[s-d] Toward a Platonic reconstruction of B Nomic's gamestate

[Craig Daniel <teucer@xxxxxxxxx>]

We have available to us a complete archive of past messages to the public forum.

Current tradition among B Nomic people (who cannot now be regarded as
B Nomic players, or possibly even former players) is that this is a
very Platonist game. This flies in the face of early B Nomic culture,
but an understanding of our history that we would now recognize as
"correct" in a demonstrable sense depends on the assumption that it
is. This means that there is a clock bug which caused gameplay to stop
after the first Emergency began, a fact not recognized at that time.

There is, however, a woobleverse interpretation in which, at certain
times in B Nomic history, Refresh Proposals could have effects on the
gamestate via an ISIDTID mechanism. Again, this was not historically
recognized as correct, because B Nomic began life as a game played in
a pragmatic fashion, but to modern B Nomic platonists this simply
means the pragmatic interpretation led people to attempt interesting
things in a sort of fantasy alternate B, some of which, by virtue of
being on the Public Forum, also had an effect on the underlying ideal
B. (When Platonic Forms and self-amendment mate, their offspring
involves the ability of us in the observed world being able to mess
with the shadows on the cave wall so hard we actually change the
forms. We're through the looking glass here, people.)

Unfortunately the first ruleset I have easy access to is that of about
nweek 20, which is when the public display of the ruleset first
started to be on a static web page. That is viewable at
http://web.archive.org/web/20020811090059/http://www.nomic.net/~g6/static/rules.html
thanks to the Wayback Machine. However, it is highly probable that
nweek 20 never happened, and while these rules are undeniably part of
the pragmatist version of B Nomic history (and, indeed, I played
pragmatist pseudo-B for a while during what was later known as its
First Era and thus may or may not have been a player of the
Platonist's underlying game before anyone else who is currently paying
attention; these rules are quite similar to the first ones I believed
myself to be playing under), they are definitely not part of the
underlying real B recognized by modern Platonic scholars of the game.

I'm prepared to attempt a full reconstruction of B Nomic's gamestate,
in both the standard reckoning where gameplay stopped early and the
woobleverse reckoning where refresh proposals have been potentially
effective all along. This will take days. Possibly many days. I will,
however, need somebody who knows where to find an archive of the
non-static B Nomic ruleset prior to nweek 20 to point me to the
initial rules. Wooble, where'd you dig up your current probable
ruleset from?

This effort will yield four sets of possible B Nomic gamestate: a
purely-Platonic non-woobleverse version which stopped early, a
Platonic woobleverse version which stopped at the same time but has
had other changes made to the ruleset despite the clock bug, and a
semi-Platonic version in which Platonist versions of events are valid
only for the period of time when B Nomic has traditionally accepted
Platonic theories of Nomic gameplay. In this last, we all know what
happened - B Nomic made it into its Fifth Era, then proved that even
after the rise of Platonism capable of recognizing past gameplay as
fictional, a clock bug had shut the game down. The semi-Platonist B
Nomic is dead; details depend on precisely when you draw the cutoff
between Pragmatist and Platonist eras. Finally, a fully-Pragmatist
interpretation will be considered; in this, the general recognition of
B's death caused it to be so, and B is once again dead - just slightly
more recently (and more dateably) than in any Platonist version of B.
Non-woobleverse Platonist B has also been proven dead as well, though
this proof has been less rigorous than one might wish (did the
introduction of the clock bug happen validly?). The present
woobleverse of Platonist B, then, is the interesting one - if it's
correct, wooble is almost certainly wrong about the present state of
the ruleset, but it is almost certainly the case that the game is
alive (if highly dormant!) and playable. The reconstruction of
woobleverse B, therefore, will be my primary goal.

 - teucer
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