On Thu, 15 Jul 2010, Ed Murphy wrote:
Yally wrote:
Perhaps we should have a contest. Each player can submit a new player's
guide. Thereafter, Agora votes on which guide is the best and that
player is awarded a win. Then we can combine the best parts of each
guide to create one truly excellent guide.
Fragment:
Q. How do I win? What happens when I win? What's the point of winning?
A.
Agora, as an ongoing game, doesn't end or generally reset itself much
when players win. Currently, it doesn't have sequential rounds, though
the "first game" of Agora (essentially the first round), was won and
ended long ago (we keep Rule 104 around in memory; it's been judged many
times to have no effect on current gameplay, rounds, or speakers).
Rather, at any given time the Rules define multiple parallel Winning
Conditions (Rule 2186), involving, for example, collecting prizes for
performing multiple tasks (Rule 2199), accumulating political power
(Rule 2188) or finding a loophole in the rules to make a player all-
powerful (Rule 2223) or tie the logic of the Rules in knots (Rule 2110).
Achieve a winning condition, and have no losing conditions apply to
you (e.g. no Rests, which are Rule 2228 judicial penalties for breaking
the Rules), and you win!
What do you win? In general, winning only resets the minor part of
the game that let you win (so you don't win twice for the same act). You
get a small measure of political position (Rule 402) but more
importantly, you gain a Patent Title of Champion (Rule 1922).
What's a Patent Title? It's a record of distinction or honor (Rule
649) that's reported regularly by the Office of the Herald. The
importance here is that this record is, in essence, a scroll of honor
covering the whole history of the game back to 1993 (though some windows
of time are regrettably lost). Record a win, and (barring major changes
in fundamental Agoran culture) your record of Championship will join
the rolls of a 17-year history to be reported in perpetuity.
Over time, it's been possible to earn Patent Titles by manners other
than directly winning (for example, in Rule 1922(b), by becoming
acclaimed by your peers as a source of poetry and wit). As can be
seen by rule 1922(a) and (d), these may be distinctions of notoriety
as well as honor.
Precedent holds that even if those definitions are removed from the
rules, you retain the title (and it remains reported) unless
explicitly stripped; hence the Herald's report tells of a colorful
Agoran history filled with admirals, shoguns, samurai, boors, thieves,
spies, heroes, and honorless worms, all of which are titles that are
still legally held by persons somewhere out in the world.
