SUB
nomic-discussion
, SUB nomic-business
, or SUB
nomic-official
, or all three.The Rules of the game are contained in the Ruleset. The Ruleset, as of 18 Apr 95, is published by the Rulekeepor in a Logical format. The Numerical format, formerly used, listed the rules in numerical order. (Each Rule has a reference number associated with it; however, when Rules were amended their numbers used to change, so Rules on any certain topic tend to be scattered around the Ruleset.) The Logical Format presents the Rules grouped into sections based on their subject matter. The Logical Ruleset is much easier to understand, especially for new Players; however a copy of the Numerical Ruleset is useful to have available for reference.
Thus, it has become Agora practice to use the Spivak pronouns to refer to a third person singular of indeterminate gender. These were first introduced to Agora quite some time ago by Blob, who claims to have no gender at all. They were adopted joyously as a simple solution to a touchy problem and are still in common use in the Ruleset and discussion.
It is, then, important to know the formation of the Spivak pronouns. This is done by taking the third person plural form ("they") and removing the "th" at the start of it. In the subjective case, the final "y" is also removed. Thus:
Masc. Fem. Neut. Plural Spivak ===== ==== ===== ====== ====== he she it they e him her it them em his her its their eir his hers its theirs eirs himself herself itself themselves emselfand so on.
It is currently under minor debate as to what the Spivak version of "Mr." and "Ms." would be; there are three major factions. One favours using "Mir." (the derivation of which is an interesting exercise in folk etymology), one favours "H." (for "Honourable"), and one favours ignoring this entirely and just using "Mr.", "Ms.", or whatever suits them.
The Spivak forms will be used throughout the remainder of the Guidebook.
Each Rule has an associated Mutability Index (MI) which is currently restricted between 1 and 4. All Mutables have an MI of 1. Precedence among Rules is determined by MI's - Rules with higher MI's take precedence over Rules with lower MI's. If two Rules have the same MI, then the Rule with the lower Rule Number takes precedence.
The duties of the Speaker include:
To make a Proposal, a Player sends the Proposal to an Officer called the Promotor, who numbers it and issues it for voting. The correct form for a Proposal is as follows:
---------------------------- Proposal XXX (Player) Title Proposal Text ----------------------------Where
Player
is the name (nickname) of the proposing Player,
and Title
is the Title of the Proposal (all Proposals must have a
Title).(e.g.:)
---------------------------- Proposal XXX (BobJones) Make Bob "Nomic Emperor" The Player named "Bob" shall be known as the Nomic Emperor. ----------------------------Rule segments quoted in Proposals (for inclusion, Amendment, removal, whatever) should be less than 72 characters wide, not including indentation. If possible, Proposals should be shorter than 10 lines, not including blank lines (this garners a bonus), and should not be longer than 25 (as this earns a penalty). Rule Changes to Amend a Rule must mention the name or number of the Rule to be Amended and give a specific replacement text.
It is considered good manners to 'Protopropose' an idea before making an actual Proposal. Nowadays there is even a small reward. To Protopropose, just send your Proposal (marked 'Protoproposal') to the Public Forum, between 3 and 14 days before submitting it as a Proposal. Usually some commentary or rationale is sent along with it.
e.g.
---------------------------- Protoproposal BOB1 Make Bob Emperor The Player called "Bob" shall be known as Emperor of Nomic. ---------------------------- [As everyone knows, Bob is perfect. We should glorify him in this way!]
Votes should be sent to another Officer called the Assessor. E will collate them and distribute the results. Legal Votes are FOR, AGAINST, or ABSTAIN. The only legal effect of Abstaining is to fulfill Quorum. Voters receive one point for each Proposal on which they Vote.
When the Voting is over, for each Proposal a Player has submitted
e receives (F-A)
points, where F
is the number
of Votes FOR and A
is the number of Votes
AGAINST. Note that only Votes directly by Voters count for
this point gain or loss. (At various times, non-Player entities have
had a Vote.)
