From: gardner@cs.monash.edu.au ()
Subject: Nomic World Summary of Play: Nov-Jan
Followup-To: rec.games.abstract
Organization: Computer Science, Monash University, Australia
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 02:48:21 GMT

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

Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.tiny