On Thu, 13 Feb 2014, Fool wrote: > The opposite, as I said! It has the power to award a win, it does not have the > power to override the common-sense meanings of the words.
Game (MW-online): : a physical or mental activity or contest that has rules and that people do for pleasure : a particular occurrence of a game : one of the games that are part of a larger contest (such as a tennis match) Even in the standard, straightforward definition from a dictionary, there's a definition choice for which "game" is part of a larger whole. Your definition is true of a strictly limited set of games (boardgames, cardgames). It's pretty clear that Nomic is not a typical game of this sort (Douglas Hofstadter says so in his introduction article). For one example specific to Nomic that we've used before, the Prisoner's Dilemma Game has a very different outcome if it is the iterated or singular version, and both are strongly within the realm of "game". > This was anticipated and argued against, I believe it was by Alex. The game > isn't ossified, it doesn't exist. It is PERFECTLY FINE to make this argument in the metagame sense. When a game reaches a - let's call it a "climax point" (be it a win, a realization of stalemate, a nomic game that's logically internally frozen), the players can say "hey, let's call it a night." There's nothing in the rules to *prevent* that. But say two people say "hey, let's keep playing for 2nd place". Everyone else goes home, the two people keep playing. Is either side "right" here (in the sense of the rules)? Both groups have made a metagame decision, and the rules contradict neither. And importantly, no within-game decision method can decide between these views, formally, as these decisions are outside the rules. The best we can say is that we are using the judgement mechanism "unofficially" to reach a metagame consensus on whether to quit. My own, personal, metagame decision is that the game isn't over (for me) unless there's a far more explicit *in the rules* statement that "Agora is hereby over" that isn't overruled (by power, etc.), and is thus clearly contained within the Rules. Or unless everyone else stops playing, regardless of what the rules say. But if you're making this decision in the metagame sense, say so. "I am quitting, game over, anyone else?" Reach this through consensus - then it won't be bound by precedent, the good of the game, or anything, really, except whether others agree with you. But simultaneously using the within-game judgement mechanism (and arguing specific semantics of definitions that judgements are required to use) while saying the game has ceased to exist, is trying to have it both ways.
