The Agora Guidebook


Chapter I. Introduction

The official name of this game of Nomic is "Agora." It is played via e-mail, with two main distribution lists. Official messages (those required by the Rules to be sent by Officers) are sent to nomic-official@teleport.com, and business messages (those required to be sent to the Public Forum) are sent to nomic-business@teleport.com. Discussions are carried out at nomic-discussion@teleport.com. To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@teleport.com with body text 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 23 Oct 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 numerically 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 sometimes useful to have available for reference.


Chapter II. Vocabulary

Agora uses some terms which may be confusing or used in a way other than their standard usage. It's not necessary to memorize these all now, but refer back to this list as you read the Guidebook. Here are some important terms to know:


Chapter III. Spivak Pronouns

A matter of some note among Agorans is how to be referred to. The "he or she" construct becomes old very fast, and the "they" construct is considered by some to be grammatically incorrect. Referring to an indeterminate person (or even a certain person of indeterminate gender) by the word "he" is unacceptable to many.

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.     Neuter  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  emself
and 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.


Chapter IV. Rules

Each Rule is either Mutable or Semimutable. The vast majority, at least at the current time, are Mutable; as of 23 Oct 1995 there are only 18 Semimutables.

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 MIs - Rules with higher MIs take precedence over Rules with lower MIs. If two Rules have the same MI, then the Rule with the lower Rule Number takes precedence.


Chapter V: Players

The term "Player" includes anyone registered to play in Agora Nomic. This includes the Speaker, Officers, and other players. There is only one Speaker, and every other Player is a Voter (though nowadays the Speaker may vote as well).

The duties of the Speaker include:

The Speakership is the reward for Winning the game. In the past, this "reward" consisted of losing one's Vote and doing all the work of distributing Proposals and counting Votes, for several weeks. Nowadays these responsibilities are distributed among the Voters, and the Speaker is able to Vote.

Chapter VI: Making Proposals

Any Player not On Hold may make a Proposal. There are two types of elements that can be put in Proposals: Rule Changes can Create, Amend, Repeal, or Mutate (that is, change the MI of) a Rule, while Directives make other changes to the game state. A Proposal can contain any number of either type, in any combination.

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:

"Title" can be anything you want (but try to choose something descriptive), and of course "Proposal text" is the Rule Changes and/or Directives contained therein. Thus:

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.

Protoproposing

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.


Chapter VII: Voting

Once a Proposal has been submitted to the Promotor, e will distribute it. The voting period for a proposal is exactly seven days from the date and time of the distribution.

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. Ordinarily, players may use only one Extra Vote per proposal (although there are ways around that restriction), and may trade or sell them if they wish. There are currently few ways to gain Extra Votes, but there are a number of ideas to fix that problem.


Chapter VIII: The Judicial System

There is an Officer known as "Clerk of the Courts" (CotC). E administers the Judicial system, which consists mainly of Calls for Judgement (CFJs). A CFJ is a request for a Judging on the legality of a specific move or a clarification of the correct interpretation of a certain Rule. An interpretation CFJ must specifically allege that a Rule should be interpreted in a certain way. For example, the following is NOT a legal CFJ:

The following IS a legal CFJ:

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, UNDECIDABLE, 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.


Chapter IX: Other Offices


Chapter IX: Currencies and the Like

There are several major quantifiable assets that a Player may posess. They are listed here, with descriptions:

Marks, Coins, and EVs can be freely traded among Players by sending a message to the appropriate recordkeepor.

Chapter X: The Patent Titles

As defined in the vocabulary list, a Patent Title is a title given to a Player usually as an honor but sometimes for other reasons. Here is a list of all non-Unique Patent Titles and how they are awarded.


Chapter XI: Organizations

Organizations are a recently-defined class of Entities which are composed of multiple Players and Rules. There are several main types of Organizations, although more may be defined.

Groups

A Group is just that. It is a group of Players who (usually) have a common purpose or idea of the direction they want Agora to take, although not all Groups are ideologically homogeneous.