There are now floating around a number of individual "Extra Votes". A player who has one of these may use it to cast an Extra Vote on one Proposal, after which it vanishes. Players may use only one Extra Vote per proposal, and may trade or sell them if they wish. When the total number of Extra Votes is depleted a new batch is created and given to all Active Players.
---------------------------- CFJ XXX Caller: Bob How should Rule YYY be interpreted? ----------------------------The following IS a legal CFJ:
---------------------------- CFJ XXX Caller: Bob Rule YYY should be interpreted such that Bob is known as Emperor of Agora Nomic. ----------------------------CFJs should be submitted to the CotC. E or she will choose a Judge randomly from the list of Players, excluding the Caller (the Player making the CFJ) and up to three Players that the Caller chooses to bar from Judgement. After the CotC has distributed the CFJ, the Judge has one week in which to make a Judgement. Judges receive three points for judging a CFJ, and an additional two points if their Judgement is "speedy," meaning submitted to the CotC within three days.
All Judgements are either TRUE, FALSE, UNDECIDEABLE, or UNKNOWN. A Judgement must be accompanied by reasons and/or arguments for the Judgement. After a Judgement has been distributed by the CotC, Players may insist on its Appeal. If at least three Players do so, the Judgement is Appealed, and is re-Judged by three separate Justices. These are the Speaker, the Clerk of the Courts, and the Justiciar. The Justiciar is an Officer whose sole duty is to Judge Appeals.
These three Justices make their individual Judgements, and submit them to the CotC. If at least two of them agree on the Judgement (i.e. TRUE, TRUE, FALSE) then the majority Judgement is official. If they are split three ways (TRUE, UNDECIDED, FALSE) then the Judgement is UNKNOWN.
( 10 * N * (1 + G/6) )
,
where N
is the number of Players currently in the game and
G
is the number of games the Player in question has already
won. Points are generally considered to be a measure of one's skill. New
Players begin with a score equal to the average of the scores of the other
Players, excluding all negative scores. As of the Currency Reform of June
1995, Points are now officially Currency, and fall under the Rules for
Currencies.
---------------------------- Mr. Herald: I hereby transfer one Kudo from Bob, for attempting to become Emperor of Nomic, to Joe, who made Proposal 1862, which I really liked. ----------------------------Remember that you can only transfer two Kudos per week, and the two donors and two recipients must all be distinct players.
Each Player can belong to only one Group (or be unaffiliated). In the past, Groups were allowed to cast Votes on each Proposal just like a Player; this was abolished in January of 1995. Each Group has a set of Ordinances, which are like a miniature Ruleset for that Group. The Group's Ordinances specify how the Group casts its Votes. Some Groups require their Members' Votes to be cast as a bloc on certain Proposals (i.e. all FOR or all AGAINST), while others split their Votes.
---------------------------- I, Bob, hereby make an Oath that I will transfer 10 Points to Joe if and when he sends a message to the Public Forum expressing his acceptance of me as Emperor of Agora. ----------------------------Oaths used to be legislated and an official part of the game. Even though they are no longer official, it is still EXTREMELY bad form to break an Oath. Don't do it.
---------------------------- ANNOUNCEMENT OF CONTEST This announcment creates a Contest named "Bob's Contest" with the following regulations: 1. The entry fee is 10 points, payable to the Contest Fund. 2. Each Contestant guesses a number between 1 and 100. 3. After one week, the player guessing the largest number not guessed by another contestant receives the entire Contest Fund. The Contest then dissolves. ----------------------------
I had been a Player on Nomic World for several months. In May 1993 I graduated from Illinois, and left there. In Nomic World I went "On Hold" (or whatever the NW equivalent was--I think it was "On Vacation") with the intention of returning from time to time over the summer, and then full-time once I came to the University of Wisconsin and got an account here. I first returned to Illinois in late June 1993 for about a week, and checking my e-mail, discovered that Nomic World had crashed.
There was some discussion of ressurecting Nomic World, in the state it had been in when it crashed, as an e-mail game, but that would have involved some severe bending (if not breaking) of the Rules, so it was decided that it would be better to start anew for an e-mail game.
