Greetings again, Nomic players everywhere! The time has come once again for a summary of play of Nomic World, the world's largest game of Nomic, now into its fifth month. I should begin with an apology. It had been my intention to produce one of these summaries of play every month. However, the last summary was due on or about Dec 9, a particularly intriguing and controversial period of play as I hope to outline below. I didn't want to produce a play summary until matters had sorted themselves out, and then it was Christmas, and then New year...but this is beginning to sound like a trail of excuses, so let's go to the videotape: As things stood in the last summary, our 50th proposal had just been tallied, and game 2 had just ended uncontroversially with one player scoring 100 points. After the controversy of game 1 (which ended in a consitutional crisis), this came as something of a relief. However, those of us who hoped that this augured well for the simple determination of winners in future games were to be utterly disappointed. January finds us in game 6, and none of games 3, 4 or 5 ended without some dispute over who actually won. We still await judgement on game 5. At time of writing, 162 proposals had been tallied, with 101 of these successful. As you can imagine the game is getting complicated! Here is a summary of the focus of legislative change. As before, scoring and the judiciary have been major preoccupations. A proposal to totally overhaul the Judicial system is currently being voted on. Scorin When I last wrote, new scoring rules, known for some reason as the Political Correctness (PC) rules, had just been introduced, which rewarded players for voting with the majority. That is, a random (1-10) points for voting FOR proposals which pass, or AGAINST those which fail. With about 10 proposals a week being tallied, it didn't take long for scores to approach the 100 needed to win. Very quickly it was decided to scale down the PC rewards, and proposals 1070 and 1080 reduced the the reward to 1 point. There matters were to remain for some time. PC encouraged different voting patterns to the system it replaced. Since it paid, if only a little, to be on the winning side, the political battle over proposals tended as often as not to become one of perceptions. The best way to get a proposal passed was convince people that it was going to pass anyway, and then let the Bandwagon Effect do the rest. Conversely, even a single post the discussion board against a proposal could sow enough doubt to bring a proposal down, for once players began to think that others might be voting against, their own tendencies to vote against were correspondingly increased. In discussions of Prisoner's Dilemma type situations, this phenomenon is known as reverberant doubt. In any case, PC produced results that tended to be either very one sided or very close. PC was eventually repealed completely by proposals 1149 and 1150. At present, scoring for proposals is described by rule 1111, which awards (YES votes - NO votes) to the proposer. With points for voting abolished for the first time, except for a brief hiatus before PC was adopted, voters are now free at last to vote with their consciences, assuming they haven't...ahem...been bribed. Two other scoring rules, or at least rules about points and their distributions, were also passed in this period. 1071, the Points Trading Act, allowed players to trade points between themselves in any manner they saw fit. The PTA has sharpened the political and bargaining aspects of the game considerably, although as far as I am aware, no one has yet used PTA to do anything spectacularly corrupt like suborn a judge or buy a lot of votes. Nomic players are good citizens, although their interpretations of what constitutes good citizenship often vary widely! The other change of note was the conversion of Nomic to a zero sum game by proposal 1102. Under the system introduced, all players pay a 1 point tax to a central pool whenever revenue is required to pay points awards. The slow drift towards a Nomic economy with points as money continues. This is best shown by two developments, the first now well established, the second still just a vague idea. A series of rules has been introduced, beginning with 1109, that allow the creation of specific player functions within the game, called Offices. At present there are 4 Offices - Custodian, whose job it is to make available an up to date copy of the ruleset to all players; the Nomic Doofus and the Nomic Doofus Appointer (Doofus is a curious word whose etymology I have never satisfactorily been able to establish, but the title of Doofus is awarded by the Appointer to the person the Appointer feels has behaved in the manner most recently deserving of derision). Finally, the job of Scorekeeper is to Officially be responsible for scoring, since this is now a task complicated enough to warrant that sort of attention. The Custodian and Scorekeeper are each paid a weekly salary. Thus, we have witnessed the rise of a professional class within Nomic. Another intriguing idea floated in the last few days has been the idea of a Nomic Stock Exchange, wherein players can buy shares in other players whom they think are "going concerns", ie likely to score well. Share value depends on a players score. The concept of speculating in player futures is still being developed, but if adopted it will add a whole new dimension to play. The Judiciary: It has been a turbulent couple of months for the judicial system, during which it has been repeatedly put under strain. A number of incidents, which I will describe later, made evident the flaws in the judicial system which I outlined in a letter to the game's inventor, Peter Suber. After seriously circumscribing Judicial powers after the fiasco in game 1, the new Judicial system served us well initially, but the cracks have begun to show: the current system is too slow, and lacks credibility, authority sometimes neutrality, and occasionally, competence. Some Judicial Reform proposals (1146-47) were adopted, and have addressed some of the problems. However, at time of writing, the Common Judgement Act (CJA), a proposal to completely abolish the judiciary and replace it with a system in which the players vote to determine those matters which up until now have been settled through Judgement is currently being voted on. I'm told that the Ancient Roman legislature used to vote on judgements