Game-direction

From Nomicapolis

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Revision as of 20:58, 4 January 2007

Nomicopolis is off to a pretty good start right now. It'll be a bit bumpy while we get used to the rules and the wiki format. This page is intended to be the "message board" for draft proposals and ideas for proposals. Feel free to add sections and comment on anything.

Nomic Positions

Minister of Order / Gamemaster (for lack of a better name)

Should create a position for what Simulacrum does right now, even though we give it to him? Keeping an eye on thresholds, making sure points are more or less correct and such...

Governor General?

I haven't yet proposed this, I'd just like to get some feedback on it.

Another idea would be the Metanomic General. This position would rotate through the players - once its power is used, the position would automatically rotate to the next player on the census. The power is this: The Metanomic General would devise a meta-rule which provides some stylish limit or outline which rule change proposals must follow in order to be considered proper. A meta-rule would last a month, at which time the next MG would implement his meta-rule. Examples might be: Rule proposals must be in verse; Rule proposals may not use the letter "e"; Rule proposals must consist of a single sentence; etc.

Governor General is defined in proposal 341 --TomFoolery 15:49, 29 November 2006 (EST)

The meta-rules sounds a lot like Fantasy Rules Committee. I think it'd be fine for a "sub game", but I don't think I'd want to see it change everything globally (and poetic verse in nomic so been done to death) chuck 15:58, 4 January 2007 (EST)

Adaption of Judge?

It seems like there are a lot of potential positions that could make this game move more efficiantly. We have adopted the Judge and Scorekeeper...shot down Supreme Grammarian and Governor General. Perhaps when we have more players this will become a more practical idea...having several positions. What if for now, we combined all of these ideas we've been having into a SuperJudge or something. I know the first concern I have (and I assume you as well) is corruption. Here is my idea. A SuperJudge (lets call them Supreme Nomicapolis Orator Of Canton's Utopia and Moderator also SuperJudge [SNOOCUMS] for now) would be an elected position voted on as of right now-once per month. SNOOCUMS would be held to the same regulations now in place for the Judge as far as removal or we could adopt something different if desired. SNOOCUMS would remain active for that month, but would not make proposals or vote (i don't know about debate???). SNOOCUMS could be rewarded for their month of work either by an increased point total (equivalent to pass/fail ratio OR match the largest point gain by any player over that month OR something) or perhaps if the popularity proposal goes through there could be a tie-in to that.

CONS-centralized power(could this also be construed as a pro given your philosophy?), One person has a lot of work (responsability) for a month....

PROS-Something new and interesting, Greater Motivation to WANT to be the SNOOCUMS (depending on rewards decided upon, etc)....

Please let me know if you hate this or have any suggestions... P.S. I hope its okay i move this to the top...it seemed easier than going and finding the most recent entry...--Tucana25 14:16, 3 January 2007 (EST)

I like the idea of power limitations, stopping them from participating other than being an all-seeing eye and moderator of the game. I'd vote for this. --Finisterre 14:40, 3 January 2007 (EST)

Debate Time Ending

360 and 361 are getting toward the end of their gestation period. --Tucana25 14:22, 3 January 2007 (EST)

356

I have not yet repealed several rules, as i am waiting on a decision from the Judge. These rules have amended (and thus repealed) other rules: 308 311 317 326 334 336 349. Per 317, this round of the game may be over. --Tucana25 14:27, 21 December 2006 (EST)

You know if the Judge does rule that all the amendments are to be repealed as well then 317 will cease to exist and then there are no rules guiding what to do in the event that play can't continue. But I did repeal 349 since it explictly said it was to repeal 314. I have a feeling AJF will rule that it only affects rules that explictly state they reapeal a rule and not rules that are repealed as a byproduct of amendments. But in the event that he does rule that all the amendments are to be repealed as well it will probably then repeal all the rules but 308 allowing rule changes because the immutable rule 114 that says you must always be allowed to make rule changes. So the game could techniquely still continue, but we wouldn't have any guidance on how many votes are needed to pass or fail a proposal, which would then be the next Judgement needed. Well that's my opinion on the situation and somehow I think that current Judge will see things in a similar light if not exact. --Dayd 22:19, 21 December 2006 (EST)

