On Mon, 2025-10-27 at 12:04 -0300, juan via agora-discussion wrote:
> Here's a ruleset I wrote without thinking too much about it:
>
> {
> This is a game played over email over the list <insert list> and has
> the following rules:
>
> 1. Any player may at any time propose any change to the rules in a
> message, but only if no other proposals have been made in the past 24
> hours.
> 2. Any player may vote for or against on any proposed change between
> the time the message was sent and 24 hours later.
> 3. A proposal is adopted 24 hours after it is proposed if it has more
> votes for it than against it.
> 4. The player are the people that control the following email
> addresses:
>
> <insert email addresses>
> }
>
> Idk, might be fun.
The problem with small rulesets is that they're nearly always rife with
timing scams (e.g. with this one, you can make a proposal every 24
hours to prevent anyone else proposing). In nomics that frequently
reset down to a small set of rules, dealing with timing scams is a
perennial problem (often it's virtually impossible to fix all the
available scams without either replacing them with other timing scams,
or switching to a turn-based system which has its own problems).
I also note that that ruleset appears to allow players to vote multiple
times and to count all the resulting votes, which might be somewhat
problematic and would likely be abused right from the start.
An alternative approach is to start with a very simple *subjective*
ruleset, where the subjective interpretation helps to prevent scams by
having nothing to latch on to. I know there was an attempt to start a
nomic whose entire initial ruleset was the first paragraph of Agora's
rule 217, and it worked at least for a bit, until players lost
interest. Maybe that would be worth trying again?
--
ais523
