nix wrote:
But it's also worth noting that the very original Agora doesn't seem to
have played as platonically as we currently do; ie, an accepted mistake
would be treated as the reality of the game often-times, without need
for some ratification process. There's another thesis, Vanyel's
*Pragmatism and Platonism* that deals with the early history of this. If
you interpret Agora pragmatically, then nothing can really break it as
long as players collectively agree on what to do next.
I think it was more that there was significant disagreement over which
way to play, with "Plato-Pragmatism" (methods of adjusting the Platonic
actual gamestate to match the Pragmatic what-we-thought-it-was
gamestate) eventually emerging as a compromise. A couple of examples
that significantly pre-dated the general ratification rules:
1) A rule defining something similar to self-ratification, but limited
to the points report.
2) The Marks crisis (Proposal 2662 IIRC), a change of economic systems
that was discovered several months after the fact to have been
rejected due to an obscure issue with voting strength. Eventually
resolved by having everyone announce "I resign as Promotor, naming
<player we thought was Promotor> as successor", and same for
Assessor, and then processing a proposal similar to "the alleged
adoption of Marks is ratified".
IIRC, Kelly left the game some time over frustration that, having come
up with this approach, we didn't always cover our bases as thoroughly as
we did for #2. It's certainly theoretically possible that some old
mistake went collectively unnoticed, and still hasn't been fixed by all
the various ratifications since then (especially if it pre-dated the
adoption of the general ratification rules); but most of us probably
dismiss it as "even if it does exist, I'll probably never find it, so
not worth worrying about", just as most people not pursuing a career in
theoretical physics don't worry that gravity might suddenly work vastly
differently tomorrow for some previously unforeseen reason.