I wrote the Agora Initial Set essentially as a composite of several Initial Sets I had. Peter Suber's original ftf set, the Nomic World Initial Set, and there was also another Initial Set I had (which I think was sent to me by Dave Bowen, but I'm not sure) which was written for e-mail play. It gave me the idea for the Speaker to solve what was called "the problem of simultaneity"--i.e. if people gave their own proposals numbers, we might well end up with duplicated numbers. In this Initial Set the Speaker was much more of a "benevolent god," almost like the Game Master in RPG's, and not really a player. This seemed, to me, contrary to the spirit of Nomic so I made the Speaker a Player as well. So that the Speaker would not be overwhelmed with additional work that the Voters added, I gave him the "veto"--i.e. a two-thirds vote was necessary to make a Rule Change affecting the Speaker's duties which the Speaker did not approve. Keep in mind that in the initial set there was no Rulekeepor, Scorekeepor, or CotC--the Speaker did it all. (It's true that even with my initial set, you needed to put a fair amount of trust in your First Speaker not to act psychotically, but this was much much more so in the pbem initial set I had. For this reason, at least to me, the Patent Title of First Speaker and the retention of Rule 104 in the Ruleset is much more than just recognizing Michael as the Speaker for the first game--it's also a sort of "thanks" for behaving benevolently towards the game, saying that he behaved honourably even though he could have taken all kinds of liberties within the Rules.)
I also added in the Initial Set a few things that had been learned from NW--"Points may not be gained, lost, or traded except as permitted by the Rules" had not been in any of the other initial sets that I looked at! (But it had been added in NW.) Several people gave me helpful comments during this period--as I said before, Dave Bowen sent me some initial sets, and Michael Norrish gave some helpful comments as well. I'm sure there were other people who contributed as well, but I don't remember who. But as I had a little less than a week in Champaign-Urbana to do this, the Initial Set was still quite rough. I tried to clean up any major problems, but I was well aware there were many lesser problems. "Fix them!" I said, "from *within* the game! This is Nomic, after all!" (After all, if an Initial Nomic Set is already an Ideal Set, it's a pretty boring game of Nomic. :)
As I said, I was only in contact (netwise) for about a week, so I couldn't join initially as a Player. But Michael Norrish agreed to serve as First Speaker, and the first Game began in late June/early July. I joined in September 1993, when I got my e-mail account here at Wisconsin.
The name "Agora" didn't come until much later. Originally we were just "Nomic," and in fact had no official name. (When other netNomics were first discovered, we were unofficially "yoyo.")
Incidentally, I still have the Initial Set if anyone wants it, and I *think* I still have the other initial sets I drew on somewhere.
Here's some history from a Watcher's viewpoint...
Actually, the name Agora was chosen fairly recently. When this Nomic started, it was just referred to as Nomic, or sometimes E-Nomic for electronic or email Nomic. After the Tabula Nomic got started and there were rumors of other Nomics starting as well, it became necessary to distinguish between the various Nomics; since this one ran out of the "yoyo" machine, it was often referred to as Yoyo. This offended the sense of dignity of certain players, so someone -- I think it was Wes, or maybe Garth, but I'm not at all certain -- took a straw poll for preferred names, and then proposed a Rule Change making the most popular name, "Agora", into the official Name of the Game.
The "Walrus scam" was one of the most entertaining bits in the entire history of Nomic, IMHO -- not for the scam itself, but for the discussion which followed. The scam was fairly simple. A Rule had been passed that prohibited proposals from directly giving/subtracting points to/from voters based on their votes for/against that proposal. The Walrus proposal, instead, created "happy walruses" and "sad walruses" and awarded them to those who voted for/against the proposal. Then, some miniscule amount of time later (I don't remember the exact figure, but it was a number of seconds with a large negative exponent), all of the walruses would convert themselves into positive and negative points and self-destruct. After the Walrus proposals passed, some of the more studious members of the populace pointed out that this time unit was small enough that, due to the uncertainity principle, the actual numbers of walrusses could not be determined, according to modern physics. From there, the discussion became more and more obscure, including speculation on the "ideal walrus" and whether an ideal walrus had no hair, or an infinite number of hairs. The officer responsible for awarding the points refused to do so until the question as to whether the walrusses could be measured was settled by CFJ; this got the originator of the scam so annoyed that e finally quit the game in disgust.