314

I believe this rule was placed under 'protection' and has now been repealed. It is currently listed on its page as current but has been removed from the ruleset. --Tucana25 13:42, 21 December 2006 (EST)

Unprotected. Simulacrum 01:26, 3 January 2007 (EST)

Improper Proposal :)

First off I just have to laugh that no one noticed or if they did no one brought forward an act of improper proposal against 355. Notice that chuck didn't put his name on it only after passing it and when I was copying it onto the ruleset saw that his name was missing. Always nice to see an easter egg sneak in. --Dayd 01:13, 21 December 2006 (EST)

Oops .. I don't think I put my name on it at all actually! I suppose without digging into the history it's not obvious who proposed what -- I'm used to nomic systems like email or blogs where it's self-evident. I'm not very good at tracking my own score either... paperwork was never my thing I guess :) I'm going to test a template to see if I can get it to insert a the equivalent of a ~~~~ automatically (the tilde hack is tough since it's an editor substitution, not a wiki markup token) chuck 11:37, 21 December 2006 (EST)

Contrarian Votes

Suber's ruleset rewards voting against proposals that pass, so it encourages some players to play the contrarian just for the points. One interesting neat thing Perlnomic came up with was an 'ethos' property, with an axis of "chaotic" to "orderly". Voting with the majority added to your ethos, making it more orderly. Voting against it got you negative ethos. A "smite" command was then added that would subtract 100 points from anyone with -100 ethos, resetting their ethos back to 0. It took quite a lot of contrary voting to get an ethos that chaotic, but it still limited the strategy (of course Perlnomic never had a points victory condition, but some people just like being on top of the scoreboard anyway). This is a trivial sort of thing to do on a codenomic or wherever you have a really diligent scorekeeper, though it'd probably be a pain to do on a wikinomic like this one. Maybe someone has similar ideas, like diminishing returns of contrarian votes rather than the extreme of a Hammer Of Smiting? chuck 20:49, 18 December 2006 (EST)

I was wondering about that and it occured to me that if you do get close to the point threshold for victory, the way the game is set up is that at that point you have to rely on contrarian votes to win because people are probably going to shoot down all your proposals to knock you down the 10 points. --Tucana25 14:45, 19 December 2006 (EST)

Using an ethos would just limit one's use of the strategy, not eliminate it. You'd just have to save the contrarian votes for special occasions, like getting over the top. Besides, since most online nomics don't reset all the rules after a win, I'm more inclined to just let people win if they clearly deserve it. chuck 09:37, 20 December 2006 (EST)

Gave me a great idea. I'm going to propose the contrarian voting system. And then I'm going to use it for popular support from the "Population". Therefore the more popular you are with the contrarian voting system the more the population supports you as well. I think this could also branch the game so that some people might try to top the scoreboard, or be lowest scorer I suppose, and then some might try to be the "most popular", while others might try to be the villian. Could try into Pro wrestling, but then again might be diamond in the rough. --Dayd 01:13, 21 December 2006 (EST)

Linky linky -- proposal 360 I presume? Let's direct the rest of the discussion there. chuck 11:25, 21 December 2006 (EST)

Assuming that this concept is introduced into the game (and even if it isn't, I suppose), I think the time frames for voting need to be altered. I beleive I mentioned this in a discussion somewhere else. If this passes, however, it would be even more beneficial to wait until after the majority has voted to cast your vote so you know where the census is leaning. If you are attempting to stockpile points, this may already be happening, but if everyone is going to have their popularity affected... You get the idea... --Tucana25 11:02, 21 December 2006 (EST)

Election of Scorekeeper

Since the new rule we need to elect a Scorekeeper. I'd be more proactive and actually create the page, but I'm feeling really lazy at the moment. --Dayd 20:42, 17 December 2006 (EST)

Busy

Hey guys...sorry I'm kind of slacking off here lately. As a high school teacher, I'm pretty busy this time of year - it's the end of the Fall semester and we're getting ready for finals and grades and all that jazz. After next week, I should be able to pick up the slack again - school will be out and I'll be able to think about Nomicapolis again! That said, I do get on here at least once a day and look at things. I'll try to keep off the inactive list by voting, and don't hesitate to request a judgment - that's the first page I always look at. I wouldn't want to shirk my duty. Thanks for your understanding, Applejuicefool 10:06, 14 December 2006 (EST)

Scalability of Pure Wiki?

