You'll have to forgive me if I say things which seem obvious -- please remember that I've been away for 9 years and no longer know what is common knowledge.
I think the most basic insight is that events (such things as making proposals, voting, transferring units of whatever media of exchange are defined by the Rules, the gain or loss of various legally relevant properties, and so on) occur as the result of messages sent by persons (one would like to say 'players', but there's registration to consider). As a design principle, rules should not cause events to occur - the danger in their doing so is that events occur without anyone noticing so that vast swathes of game play can in retrospect seem to have been illegal. Instead, well designed rules restrict themselves only to defining the permissions, prohibitions and obligations on persons to send messages of various kinds. The challenge for designing a terse and elegant initial ruleset for mailing-list based play is to define 'event', 'message', 'send', 'publish', 'permit', 'require', 'prohibit', etc in the simplest and sparsest way. Suber designed his Initial Set for over the table play, so these issues simply never came up for him. That is why initial rulesets based largely on his initial set are actually very poorly designed for mailing-list based play. On 28 June 2013 22:27, Charles Walker <charles.w.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 28 June 2013 05:49, Steven Gardner <steven.gard...@monash.edu> wrote: > > What I'd be looking for is a ruleset which fixes bugs likes changing rule > > numbers, defines simultaneity, incorporates some lessons about > pragmatism in > > a minimally committal way and generally leaves the rest open for players > to > > explore politics and law and not bug-fixes and mechanics. > > I've actually started the project you suggest of designing an ideal > inital ruleset for blitz style play. > > I would be interested to read how you might phrase your "lessons about > pragmatism". > > -- Walker > -- Steve Gardner Research Grants Development Faculty of Business and Economics Monash University, Caulfield campus Rm: S8.04 | ph: (613) 9905 2486 e: steven.gard...@monash.edu *** NB I am now working 1.0 FTE, but I am away from my desk** on alternate Thursday afternoons (pay weeks). *** Two facts about lists: (1) one can never remember the last item on any list; (2) I can't remember what the other one is.