The CFJ scam was one of Stella?'s. There was no limit to the number of CFJ's one player could submit, and there was a point award for returning judgement, so Stella? conspired with another player to give him the win: Stella? transferred some points to eim, and then submitted several hundred CFJ's, all of which were meaningless, the number calculated to be enough that the collaborator would receive enough points for judging eis randomly-allocated portion of them that, added to eis previous score plus the points transferred from Stella?, it would pass the number needed to win.
The name Stella? refers to an ancient scam, involving a player named Stella. Many of the players at that time accused Stella and the scamster of being the same person, a convenient alter identity invented to be able to work the scam. Both of them hotly disputed this, maintaining to the end that they were separate people. More recently, Alice was said to be an alter identity of Wes, and after Wes and Garth both vanished in similar ways, there was speculation about them as well. All of these individuals have stood up for their own reality, but for a while this was sort of a running gag.
Another bit of history which deserves to be noted so that it won't be repeated was the "secret word" sweepstakes. For some reason I can't understand, many new Nomic players like proposing sweepstakes and lotteries of various sorts. One such was proposed and passed, in which the responsible officer was to pick a "secret word" and the first person to use that word in a message to the listserver won a prize. A player with too much initiative and too little common sense posted a large portion of the dictionary in messages of a hundred words apiece, spamming everyone's mailboxes and interfering with real world functioning.
There, I hope that's useful.
Submitting a large number of PP'ed proposals would therefore give an easy gain, as the penalty for all those failed proposals would fall only in the next game.
There was one problem: in April we had limits on the allowed number of Proposals. The limits were 15 for the number of Proposals up for vote and 7 for the number of proposals that could be submitted by one Player.
The Case of the Black Repeals therefore started with the submission of 165 proto's of the form in the beginning of April:
---------------------------- Proto-Proposal Repeal a Rule Repeal Rule N (where N ranged of all Mutable Rules) ----------------------------These PP's were largely ignored by the Agora Community. However, at the same time a CFJ was submitted that showed that the proposal limits were illegal and void.
A couple of days later the CFJ was judged TRUE and the road was clear. Speaker Garth Rose received 165 proposals and felt himself forced to distribute those.
The Scamming Player received 330 Points and all hell broke lose.
The reason was that not many Players bothered to vote on these Black Repeals (TM). But, the Abelians (a Group) conspired to clean up the Ruleset, by voting unanimously FOR the Repeals: they were accepted.
The Agora community split in at least three camps. There were those advocating that we should go on with this mutulated Rule set (and mind you, even the Rules on Proposal Voting were Repealed). Another group prefered an extraneous solution: either to start over or just ignore the Black Repeals. A minority tried to invent an emergency proposal just to keep Agora floating.
Agora no doubt came close to a schism.
However, just in time, someone pointed out that all the Black Repeals all missed declarations (at that time declarations were required for ALL proposals) and thus were improperly submitted and shouldn't have been voted upon. A sigh of relief went up, the community collectively ignored the Black Repeals (and the 330 Points reward, sulk), but a split was avoided.
This salary can sometimes be used to win a Game.
The occasion game when the CotC went On Hold and choose another Player (let's call him M) as his successor. M. immediately was approached by S., with a plan to make M. Speaker. Here's how it worked: S. became CotC and immediately (well sort of, we had server problems in that day and age too) send out 500 CFJ's, all with randomly chosen Judges. Thirty of those CFJ's were assigned to Judge M, who immediately replied with preprepared Judgments.
Bingo. The 30 times 5 Points, plus the 40 that S. had transfered to M. before the start of the Scam, were sufficient to make M. the next Speaker.
Only later S. realized the problem with this Scam. Not all Judges replied, and CFJ's had to reassigned and reassigned and.... ad nauseam.
