, "Unterumwelt" is a fancy name for a society that 
has to have a secretary. Each is a group of players, governed by a
local body of law that doesn't apply to anyone outside of the group.
The differences are that Unterumwelts cannot take game actions, and
must have Unteradmins presiding over them. Why can't an Unterumwelt be
defined by "Unterumwelt: a society that cannot take game actions, and
must have a secretary in charge of tracking its charter"?


You have misunderstood this rule.
The difference is that an Unterumwelt is not a group of players. It's a
miniature game that exists inside of B Nomic. The rule is carefully set up so that we can nest Unterumwelts and have interesting Labyrinth-like effects. An Unterumwelt is a Rulebook. It doesn't contain players anymore than the Ruleset contains players, and there is no "group of players" an Unterumwelt applies to. It has its own Gamestate, but the gamestate takes precedence over its Gamestate. Thus, the Players of any Unterumwelt are the same as the Players of B Nomic, and you can't leave an Unterumwelt without leaving 
B Nomic.
I'm having difficulty seeing how this follows from the rule. Here is what seems to be the relevant text of the rule, with my comments on what it seems to say:
======================================================================== ========
The Scope of a Rulebook is a collection of Rules. A Rulebook's Scope may be defined at its creation to be Unlimited (that is, containing every Rule) or Limited to specified Rules. If the Scope of a Rulebook is ever unspecified, it reverts to the last specified Scope, or to Unlimited Scope if its Scope was never specified.
Every rulebook is assigned a (seemingly arbitrary) set of rules called its Scope. 


 Nothing in a Rulebook has any effect on Rules outside its scope.
The Rules in a given book can never affect Rules outside of this arbitrary Scope.
For each Rulebook with Limited Scope, there exists a local Gamestate, referred to as the X Gamestate, where X is the name of the Rulebook.
If The Book of Foo is a rulebook with limited Scope, then it has a Foo Gamestate associated with it (Really, this is called the "The Book of Foo Gamestate", as the book is called "The Book of Foo", but I'll be calling it the Foo Gamestate for the sake of brevity).
Nothing in a Rulebook with Limited Scope, which may be referred to as an Unterumwelt, may change any part of the gamestate that is not also part of its local Gamestate. A local Gamestate is part of any local Gamestate whose scope contains every Rule in its Rulebook, as well as being part of the gamestate.
We call the Book of Foo an Unterumwelt, and only "parts of the gamestate" that are also in the Foo Gamestate can be changed by the Rules in the Book of Foo (henceforth called "Foo Rules").
All Rules in a Rulebook "Fnord" apply to and take precedence over any Rules in a Rulebook whose Scope is a proper subset of Fnord's Scope. 

A normal rule takes precedence over a Foo Rule, always.
When an Unterumwelt is created, its local Gamestate is set to the null set. After that occurs, its Rulebook is set to a set of rules specified by the player who created it. An Unterumwelt may be created by any Player specifying an Unteradmin and a set of rules. No Player may create more than one Unterumwelt per nweek.
The Foo Gamestate is initially null. The Book of Foo contains whatever rules the creator wants. Any player may do this.
======================================================================== ========
What this seems to say is: Any player may, at any time, create a new set of rules, provided that those rules A) don't try to supersede the normal Rules, B) don't try to mess with rules that aren't in an arbitrary subset of the rules called 'Scope', and C) don't try to affect anything that isn't contained within its local gamestate, which is the null set. So this amounts to: Any player can create rules, provided that those rules don't affect anything.
I think the problem with this is that "Gamestate" is never defined anywhere in the rules. We assume that it refers to the collective set of all things in the game, but I see no obvious way to translate this concept to Unterumwelts, and certainly no basis for assuming that the capitalized "Local Gamestate" is in any way related to the global Gamestate. As far as I can tell, the creation of an Unterumwelt causes it to gain the null set as its local gamestate; nothing indicates that this should ever change, and so we must conclude that the local gamestate of an unterumwelt is always the null set. 

--
Wonko

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