On Sat, 16 Apr 2011, Alex Smith wrote:
> Recently Yally embarked upon a campaign of systematic rules-breaking,
> pointing out that all the punishments listed in the ruleset for
> rules-breaking could be avoided via more rules-breaking. However,
> generally speaking, someone who refuses to abide by the rules of a game
> is, in fact, not playing it, but a different game.
In general (in games), when we find someone breaking a rule, it's an
instant CANNOT; e.g. "that's against the rules put the $50 back in the
bank before we go on." The simple fact is, we can't play that way
without constant and continual rewinds, or making this game a sequential
turn-taking game ("put that $50 back before I take my turn"). So we
(Agorans) have firmly rejected that interpretation and codified that
rejection.
The alternative you're offering is literally stopping the game every
time a rule breakage is suspected, to make a metagame decision that
"Yally can't do that." But who will judge that? Rejecting that sort
of metagame decision is the very essence of nomic.
In accepting this, we have to accept the fact that, for rules
breakages that can't be easily "put back" (e.g. missing a time limit,
announcing a secret) or that are too difficult to put back (various things
that we prefer to be pragmatic), a person can break those things and
still be a player, and the best we can do is have a working punishment
system with meaningful censure mechanisms.
In this very specific case, it's the punishment system that's very
directly broken as we've removed harsher meaningful punishments,
something that (if the votes are there, which I think they are) we're
about to put back in a manner sufficiently timely to still zap Yally.
-G.
