On 8 February 2014 22:45, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > > > Gratuitous argument for the game ending-case: > > If the Judge finds that the game has ended, I request that the > judge further opine on exactly what "ending the game" means, if > only to bring us closure. A (non-exhaustive) list of possibilities: > > 1. The game has "ceased to exist" (the rules and any connection > between properties no longer exists). This is odd; when I > finish playing monopoly, I put it on the shelf, the game still > exists. > > 2. The game has ended in a frozen state, so we can say "all > properties are frozen as what they were at the end of the game." > However, this would freeze certain abilities; for example, I'd > no longer be able to deregister from *that* particular game. > This contradicts the rule allowing me to deregister. > > 3. The game has ended, and all those properties have "reset" > (or perhaps a limited number of things have reset, for example, > only things that have a defined "default" state have reset). > The problem here is, where's the mechanism? Sure we can make > a metagame decision to reset to a "new game" this way, but that's > a metagame decision, not an in-game one. In-game, many of those > quantities have specific regulatory mechanisms, so they couldn't > be put back to default without contradicting some rule. >
This is funny, because now that I've started thinking about it I can imagine many games (eg. boardgames) with rules that do not explicitly allow the game to end as cleanly as intended on a win. Granted, almost no such games have rule precedence, "rules to the contrary notwithstanding" or anything, but still. There're probably a lot of games out there relying on the fact that "player X wins" or "the game is over" overrides everything else, and is a shorthand for other effects. For one example, a rulebook might simply say that "the players take turns clockwise, and on eir turn a player can [...]" or "after the Action phase, move on to the Bureacracy phase". This does not include any "unless a player won/the game ended during the Action phase" text. So in Agora, we must ask: all the stuff that happens back and forth as regulated by the rules, does that need to keep happening when the game has ended? Does a definition of "game ends" or "player x wins" that says the stuff doesn't keep happening need to be backed up by higher power than 1? -Tiger
