On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 13:17, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
I would like to see massive incentives given for holding office. Perhaps
one's voting limit is the interest index of the postulated offices e holds?