I've noticed that some proposals that have already had their debate ended haven't been opened for voting. One of them I just went ahead and stuck the "debate is over, must vote" bit in since there didn't seem to be any ongoing debate anyway. On another I comfortable doing that. I'm concerned that all the manual editing tasks are going to overwhelm editors, and that some rules might even fall by the wayside. Some kind of automation would help, where things that can be programmed, such as tracking the state of proposals, should be. Perhaps this could be done with a bot like pywikimedia and some standard templates that the bot knows how to recognize, parse, and modify? I'm not complaining or saying that the sky's falling just yet, but I am a little concerned about how well the manual editing tasks are going to scale. (And speaking of scalability issues, anyone else having major problems with timeouts? Good old Dreamhost...) chuck 13:24, 13 December 2006 (EST)

No problems on timeouts here, but I do agrees with you on the sheer amount of editting to keep everything current. I mean in order to propose a rule you have to edit ###, Talk:###, Proposals, Main Page. And then if you happen to be the one to pass it you have to edit ###, Talk:###, Proposals, Main Page, Ruleset, and possibly User:Name if you scored any points. And with the new Proposals page, which looks nice, is hard to find all the exact line you need to edit, both coming and going. I mean the All rules page seems to have some sore of mechanism to link all mutable and immutable rules. Maybe we just need a page like that to link all Proposed rule templates. Wouldn't be as spiffy looking, but it would reduce stress. Also as for your "debate is over, must vote" it's in the rules 326, which I voted against, that the proposer has to end debate. So either the proposer needs to end it or you have to wait 14 days and discard it. --Dayd 10:39, 14 December 2006 (EST)

I think clever use of templates and categories might help in terms of collecting rules, but the only thing I can see it doing is collecting a set of links. It would still be hard to build the table of open proposals that way. The basic problem is that MediaWiki pages have no concept of metadata. However, subpages might suffice, and in fact one of the first things the the templates documentation for MediaWiki demonstrates is a page transcluding one of its own subpages. So it might be possible to do something like "Debate Closes on {{/Closes}}" followed by an edit link to change it, then the table of open proposals could simply transclude the /Closes subpage of each proposal instead of pasting it. I still have no idea how I'd be able to generate a table row like that for each proposal in a category though -- at some point it's easier to break down and write a macro (and trac makes that a LOT easier than mediawiki) chuck 18:01, 14 December 2006 (EST)

Citizens' Age

Please check out and comment on my draft proposal at User:Applejuicefool/My proposal workspace. Applejuicefool 13:17, 11 December 2006 (EST)

326

tucana25 wrote:

Before I vote, I was wondering if anyone could give me some feedback on rule 326. As of right now the statement declaring that a vote shall end at **date and time** is meaningless. Also, calling an election based on all registered voters includes inactive voters so I don't foresee any time in the near future when we will get 1/2 of all registered voters being involved. I would also like to see the '24 hour' rule on closing a vote be extended to 48 hours. Assuming this amendment is approved, is there any opinion on amending 326 in the future? --Tucana25 13:39, 4 December 2006 (EST)

I agree, the **date and time** wording on 326 is badly worded. The intent is clear, but it still provides wiggle room for word-picky Nomicapolis players. I don't believe it's really expected that we will ever get all registered voters to vote on an issue; that clause exists in the unlikely event that it does happen. As far as the 24-hour thing, I was thinking we might perhaps set a 3-day voting period after the end of the debate, rather than having an undetermined period for voting based on when the last vote was cast. Further comment? Applejuicefool 15:09, 4 December 2006 (EST)

