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

[Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxx>]

It's good to see some familiar faces lurking on the spoon-fora!

FWIW, I would like to go on the record again claiming that the Imaginary
Period was a myth - B did not die because of a bug, but because a perceived
bug caused the players to stop playing[0].

In a Platonic interpretation the game is still running, although the
current rules etc. are inaccessible because nobody's been maintaining the
wiki. The Emergency ended; the statement that the Emergency Coordinator
would apply the winning Refresh Proposal turned out to be false[1]. The
standard timekeeping method restarted, and Normal [[?!?]] Play resumed. The
Clock ticked forwards, until the next automated clock stop[2]. So
currently, the Clock is stopped, the Watch[3] has been advancing for
months, and the game is waiting for whatever minister is needed to start it
again.

However, in the more practical interpretation the game is over in the sense
that nobody is playing it, which pretty much makes it definitionally not a
game.

I liked the nweek 112 reset[4], and IIRC it worked pretty well. I'd be
careful with a ratification system, though - we used that once upon a time
until a player won by hiding game actions in eir signature and the "Statute
of Limitations" rule automatically made them retroactively true.

Personally, I'm leaning much more pragmatic than platonist these days, and
am more inclined to omit ratification on the grounds that if we all act
like a fact is true when the rules say it's not, then all that means is
that the rules don't accurately reflect the game that we're playing, and we
should probably fix it. This is in keeping with all other games ever - if,
30 minutes into playing a board game, you realize that you've misread one
of the rules, you don't undo the last 20 minutes and do them over, you just
declare whatever you were doing a temporary house rule and then use the
correct rules for the rest of the game.

-- 
Wonko


[0]
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/archives/spoon-discuss/spoon-discuss-201302/msg00017.html

[1] Precedent is that false assertions made by the rules are simply
ignored; see e.g. the debates regarding the Cursed Sushi of Babel.

[2] Checkpoint? I'm not sure what sort of automatic stopping points existed
in the most recent rules, my last local snapshot is way back at nweek 99.
But I'm pretty sure they exist.

[3] Or ndelay, or whatever currently tracks time when the Clock is Off.

[4]
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/archives/spoon-business/spoon-business-200611/msg00000.html


On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Craig Daniel <teucer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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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