I've hosted and played in non-Nomic Blitz PBM games before, and, while
this isn't the most argumentative bunch I've seen by any means, I have
to say this group produced the highest quality logical and legal
argumentation I've ever seen. I was really impressed. I thought there
was some excellent stuff in the calls to judgement, the associated
discussion, and the verdicts. Even when I thought it was bogus, I found
it to be creative and/or well-executed bogosity.
Agoran CFJs take days or weeks. In XX it was 24 hours, and people were
online at different times. In some cases it seemed like people were
cranking out these fairly long well-reasoned monologues out on the fly.
I guess that comes with experience or something? I AM NOT WORTHY.
There was some talk of legalism/logicism or idealism/pragmatism. Maybe
relative to the group I'm very far off one end of these scales. I also
expect the question of _objectives_ made a big difference. On the last
turn, a fairly large coalition simply voted themselves joint winners.
I'm curious _when_ did this coalition form? And generally, to what
extent were people trying to win?
As to the ruleset itself: I don't think I have anything new to say about
the technical issues. On the higher-level end, I don't care much for win
by paradox. And maybe the biggest bug is majority rules. Maybe not so
good when things get really competitive. To be sure, these are opinions
I held before the game started, and likely are minority opinions.
Credit to Aaron Goldfein not only for rounding up the old-timers, but
also for coming up with the idea for the game in the first place, about
two months ago. Charles Walker posted a wake-up two weeks ago, reminding
us that time was ticking. I was a fool who happened to be in a position
to pick up the ball and run with it, so I did.
And the turnout sure was a lot better than I expected! Thanks to the
old-timers and "kids" for a fun game, it really was a pleasure. And
thanks to all Agorans who were not playing XX for putting up with our
antics for a couple of weeks. We return you to your regular Nomic shortly...
Yours,
Dan Mehkeri