Here is what I would like to see in an amendment to 303, 326 as well as any other rule with similar relation to debate and voting. Debate shall last between at least 3 days. At any time between day 3-7, the proposee can call to end or extend debate. If at 7 days, no extension has been called, the vote shall commence. Voting for a proposal shall last 7 days. If at any time before the 7 days have expired the vote can be called if the needed number of votes to pass/fail the amendment based on the number of active players at the start of the vote (so if there are six active players, if 4 votes for/against are cast the election can be closed). I think something to this effect will give all players enough time to not visit for a few days without totally missing a proposal, yet not have proposal drag out for up to 3 weeks or longer. I am out of time, but I think there were a few other suggestions I had, so I'll try to remember them later. --Tucana25 15:24, 4 December 2006 (EST)

I have another concern with 326. Part 2 states partially, "... Should the proposer fail to call a vote within 14 days, the proposed rule change shall be dismissed...." Does that mean that it failed? Could it fail without a vote? Or is it withdrawn? If so, would there be a change in point status for the proposer? --Simulacrum 20:24, 6 December 2006 (EST)

I haven't looked back through all proposals but i thought there was one that stipulated a proposal failing in that way would penalize at half the standard amount. I don't know what happened with it:repeal or failure to launch or ... --Tucana25 22:16, 6 December 2006 (EST)

Quorum

We have rule 304 which states that quorum shall not be less than 2 players. I am wondering if that rule adequately defines quorum. Is it 2? 1/2 of active players? 1/2 of all players? Given the way things have been running, I assume we have been operating under a quorum of 2 method for all votes. Do we need to create another rule further defining it? --Tucana25 23:48, 3 December 2006 (EST)

IMO, 2 has been working well so far. If we start getting more active participation, we might need to revisit this rule. We have 6 active players, so 1/3 have to vote for it to meet quorum. That sounds about right to me, although i would not be adverse to a proposal setting quorum at 1/3 or 2 players, whichever is greater. Applejuicefool 11:57, 4 December 2006 (EST)

Call for Judgement

Decisions of the Judge is the new page for Judgements. Question however is where do you want the actual questions to go?

I generally read just about everything that comes up in Recent Changes (except usually not player pages or stuff like that), so I'll usually find it. It would be nice if they were all posted to the discussion page of Decisions of the Judge Applejuicefool 19:54, 2 December 2006 (EST)

Nomicapolis:Look and feel

I created a meta-discussion on how we can make the wiki look better. Suggestions and comments are welcome. --Simulacrum 16:28, 29 November 2006 (EST)

326

Important note: per 326 all players proposing a rule change shall set a limit on debate time at the time of proposal. This rule took effect today. I will move this comment to the Game Direction page soon. --TomFoolery 12:47, 29 November 2006 (EST)

Citizens

As you know, I have a proposal in debate which would create Citizens of Nomicapolis. Some people have had questions about what the purpose of these Citizens is. Here are some of the ideas I had:

We could use them as the basis of a Nomicapolis economy. Citizens could be assigned roles to create materials, process those materials into products, and consume those products. Players could start businesses in which they employ these Citizens, possibly earning Nomicapolis money with which they could purchase points.

We could track players' approval ratings among the citizenry. That way, the citizens themselves might actually "elect" players to certain positions, based on this approval rating. The approval rating might depend on factors such as having one's proposals adopted, score, voting record, etc. We might say the player with the lowest approval rating has some penalty.

Population might increase and decrease through natural cycles and/or through vagaries of the economic system.

Simulacrum made the point that this adds a level of complexity to Nomicapolis, and worried about our ability to handle the increasing complexity. Nomic is a game which is all about increasing complexity. By its very nature of changing and generally increasing rules, Nomic is intended to become more complex as it goes.

That said, this rule doesn't dictate that anything needs to be done with the citizens; it simply puts the "raw materials" in place, giving us something to work with should we decide we want to mess with it. Applejuicefool 11:16, 28 November 2006 (EST)

Players

There are eight active players right now.