Each Player can belong to only one Group (or be unaffiliated). Groups are allowed to cast Votes as if they were Players, provided that they have three or more Players. They are allowed to cast EVs, provided that they possess them and their Ordinances permit it.

Each Group has a set of Ordinances, which are like a miniature Ruleset for that Group. The Group's Ordinances can 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 do not restrict their Player's voting. In general, the Members of a Group must follow the Ordinances as if they were Rules in the Ruleset.

Each Group has an Administrator, called the Ordinancekeepor, and an Executor, called the Vizier. The OK keeps track of the Ordinances, and is effectively the Group's spokesperson; the Vizier keeps track of the Group's Treasury, and transfers to and from it. Both the Vizier and the OK are always members of their Group.

A Group is created when three unaffiliated Players agree on a set of initial ordinances and a name, and send eir application in to the Registrar.

Contests

In nearly every Nomic, one can see a number of subgames pop up over time; Agora is no exception. We have had our share of sweepstakes and games that were made part of the Rules. However, it seemed inelegant and wasteful to have to pass a whole set of Rules to start a subgame, and Repeal them when nobody was interested... plus the fact that not everyone would be interested in the first place. Thus, Contests were created to fill in that gap.

A Player may belong to any number of Contests. Contests may have any number of Contestants. The Contestmaster of a Contest may or may not also be a Contestant of that Contest.

Each Contest has a set of Regulations. Like Groups and Regulations, Contestants must always follow the Regs of all Contests they belong to as if those Regs were Rules in the Ruleset. The Contestmaster must also always follows the Regs of eir Contest.

The Contestmaster of a Contest is both its Administrator and Executor. E carries out any moderating that must go on, and e reports transfers that are made as a result of Regulations.

A Contest is created merely by posting the initial Regulations to the Public Forum. The Player who posts the Regs is the initial Contestmaster.

Contracts

Contracts are an Organization of a different sort. It has many similarities to both Groups and Contests, but many differences as well. They were created, much as in real life, to ensure that someone would have to keep eir word or pay dire consequences.

A Player may be party to any number of Contracts, and a Contract may apply to any number of Players.

Each Contract has a set of Terms. Like Regulations and Ordinances, Terms are meant to be followed; however, there are provisions for them not to be followed. (In other words, you are fully allowed to violate the Terms of the Contract, but if you do you have to pay the consequences.) The penalties for Breach of Contract are very severe.

The Administrator of all Contracts is the Notary. E does not have to be a party to the Contract. Furthermore, e is not allowed to divulge the terms of any Contract--unless one of the Parties to a Contract releases that information, it is completely secret.

A Contract is created when all parties to the Contract agree on its exact form, and send identical copies to the Notary.


Chapter XIV: Agora History

I. Early History


By Charles E. Carroll: ccarroll@students.wisc.edu

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.

II. A Few Great Scams


By Beth Moursand: bethmo@microsoft.com

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.

III. A Few More Scams


By Ronald Kunne: KUNNE@crnvma.cern.ch

The Black Repeals (or Agora at the Brink...)
The Black Repeals were a Scam to profit from the 2-point award for proto-proposed Proposals. At the time, that is April 1994, the PP award was given at the time of distribution of the proposals rather than at the end of the voting period.

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.

The CFJ Scam (or How to make somebody of your choice Speaker)
The Nomic World at one time crashed, because somebody submitted a too large number of CFJ's. The idea has its uses, especially since a rapid Judgment entitles the Speedy Judge to five Points.

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.]

IV. Late 1994 to Early 1995


By Jeffrey Caruso (elJefe): jlc@triple-i.com

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!



First edition authored by Chris "ChrisM" Monsour
Revised for second edition by Jeff "elJefe" Caruso and Don "Vanyel" Blaheta
Revised for third edition by Don "Vanyel" Blaheta
(c)1995, Agora Press. Freely distributable.
Comments to <jlc@triple-i.com>