[ed's note: Hint. The author of this history was nicknamed 'Stella?' at the time of this scam. The First Speaker of Agora was (and is) named Michael Norrish. Both these Players are still around today.]
This has been a fairly lively period; many of the concepts appearing above, such as Extra Votes, Contests, Degrees, Blots, etc. have appeared during this period. On the other hand, a number of the old entities that people had grown used to disappeared, such as Group Votes, the Vototron, Marks Interest, Stocks, the Proposal Sweepstakes, etc. Life unfolds.
One of the major themes has been the removal of the "Immutable Rule" concept from the Ruleset. Now all Rules have "partial mutability", with a Mutability Index which defines how much precedence they command, and how hard they are to change. Also, Rules are no longer renumbered when amended. This is a major change which greatly improves the stability of the precedence relationships.
Much of the work of crafting the proposals to achieve this has been done by the Reform Group, and not all of it has been without controversy. In fact "controversy" would pretty well describe this entire period.
Since August, when I started Watching, we've seen several major explosions in the Ruleset, and one or two really good scams:
There was the typo in Proposal 1004 which deregistered people after inactivity of two DAYS (instead of two weeks, as intended). There was the Marks Scam in which the scammer used a loophole in the "Game Entities May Not Be Arbitrarily Changed" rule to transfer everyone's Marks to emself.
There was the time in October when one player attempted to place everyone On Hold retroactively from the beginning of August, in an attempt to deregister those players and force their Groups to dissolve. This provoked quite a bit of discussion but was eventually ruled illegal.
Later, a Group was formed with the purpose of scamming the Coin laws. In those days a dissolving group's Coins were automatically redeemed at 2 points each. The Millionaires Group was formed very briefly, long enough to mint 4,000,000 coins and give them to Timothy. His 8,000,000+ points were enough to win the Game...
Not all the Rules surprises had to do with deliberate Scams. In December, an innocuous CFJ determined that in fact the Kudo Rule was defective and did not allow for the transfer of Kudos at all!
Some of our controversies did not directly involve the Ruleset at all. In November, the pace of the Reform proposals provoked a reaction in the form of an unofficial and secret group, known as "SLOWDOWN!" There was a lot of emotional reaction to the fact that this group used anonymous mail to broadcast their position, with some Players doubting that the group really existed, or contained any Players, and others debating the propriety of using anonymous remailers. We even had a copycat anon-mailer! Well, it was interesting for a while...
In December the Speaker (who was also Scorekeepor), claimed overwork and went On Hold to get rid of the Scorekeeporship. Eventually e abandoned eir position as Speaker, and the Scorekeepor position was filled part-time by various people before regular reports resumed in March.
The period since January has been one of great creativity. After wiping the slate clean of non-Player voting entites, both old and new Players began floating various ideas for transferrable votes, new ways of winning (besides Points), new ways of NOT winning, and reorganizing the position of Speaker. We even had a competition to create an Agora Anthem!
The Extra Vote rule, one of the first fruits of this effort, had a number of loopholes; originally it awarded a Player one EV for each proposal on which e ABSTAINed. Sounds reasonable enough, but it actually encouraged submitted large numbers of frivolous Proposals to give plenty of opportunities for voting ABSTAIN.
Another amusing loophole was that the limit of 5 EV's per player was worded in a way that made it ineffective, and one player who habitually ABSTAINs on everything managed to get a windfall of 35 EV's!
A Proposal of my own (Contests) slipped through with even worse loopholes. My idea was to allow subgames of Agora whose regulations were enforceable in the Nomic Courts. What actually resulted was a Frankenstein's monster in which anyone could be nominated as Contestmaster of a contest against their will, and subject to its rules! And this was not the only problem! Hopefully by the time this is published the rewritten Rule will be in place.
This brief review of some of the recent highlights cannot do justice to the full range of creativity that players have shown, in trying to construct a Nomic Economy, in crafting beautiful theses and outrageous scams, and in using the Rules as the raw material for making logical pretzels. In hopes that the spirit of friendly one-upmanship and logical limit-testing will continue, I conclude: long live Agora!