If anyone knows of any people who may be interested, this game could easily take on a few more players.

As per rule 304 only two players are needed to do business

Speed up rulemaking

I feel there is a need to make some rules regarding clarifications of rules. Sometimes a rule may be unclear or contradicting. There should be a possibility of having an ammendment of such a rule passed faster than normal rules.

I do not think any speed rules need to be introduced. I think the current system will allow for rules to be added quickly. Also part of the game is to create a tangled web of rules that do contradict so that you can "win" not that I really want to "win".

We could enact a rule where the game would go to "Committee of the Whole" mode, where we could enact ammendments by unaminous consent of players active within the last x days. This would address grammar issues, dead-references (which has been around since almost the beginning, and backwards implementation of certain rules such as rule 306. While implementing the committee we could just edit the rules in question and not have actually make new rules to replace them. The game could also go into committee as a whole in the extreme circumstance that a paradox is discovered and we wish to not go into the endgame. This idea is potentially dangerous though. Any thoughts?

Yes perhabs we could declare a state of "law cleaning". During the next few days laws that corrected minor errors and carified things could be passed very quicky. Or alternatively compose a big list of errorfixes into a "lawpackage" and then vote only once for all the fixes. (Maybe the items in the list would still be individual laws for the sake or order, but passed as one) --Shivan 17:31, 16 November 2006 (EST)

Can't we set up a 'Security Council' of active players, work out a list of grammar fixes everybody is happy with then push it through unanimously? Alternatively, give the Judge powers to fix that sort of thing but retain the ability to revert to a former version if the Judge tries anything cheeky. --Finisterre 15:25, 30 December 2006 (EST)

Rules with non-existant references

Rule 306 Refers to Rule 105 that was transmuted. NOT ADDRESSED YET.

Nomic Economy?

I thought of starting up a nomic economic system? I very open to your ideas. The argument against an economic system is that the points already seem to rule the game. But of course we could just make a rule that allows money to be converted to points. Does anyone have any ideas? What could the money be used for?

In the last game I played, CO-NOMIC (see my User Page for link), the introduction of a currency actually helped kill the game. The trouble is that in a wiki-nomic there is so much to do when marking Proposals enacted or failed (as mentioned in a discussion further up this page) that players lose interest in enacting them, waiting for someone else to do it. I think that before we have an economy we should have dedicated players in semi-permanent positions to carry out menial tasks. Perhaps a 'Noimcapolis Caretaker' who isn't voted into office but rather each active player holds the position for a month, and is responsible for marking the various pages and keeping it up to date (within reason). Also, it helps to have a clear idea of what to use currency for. That was CO-NOMIC's other problem- the money served no purpose. Maybe we should see where the population/popularity ideas go first? --Finisterre 15:22, 30 December 2006 (EST)

I think any economic system should involve the population, having the citizens do things in some kind of simple simulation, with us pulling the strings in some manner. The automation really does need code however; even if someone were willing to do it, they wouldn't be willing for long, and the ability would never meet demand. I don't think the wiki would adequately serve the purpose of a highly-automated nomic, so I'm building up Pythonomic to eventually fit the niche .. it's not ready yet, but new players are always welcome to come help steer the direction (plug alert!). Alternately some kind of bot could be used instead, with the wiki being merely serving as human-readable I/O for the bot. Ultimately, a game economy ususally serves no purpose, but the challenge is to make it fun to watch and play with (you can substitute virtually anything for the subject of that first sentence actually). chuck 00:24, 2 January 2007 (EST)

@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 Governor General is defined in proposal [[341]] --[[User:TomFoolery|TomFoolery]] 15:49, 29 November 2006 (EST)
+:The meta-rules sounds a lot like Fantasy Rules Committee.  I think it'd be fine for a "sub game", but I don't think I'd want to see it change everything globally (and poetic verse in nomic '''so''' been done to death) [[User:Chuck|chuck]] 15:58, 4 January 2007 (EST)
 === Adaption of Judge? ===