rfj add 38/0 13 Mar 2001 17:54:27 Poulenc M22, by Jeff Schroeder, text quoted below, did not result in a Motive order requiring Poulenc to transfer 30 points to the bank, because its wording and type (Bank Motion) were directed at the Bank, not at Poulenc. Text of M22: "I create a new Bank Motion requiring the bank to reclaim 30 out of the current 60 outstanding points from Poulenc. This will reduce Poulenc's debt by 30." Ordering the Bank to reclaim 30 points from Poulenc is not the same as ordering Poulenc to transfer 30 points to the Bank. And a Bank motion is not the same as a Motion for Repayment--they have different definitons under the rules. The Judge is encouraged to refer to R317/2 "The Bank" and R319/0 "Points Owed". ---- rfj assign 38/0 14 Mar 2001 09:00:38 Benjamin ---- rfj recuse 28/0 14 Mar 2001 09:11:36 Josh Kortbein ---- rfj assign 28/0 14 Mar 2001 09:11:36 Zagarna ---- rfj add 39/0 14 Mar 2001 01:46:21 Joel R226/0 does not prohibit voting in private fora. Here's the text of R226/0: "A Player may vote privately if e so desires by notifying the Administrator. Votes cast privately shall not be revealed until voting ends." 1. It seems to me that the second sentence implicitly apples to the Admin, and not anyone else. 2. The second instance of "privately" in the Rule could be read in the usual, rather than the technical, in-game sense. 3. There is clearly no prohibition against posting one's own votes to a public forum---and it seems to happen quite a lot. That said, it can be noted that there is no blanket prohibition on revealing votes prior to the close of voting. 4. For non-revelation to be possible, someone must lack the unrevealed knowledge. For instance, it would be impossible for me to avoid revealing to anyone on the list that 1 + 1 = 2, because everyone already knows that. Similarly, when someone votes to the discussion list, there is afterward no one on the list to whom their votes could yet be revealed. So, if it is granted that the sending of votes to the discussion list is not covered by the non-revelation clause in R226/0, then there could not possibly be any violation of the Rule in that case. I contend that voting to the discussion list does not constitute vote revelation, as conveying one's votes in private fora---of which the discussion list clearly is one---is explicitly allowed by the first sentence of R226/0. So, either R226 is self-contradictory, or poorly written. I am inclined to go with the latter. ---- rfj assign 39/0 14 Mar 2001 09:22:40 relet ---- rfj ruling 39/0 14 Mar 2001 14:13:30 relet true R226/0: "A Player may vote privately if e so desires by notifying the Administrator. Votes cast privately shall not be revealed until voting ends." Postings in private fora are not officially part of the game. However, the action of notifying the Administrator (if e is member of the private forum) is official, as its means are not further specified in R226/0. Concerning the term of "revealing", I agree with Joel s interpretation: It is impossible to reveal a condition known a priori. A priori in this case means, that the members of the forum have the knowledge in the moment the votes are cast, not by any information afterwards. [[A moment in PbeM-games is hard to grasp, in our case the forum time stamp should suffice]] Thus, any later notification of ones votes, either by the Administrator or by the player emself, is forbidden by the rule in question. In addition, the player may even decide to adjust eir votes (if allowed by the Rules) in another official notification, which may be adressed to the Administrator only. Notification of other players is non-official and non-binding. [[This kind of misinformation is of course strongly discouraged and shall serve only for demonstration purposes here.]] ---- rfj ruling 33/0 14 Mar 2001 21:25:41 Joel true This strikes me as very possibly the single most important issue the Courts have yet been asked to decide. The relevant Rule for deciding this matter is R101/0, quoted here: "All game entities must always abide by all the Rules then in effect, in the form in which they are then in effect. This Rule takes precedence over all other Rules." That the Rules are binding on Players is not ambiguous. What is unclear is what sort of Rules we have. Are they Laws or laws---i.e., do they define what is possible, similar to physical laws, or merely what is permissible, as statutory laws? This is a metaphysical question, and an odd one at that, since it deals with the nature of the conceptual space we have constructed rather than the nature of the world itself. Moreover, rarely does an opportunity to do applied metaphysics present itself outside of the philosophy of science. But I digress. Put another way, what is at state here is whether actions which violate the Rules are impossible, or merely illegal. As noted, the Rules provide no explicit statements about the matter at hand. What about indirect evidence? "Players" could take "actions" (bot used advisedly here, not in the technical sense) that would violate certain existing Rules. E.g., R354/0 is one such Rule. R354/0, inter alia, prohibits the further distribution of secret Party documents by Players who have seen them as a result of having been Judges. There should be no doubt that a person who has been sent such information would thereafter be capable of posting it to one of the game mailing lists. Taking this to be the act of a Player argues for Rules that are laws, not Laws. Further support for such a view is provided by R350/0. It requires certain undoubtedly physical actions, which though not impossible, could certainly fail to be performed. If our Rules were Laws, nothing they mandate could fail to occur. The picture is not so clear as that, however, and there are a number of factors which muddy the waters a bit, e.g., one might suppose Rules which it is possible to violate would include penalties for flaunting them. An inspection of the Rules reveals that the vast majority do not include penalties, nor do they even hint that violating them might be possible. Moreover, it may be argued---plausibly, I think---that Rules which do specify penalties, e.g., R325/1 on Bankruptcy, do so in such a way that incurring the penalty does not constitute a violation of the Rule, but rather is perfectly in accord with its provisions. If, in fact, the Rules are Laws, that R101 is amendable by a majority vote (or at all, for that matter!) is problematic. E.g., we could amend R101 such that is unambiguously claimed our Rules to be laws, not Laws. That is to say, a contingent event---the outcome of voting, which is itself determined by a number of other contingent events---could cause the force of our Rules to change from necessary to contingent. This is bizarre. In the language of modal logic, our game world is one in which things which are necessary are not necessarily necessary. (For those familiar with modal logic, this would mean that the modal system of our game world is neither S4 nor S5. Hmmm.) Now, a question arises as to whether this is a correct characterization of R101---that R101, or more generally, _some Rule_ actually, or potentially serves as the anchor for the metaphysics of our game world, and whether as a consequence of the malleability of our Ruleset, that our metaphysics is malleable as well. Sources external to the Game seem to regard game rules as statutory. On reading the appendix on Nomic in Suber's _The Paradox of Self-Amendment_, one gets the impression that Suber views the rules as statutory rather than necessary; however, this is unsurprising as he devised Nomic for the purpose of exploring such laws. One of the annotations to Agora's R101/1, part of which is comparable to our R101/0, seems to indicate that in their game, the rules are statutory, noting that by CFJ 1132, "A Player failing to perform a duty required by the Rules within a reasonable time may be in violation of the Rules..."---an impossible state if the Rules placed necessary constraints on action. Consider the negation of the statment: ~PEx(Px & Vxr) This is equivalent to NAx(~Px v ~Vxr). That is, "It is necessary that for any x, either x is not a Player or x does not violate the Rules." Note the lack of causal implication, e.g., that violating the Rules would cause one to cease being a Player. If, for instance, a chess player moves a knight forward one space along a rank or file, it is not that e has ceased to be a chess player, but rather that e is no longer playing chess. Such an observation is only possible, however, because the rules of chess are unambiguous---there could be no disagreements about what a constitutes a legal move. In our Game, and Nomics in general, this is not the case. What is legal is mediated by our (varying) interpretations of the rules. Nomic is fundamentally a language game. Thus, while it is possible to violate the rules---and it will become increasingly so as their complexity grows---we need not recognize such violations as permissible moves. It is the very purpose of the courts is to reverse them. ----