I believe that actions that happen without a message that explicitly causes them to happen are a Bad Idea due to the challenges they cause in record keeping. In general, “any player may cause x to happen” is way better than “x happens.” In fact, the former is already possible via agencies.
Gaelan > On Aug 23, 2017, at 10:15 PM, Alex Smith <ais...@alumni.bham.ac.uk> wrote: > > 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
