Re: [s-d] [s-b] Testing

[Craig Daniel <teucer@xxxxxxxxx>]

For reference: http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/thermo/files/ruleset.txt
has a mid-stage version of the ThermodyNomic ruleset archived, which
will give a sense of what it was like.

For other ways to scratch the Nomic itch, I should let it be known
that I'm busy working on a history of B Nomic to be submitted as an
Agoran thesis; I believe mentioning that this was in progress in IRC
is what prompted this thread to arise. Toward the end of it, I'm going
to include my throughts on how to make a hopefully-longer-lasting game
that recaptures a B flavor.

Spoilers: the idea I'll be suggesting is a debugged version of the
Great Rules Reset of Nweek 112, which itself is a very stripped-down
but still distinctly B-flavored iteration of the game from when B was
at its height. It has the feel of an initial Nomic ruleset of a
decidedly Bn sort, complete with an Emergency protocol, and might at
the moment be my favorite initial ruleset I've never played by. It
isn't useful as actually implemented - it contains the clock bug that
created the Imaginary Period - but the fix is literally only a few
words' change to the comment rule. (I'm also going to suggest in the
thesis that Nomics in general should have some kind of ratification
mechanism which jolts the gamestate into what we believe it to be.
While that's usually thought of as a pragmatic mechanic I think my big
conclusion in this study is going to be that it is in fact more useful
the more Platonic your playstyle. I think in late-stage B, part of why
Emergencies were so frequent is that they could in fact be used for
precisely this purpose; adding something else may not be remotely
necessary.)



On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 10:27 PM, Craig Daniel <teucer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Alex Smith <ais523@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2013-08-20 at 19:09 -0400, Jamie Ahloy Dallaire wrote:
>>> Since people seem to be paying attention... :-)
>>>
>>> Would there be any interest in starting a self-destructing round of nomic?
>>> What I have in mind is something that, in addition to a traditional nomic
>>> ruleset, also includes a core of (truly) immutable rules that operate
>>> something like a ticking timer that automatically ends the game when it
>>> reaches zero, and govern the (difficult) ways in which the group of players
>>> can temporarily halt or reverse the flow of time. There can't be a way to
>>> just legislate our way around the timer.
>>>
>>> What I'm interested in is the potential for tension between competitive
>>> (seeking individual victory) and cooperative behaviour (trying to keep the
>>> game alive).
>>>
>>> Do let me know if this already exists!
>>
>> You may want to talk to Teucer about ThermoDyNomic.
>
> Yeah, that was a fun time. It had restrictions on how much the game
> could be expanded (including in number of rules), that were a bit
> looser when they came to new players joining. But if you didn't get
> newbies in, it was basically impossible for the game to get bigger...
> but it could shrink. And if you didn't pass proposals (likely to
> shrink the game slowly but surely), it had rules that would start
> destroying things at random - deregistering arbitrary players, taking
> away their points, repealing random rules, and so forth.
>
> We found a loophole (actually I think one created by a random rule
> deletion, but I could be mistaken) that let us hold it at bay for a
> while by scamming the CFJ system (whose judgments got inserted into
> the ruleset in the hopes of keeping important things true even as
> important rules went away) to create rules that said things like "This
> is a rule!" without having to delete anything to make room for it
> anymore. But then half of us went on simultaneous vacations and I came
> back and implemented the resulting necessary deletions and we
> discovered that we couldn't propose things anymore, at which point
> there were no possible actions that would stop the game from slowly
> ejecting us and repealing bits of itself until playing was impossible.
> Oh, and lacking a proposal mechanism meant people couldn't join,
> either.
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