On Sat, 22 Feb 2014, Fool wrote: > On the contrary, it used to be explicitly stated "winning the game does not > cause Agora to end", and moreover rule 101 used to say Agora "since its > inception has functioned not only a game but as a society". Then the ruleset > was radically overhauled. > > In the new ruleset there were no statements that winning the game does not > end, no statements about how Agora has functioned since the start. "Agora is a > game of Nomic." If this does not signal an intent to break from tradition, it > should at least signal that the prior tradition lost a lot of weight.
To the extend that intent matters (not much!), I agree that I purposefully moved back towards the "we're playing a game of nomic" in the re-write, and away from the "we're a society" angle. However, the operative part is not just "game" in isolation, but a "game of Nomic". As I argued in an earlier email, we now have enough history of nomics in general to say that games of nomic are quite unclear about what happens when a win occurs - the very act of blurring gaming and metagaming in the principles of the ruleset leaves it unclear. This is, in part, why the original Suberian ruleset made sure to specify that the worst that could happen to you was leaving the game, because in nomic the in-game and out-of-game are in a very different place than in traditional games (didn't Vlad publish an actual novel about a game of nomic getting out of hand that way?) > But if winning didn't end the game, it seems it had no effect. (No titles, no > nothing.... gosh, what a ripoff!) We should prefer an interpretation where > "winning" has effect, and "winning" seems like the more important one to give > effect to. It has the effect of making "omd won the game on such-and-such a date" part of the history of the game. If more is desired, that fact can be converted into something shiny, as omd has already made a proposal to do. -G.
