On Wed, 2017-08-23 at 23:46 -0400, Owen Jacobson wrote: > > On Aug 23, 2017, at 11:37 PM, Cuddle Beam <cuddleb...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > > like playing I Want To Be The Guy > > Steady on! > > Actually, I broadly agree with your overall thesis. Precedent and > history are _important_, and I think it’s worth understanding why > things are the way they are before tearing them down or rebuilding > them another way - but the way things are is fairly knob-heavy, and I > cannot in the slightest blame K for deregistering out of concern for > comprehension. > > My personal coping strategy has been to ignore the mechanics that > don’t immediately interest me, more or less, and to focus intently on > the ones that do. However, that’s a coping strategy, not a solution: > I’m surely missing interesting opportunities by mostly-disregarding > ribbons and patent titles, or by not trying terribly hard to win.
The issue with games like Agora is that it's very difficult for a nomic to contain both a) little enough that it's possible to comprehend the whole thing at once, and b) enough that there's something to actually do. Agora tends to go through long periods of inactivity as a consequence of b); in other words, whenever people decide the rules are getting too complex, there's mass repeal, then activity peters out and stops for several months. We still haven't really recovered from the last mass repeal. I don't think anyone usually comprehends much of the ruleset (which is what Read The Ruleset Week is about). Given that having a playable game and having an understandable game are in conflict, it's usual to just give up on understanding the whole thing. Many new players conclude that they're at a disadvantage because they can't keep track of everything that's going on, but that's not really the case; they might not be able to do it, but the experienced players can't do it either. For example, I'm infamous for mostly ignoring the proposal system except when I have a particularly good idea for a proposal, or feel strongly enough about a proposal to want to go and vote. (Or am operating a scam, but really those can touch any part of the rules and tend to be one-offs that don't leave you interested in the rule's intended functionality.) In fact, this is arguably a case for /increasing/ the number of mechanics involved; if you're going to ignore a large subset of them anyway, may as well increase the variety so that players can find ones that they do care about. The key is to design most of the game mechanics so that players who aren't interested can safely ignore them. > As a sketch, I’d like to draft two broad proposals: > > # Repeal the Referee > > * Convert SHALL NOT et al into something equivalent to CANNOT or > IMPOSSIBLE > * Modify SHALLs to allow any player to fulfil them if the obliged > party does not do so > * Destroy the office of Referee entirely, as well as the associated > card rules > > We can always reinvent it, but punishment is probably the wrong > paradigm for Agora as it is today, on the whole. A much more > narrowly-scoped punishment system for dealing with specific > malfeasance might be a practical replacement, and clearing the ground > will make it easier to re-draft. SHALLs aren't really about punishment. They're about handling situations in which the pragmatic reality of the real world (including the players who play in it) doesn't match the platonic ideality that the rules want to live in (both by giving the rules a way to handle "hey, this shouldn't have happened, but it did", and by giving the players notice to say "hey, the rules tell me do to X to avoid things breaking, I'd better do X"). There are several cases, in fact, where we explicitly make something both possible and illegal to indicate that a) we don't want people to do it, but b) if people do do it, the action should stand. How would that fit into a system like that? The punishments are mostly a side show to all that, but it's been proven over time that we do actually need them; many players aren't law-abiding enough to do something merely because a rule tells them to. (Note that there are some things that do fit better into a punishment system than a pragmatism system; the rule against breaking pledges is an obvious example. Note that pledges are a special case of what used to be called Contracts. Interestingly, Organisations were an attempt to bring an explicit punishment system to Contracts, rather than the old system which was SHALL-enforced, so what you're making here is actually two points that contradict each other to some extent.) > # Repeal Organizations > > They’re moribund, really. No organization presently has more than one > active member. I've discovered that it's basically impossible to force Agorans to use what were once called "supplementary legal codes" in any way other than Contracts. If you create a mechanic, either it turns into Contracts, or else it ends up unused. I know there's a lot of support for doing things differently, but this doesn't seem to be part of it. Part of the issue is that Expenditure was intended to be the basis of an economy, but wasn't used as one. Part of the issue is that it's hard to write an Organization in such a way that it functions correctly, and as such, no Organization has yet really taken off. --- Incidentally, it crosses my mind (this is something I've been thinking about for a while, but this message has encouraged me to set down on paper) that the "logical conclusion" of Organization, Contract, Promise, Agency etc. systems would be a way to create a legal construct that says "when event X happens, I automatically post the message Y" (where Y would not necessarily need to be a fixed message, and could be constructed based on any reasonably available gamestate information). This would be platonic (not needing SHALL enforcement, like contracts do), and could also trivially emulate most of the other cases (without being as complex as Organizations are). The main disadvantage is that it's trivial to set up an infinite loop that does infinite calculation in finite time; in Agora, this actually works but produces an unknowable/indeterminable result (CFJs 1975/1980), which is not the sort of thing you want all over your gamestate. As such, you need some sort of cost to setting these things up, and/or to triggering them (this is one of the key observations in the design of Organisations). Given that we're moving to a uni- currencied economy at the moment, and that Agora is desperately short of cash, perhaps these new legal constructs should be Shiny-powered, giving 1 Shiny back to Agora with each triggering? -- ais523
