Re: [s-d] In Case of Emergency

["Peter Cooper Jr." <pete@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 9, 2015, at 8:53 PM, Craig Daniel <teucer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> once proven platonically unplayable because of such a thing in its
> history), so, this time let's not let them do that.
> 
> I submit the following proposal, entitled "The Reset Button"
> 
> {{
> Create a rule numbered 0-0 with text
> {{
> The Reset Ruleset is a game document.
> 
> Any person can Press the Reset Button by posting to the public forum a
> declaration that e is doing so. If any change to the rules has occurred in
> the past 30 days, this has no effect [[save to mildly annoy everyone
> else]]. Otherwise, all game objects except the Reset Ruleset are destroyed,
> the Reset Ruleset is adopted as the ruleset, and the person who Pressed the
> Reset Button becomes a player and the Administrator.
> 
> This rule takes precedence over all other rules.
> }}
> 
> Set the Reset Ruleset to be a copy of the current ruleset.
> }}

I really like this idea. I was going to put something like it in an Emergency proposal if I did something more complicated than my Pragmatic Emergency Rule, which would allow for anybody to declare an emergency if there had been no posts to a public forum within some amount of time (30 days sounds good). I had really liked that the game had been going continuously for so long, and I really didn’t like needing to go to “it works just because we all want to keep playing”. I spent quite some time going through the archives trying to figure out what nweek to start the Clock at, but it appears that that even got lost at someplace along the way. So I resigned myself to just restarting at nweek 1 of a new Era, but I would have loved to have an easy way to have a Reset still happen within-game and so the game would have been continuously going for years.

For some history of the time I’ve been involved, for the reset to start the Second Era [1], while there was some ambiguity as to what counted as an Outsider to start the Emergency Procedure (and the player list wasn’t as certain since there was hardware failure involved), we did use a reasonable definition and follow the Emergency Procedure defined in the First Era. The Reset to start the Third Era was done by a Tweak within the Rules of the Second Era [2]. I’m not sure what happened for later Eras (as I’d stopped playing for quite some time), but this continuity between prior Eras was very appealing to me, that we were really still playing The Same Game.

Now, I don’t know as this is quite the way I’d have done it, and I’m kind of torn between trying to set things up the way I would do things, and the fact that I’ve written enough of the Rules that we have now and this game really needs to belong to all of us. So, I hesitate to bring up these nitpicks (as they probably don’t matter in practice, as a Reset would pragmatically be just as effective if declared so like I did to start Era 8), but if people want their rules a little tidier, perhaps they should be addressed:
* “Ruleset” isn’t really defined wonderfully. While I don’t think it’ll lead to any real issues, it might cause weird problems in the future if our game has two rule sets (the one we’re “using”, and this “Reset Ruleset”) but only one should be followed.
* I’m not sure if the “all game objects are destroyed” means that there will be no more Public Fora.
* The initial values of the Clock should probably be set. As a part of that, it might be worthwhile for the Reset Ruleset to call itself the 9th Era.
* If my “Language is Useful” prop passes, it occurs before this prop, and the new Section and Rules that it creates will not yet have numbers.

All are very solvable problems (if they’re even problems at all), and I’m still planning on voting FOR this proposal, since, well, it’s Nomic, so problems can always be fixed later.


[1] <http://lists.ellipsis.cx/archives/spoon-business/spoon-business-200504/msg00012.html>
[2] <http://lists.ellipsis.cx/archives/spoon-business/spoon-business-200611/msg00000.html>

-- 
Peter C.
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