I've been thinking about what makes Agora difficult to play as compared to other games.
Something I've noticed about the current rules is that lots of game actions and effects are all woven together in such a way that if a mistake is made with any piece of it, the mistake can quickly propagate and "infect" a large portion of the state of the game, leading to large-scale confusion. Sometimes a sort of "fork" occurs and we find ourselves playing two games in parallel (and thereby taking double the effort) until some ambiguity is resolved. "Real life," however, by and large does not behave this way. Consider the following scenario: Alice has a bank account with a balance of $0. She deposits a check for $100, then goes to a store and buys a Bluetooth speaker for $100 using a debit card. Soon after this, she decides she doesn't like it, so she sells the speaker to her neighbor Bob for $50 in cash. A few days later, the check Alice deposited bounces. If something similar to the above were to occur under rules similar to today's rules, then we would find that Alice actually never had the money to buy the speaker with, so the speaker still belongs to the store. Then, when she sells the speaker to Bob, the sale is illegitimate, and so the speaker *still* belongs to the store, but now it's in Bob's possession; meanwhile, Alice now possesses $50 of cash that actually belong to Bob. In real life, however, none of the above happens. The initial sale of the speaker still stands; the speaker is successfully sold to Alice and the store receives $100. The subsequent sale also succeeds, meaning Bob now owns the speaker and Alice now owns the cash. When the check bounces, the credit to Alice's account is simply reversed, leaving her with a debit balance of $100. The difference here is that Alice's bank account is decoupled from her interactions with the store. Her ability to buy things does not depend on the legitimacy of the funds in her account; instead, her ability to buy things depends on what the bank tells the store, and what the bank tells the store depends on the bank's *beliefs* about the legitimacy of the funds in her account. How could we make Agora that way? Currently, the rules state that each player has some number of coins, as part of the gamestate, and the Treasuror is responsible for keeping track of this part of the gamestate. When a player attempts to spend coins, the attempt succeeds if e has the coins and fails if e does not. Instead, I suggest amending the rules to state that the Treasuror is responsible for maintaining accounts of coins; each account represents the number of coins that each player is considered to have, but having or not having coins is not actually part of the gamestate. When a player attempts to spend coins, the Treasuror either approves or declines the attempt. For particularly important transactions (such as winning the game), the Referee and Arbitor must approve the attempt as well. Of course, there should be SHALLs mandating that the Treasuror make a good-faith effort to maintain fair and accurate accounts and to approve and decline transactions in accordance with those accounts. Any thoughts? —Warrigal
