I'm going to re-arrange CB's original message a little bit because I think it makes more sense to respond to those points in that order.
On Monday, May 11, 2020 3:55:24 AM CDT Cuddle Beam via agora-discussion wrote: > To FURTHER show how a well-documented history is a good idea, it's NOT ONLY > the history per se which is valuable, having it readily available makes > research BASED on analysis of that history possible. For instance, the > History of Victories, which has managed to apply a taxonomy to the way that > the game is played by digging up the whole past of Blognomic: > https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=History_of_victories Minor note: we do keep a history of victories with categories, it's in the scroll of Agora. It does lack links (partly because they'd make the document harder to read since we don't use a hypertext format). There's no reason we couldn't have a 'research version' of this with the links though. > I find it remarkable that, even as obscure and unpredictable as nomic can > be, a game of "anything", Blognomic has a much richer understanding of the > way that their own game of "anything", is played. Like, how do you even > start to rodeo and categorize something so vast as the possibilities in > nomic? Well, Blognomic has done so, and now has every single dynasty of its > history classified into broad styles of gameplay/victory (yes the taxonomy > thing was initially my idea lmao but it has now become something a lot > bigger than that with the help of the rest of players, especially Kevan). Tangent to your tangent: I'm trying to write a taxonomy for Agora's economies, so I'll have to take a look at Blognomic's. Thanks for bringing that up. > Maybe there could be an office for Agora academia specifically? The > 'Professor'? Has a bi-annual report of all theses, perhaps? Maybe we could > make a campaign to make a timeline of Agora history? I dunno. > > For those unfamiliar with what I mean from Blognomic, the main wiki page > has a chronological list of every dynasty, and each dynasty follows the > same general structure of the AA that started the dynasty, the main > proposals of the dynasty, and then how it was won: > * List: https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Main_Page > * Dynasty example: > https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=The_Twenty-Sixth_Dynasty_of_Kevan [gonna respond to this and the portion below together] > I believe Agora is lagging behind Blognomic when it comes to nomic theses > and academia. I'd suggest to find some kind of easy template to fill out to > record history like Blognomic has, it doesn't need to be exhaustive - I > believe that it definitely shouldn't be exhaustive, really (because if it's > too much effort to fill in, it just won't be filled in often enough and > people will forget to do it and so on) and definitely some regular report > that has links to Agora theses on it so that they're not lost in the void > of nobody remembering about them. I think Blognomic has really benefited from dynasties here. They have very clear start and stop points and themes. Part of the reason people don't write those kinds of summaries in Agora, I suspect, is that they don't even know where to begin and end. I don't think the nature of Agora is really fitted to standardized time-frames since sometimes there's big shifts and sometimes there's very gradual ones. Yearly or biyearly would certainly help out, but an even better solution would probably be actually going back and identifying specific time-frames for further study so later people can just dive in and know where to begin and end.
