On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 11:03 PM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > Also: fun's fun, but I will also deregister if scshunt persists in these > changes. Consider that an objection, as well.
Oh, come on. Although I feel obliged to counter-scam (not that it's particularly likely to work, since we already elected em dictator...), Imperial Nomic is one thing Agora *hasn't* tried in the last 5 years or so. Actually, a broader view (poorly worded since I'm tired): I was thinking about the fact that we're in a bit of a slump and the dictatorship might coax some life out of the game, but I realized that I always think that way when someone pulls off a dictatorship scam, but what's often coaxed out, rather than mere activity, is a bunch of rancor - even though the scams are usually fairly tame compared to this one - which can go on to sort of ruin the whole thing, and bely the idea that good scams are part of our culture and something we celebrate. Admittedly this is a vague claim, and dictatorship scams are sufficiently few and far between that I don't really remember the details of any; and as the perpetrator of several of them for all I know it's my behavior that caused the rancor (one of them overlapped with my deregistration two years ago for mostly unrelated reasons). But I think that people do tend to have knee-jerk reactions to being "mousetrapped" - it applies to contract mousetraps too, the theme is that someone is now lord over you - and it reduces the potential for fun that scamming and counter-scamming represents. Although it's not like these deregistrations are surprising... I see deregistration as a less passive act than people seem to think it is. It's an explicit accusation that someone has made the game no longer fun to play - not just that he's gotten an advantage, since quitting a game because you lose is generally considered bad form (if tempting), not just that he's done something you don't like, but that he's transgressed so far outside the bounds of fair play that the game is ruined. Which is probably the intended point to some extent, but it's very severe: nobody is going to want to repeat or celebrate behavior that made someone deregister, but that fine trigger prevents exploration of the limits, when as a game of laws for the sake of laws, without any practical application, much of our purpose is exploratory. This is a weird case, because obviously at least two of the people who voted for the dictatorship did so without knowing what scshunt would do with it, and honestly I think this could have been better if we'd modified quorum for Plutocratic proposals first (well, I proposed doing so, anyway - Plutocratic deserves/d to not have a single-person veto, it defeats the purpose) and e'd then pulled the scam with less compatriots; the fact that the proposal passed or almost passed by popular vote reduces the interest of a very cute misdefinition. But on the other hand, even though our consensual dictatorship policy of "create some interesting scam reward and/or a win and repeal it" is less strict than some games', where a win is the only permissible persistent reward (though at least in BlogNomic, to name one, a win is a serious boon, since it confers the right to lead a dynasty), it's still fairly boring - all these machinations and obscure interpretations and bizarre actions (which, by the way, from my observation across multiple games, tend to be very fun for people who are interested and paying attention and taking relevant actions, but annoying, exclusionary, to those who are not and perhaps just want to play whatever the game normally amounts to - which explains some of the rancor) end with a little final burst (or, perhaps more commonly, a belated judgement) and a collective sigh of relief. And that's it. As extreme as it sounds, I like the idea that a dictatorship scam can result in an actual dictatorship for a little while. I mean, we probably would have passed the bulk of scshunt's Rule Changes had they been proposed... they're more opinionated than they would be in proposal form (repealing a bunch of rules because he doesn't like them, going straight to voting persons), but in some sense that's a feature, not a bug. It's a sample of a different flavor of rulemaking, but (name change aside) not the end of the Republic. Actually, this is the closest I've seen to (but still much less extreme than) Lindrum World.
