On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Alex Smith wrote:
> I can only conclude that the players as a whole are no longer playing a
> game, but rather a "let's make up impossible-to-comply-with rules to see
> what happens" situation.
I thought that was the explicit purpose of the Fearmongor, the source of
much recent random dumbness (broken pope, Vladivostok, and others) as well
as some small amount of useful creativity. Pope in particular really annoyed
me this way - why keep in something knowingly so broken? Still. I, for one,
entered into the spirit of Fearmongor and voted for a few random and
slightly-harmful things as I'm guessing did others; the really bad ones failed.
If annoyance is outpacing creativity here , time to repeal fearmongor before
deciding the players as a whole are currently lacking.
> There's a deeper problem, here. The rules so often use ILLEGAL, etc, to
> mean "you can do this but you'll be punished if you do". That's not what
> it means at all; in most games, there's a sort-of meta-agreement not to
> cheat, and players will just refuse to play with people who repeatedly
> break the rules. That doesn't seem to happen here, at all; rulebreakers
> are just sanctioned and play goes on as normal. (This makes perfect
> sense for accidental rules breaches; it makes sense for a game to have a
> way to recover from those. But deliberate cheating?) Too often, people
> do something of borderline legality, and then people have a debate
> afterwards about whether it was legal. In any other game, someone doing
> so would generally ask for permission in advance; in Agora, they just do
> it and argue for ages about if it were legal anyway.
This precise philosophical question ("Is breaking the rules part of play
or part of metaplay") is one of those fundamental self-referential nomic
questions, since deciding what's legal in the game is explicitly part of
the game. It's not a nomic otherwise IMO - anyone asking for a metagame
agreement ("can't we just decide that X make sense") is accused of "not
playing nomic". In our current interpretation of this philosophy, it's why
we split off IMPOSSIBLE from ILLEGAL, and right now DISCHARGE is akin to
"asking Agora permission." I don't doubt that any Vladivostok case would
be discharged.
> Hopefully, Agora'll still be intact next month when the
> deregistration timer runs out.
My bigger worry is unwillingness-to-hold-officership (or at least, that
most of those that do are having semi-annual snits right now - I'm
hoping to make some time to assume at the very least IADoP and Herald
on the next few days but can't promise that).
-G.