too. So apparently there is no progress in human affairs after all. An alternative proposal, which more or less seeks to create a professional legal class, hopefully neutral and authoritative is also being developed should the CJA fail. Other Stuff: In Nomic as in Real Life, the politics is often more interesting than the legislation. As I said before, none of games 3,4, or 5 ended without controversy. Here's a brief summary of those games: Game 3: It has become convenient, even mandatory, for us to see the implementation of the game as quite distinct from the game state itself. That is, we view the rules, scores, game custom, history, etc, as a sort of platonic essence which the software we use represents to us more or less accurately (usually more, but occasionally less). This was never better demonstrated than in game 3, which ended in chaos when one player began to explore the limits of the interactions at the boundary where the Platonic Essence of the game meets the cold hard facts of implementation. The rules placed no limit on the number of calls for judgement (CFJs) a player could make, and rewarded Judges 1 point for each Judgement they delivered. One player, Joev, saw an opportunity to display a loophole in the rules: makes hundreds of CFJs, thousands maybe, all the same, until all players could grab a lot of points just by delivering Judgement on their share of the CFJs. Well, the rules certainly allowed it, but after 919 CFJs the game driver fell in a heap and crashed the game. The game could not be restarted without erasing the CFJs. What to do? The CFJs were legally made, but the software couldn't live up to the law. Perhaps inevitably, as when any legal system is confronted by its inability to follow its own prescriptions, pragmatism prevailed, and the CFJs were erased. But not before a few players had accepted their multiple invocations. One of these, Blob, thereby scored enough points to win. However, by a sort of extra-legal social contract, we agreed to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. The question of whether Blob really won game 3 is one that is destined to remain, forever I suspect, legally indeterminate. Game 4: Game 4 witnessed the first really big conspiracy of the game - 6 players working together on a complex plan to exploit a hole in the rules to score a lot of points. The hole was in the seconding rules: these rewarded players who second proposals that pass, and penalize those who second proposals that fail. But the rules did something extra. They also rewarded players who publically *refused* to second proposals that eventually failed. That created an opportunity: a small group working together could devise, say, 10 truly awful proposals - the most reprehensible, calamitous and destructive proposals they could think of. Individuals in the group would then propose these proposals, and the group, as a whole, would refuse to second them. When the proposals failed, the refusal points would far outweigh the penalties for proposing proposals that fail. The Terrible Proposals, as they were known, were almost works of art. The guiding principle behind their construction was not merely catastrophe, but *unrepealability*. This could be tricky, because the proposals had to be effective even against the safeguards already in the rules designed to protect the game from rules destructive of play. The trick turned out to be to design TPs that were completely destructive of play in practice, yet allowed a theoretical continuation of play. Hence, there were TPs that would have required all future proposals to have been written in Basque, or to contain copies of pages from the Vlaidvostok telephone directory, or that would have extended the voting period on proposals from one week to 53 years, and so on. The attempt to get the TP scam outlawed plunged the Judicial system into a crisis from which it has yet to really recover. Judgements and counter-Judgements flew furiously back and forth, as did arguments for and against. Judges were accused of bias, or blindness. The points from the scam were initally withheld, long enough for a non-conspiracy member to win game 4 independently. They were eventually awarded in game 5. Whether this was really according to the rules or not is another question history cannot answer. Fairly soon it became a fait accompli. Public resistance, or public consent, is stronger than the law. The Future: This summary is already far too long - so, just a quick word about the future. Legislation recently enacted may see Nomic World moving in new directions. The Committee Act allows players to start sub-games of Nomic, with rules (called ordinances) applying only to members of the committee, and completely different sets of Initial rules. The possibilities are endless, but some the most obvious applications are simpler games for new players, and testing out radical proposals in smaller groups before trying them out in the big game. Two committees have already been formed. One has just one initial ordinance (ideal for new players), the other is more complex and apparently devoted to writing fairy tales. With committees in place, the future looks bright, and once again, rather unpredicatable. Come and join us on Nomic World! (Details below.) Look forward to seeing you, ******************************************************************************* * __ ___ ___ \ / ___ | *"If it's not worth doing, it's not worth * *|__ | |__ \ / |__ | * doing well." * *___| | |___ \/ |___ o * -- Donald Hebb -- * *gardner@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au* * ******************************************************************************* ----------------------- Details for connecting to Nomic World: If your host site is a Unix machine, then "telnet 130.194.67.16 5000" will log you into Nomic World. On machines running VMS or other OSs, the key is to set port to 5000. The details will be specific to your machine. Once logged in, you can use the guest name to look around, but if you wish to play, you must login using the name you wish to play under. Registration to play is not immediate but takes 24 hours. There is also a Nomic mailing list, to which you can subscribe by mailing listserv@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au with no subject and "SUB nomic" in the message body. The mailing list is used mostly to post current versions of the ruleset and is recommended for all players. list