On 08/23/17 22:46, Owen Jacobson wrote: >> On Aug 23, 2017, at 11:37 PM, Cuddle Beam <cuddleb...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> like playing I Want To Be The Guy > Steady on! > > Actually, I broadly agree with your overall thesis. Precedent and history are > _important_, and I think it’s worth understanding why things are the way they > are before tearing them down or rebuilding them another way - but the way > things are is fairly knob-heavy, and I cannot in the slightest blame K for > deregistering out of concern for comprehension. > > My personal coping strategy has been to ignore the mechanics that don’t > immediately interest me, more or less, and to focus intently on the ones that > do. However, that’s a coping strategy, not a solution: I’m surely missing > interesting opportunities by mostly-disregarding ribbons and patent titles, > or by not trying terribly hard to win.
I think we've fallen into Bad Game Design lately. This is something I'm working on a thesis for, so I may reserve some thoughts, but generally: We should look at Agora like a boardgame primarily. Sure there's some automation, but it's off to the side. Equivalent to the many helpful apps for more complex games. Primarily, rules are understood and administered by players. With that in mind: * We have too many subsystems. It's hard to admit because nearly all of them are neat and well designed, but it's just too much in one game at once. Do we need three different binding agreements (agencies, pledges, organizations)? Probably not. We should either combine them or remove the least popular two. What about all of our winning conditions? * We've conflated complexity and ambiguity unpleasantly. Some of this has to do with the proliferation of SHALL NOTs and punishments. Some of this is the sheer volume of rule text that currently exists. The interesting complexity should come from how players react to situations, and how does reactions collectively change the gamestate. It shouldn't come from ambiguity about what can and can't be done, or what the mechanical outcome of a purported action is. We're playing a social game, not a single-player simulation. * We just generate too much gamestate right now. It's hard to get people to track all of it, and it's hard to keep up with that tracking. I think this is primarily emergent from the above two, but it's still a distinct problem. > As a sketch, I’d like to draft two broad proposals: > > # Repeal the Referee > > * Convert SHALL NOT et al into something equivalent to CANNOT or IMPOSSIBLE > * Modify SHALLs to allow any player to fulfil them if the obliged party does > not do so > * Destroy the office of Referee entirely, as well as the associated card rules > > We can always reinvent it, but punishment is probably the wrong paradigm for > Agora as it is today, on the whole. A much more narrowly-scoped punishment > system for dealing with specific malfeasance might be a practical > replacement, and clearing the ground will make it easier to re-draft. As a result of my above thinking, I agree here but for separate reasons. SHALL NOTs and punishments encourage more ambiguity than they're worth generally. We should limit them to behaviors we can't platonically control, like repeated sloppiness or belligerence. Most actions should be platonic, with some pragmatic-platonic backups that mostly already exist (the way reports ratify and get CoE'd is a great example). > > # Repeal Organizations > > They’re moribund, really. No organization presently has more than one active > member. This is hard for me because I really want multilateral entities to exist within an economy, but I do see the point here. At the very least we should probably scale back the expenditure and bankruptcy mechanics. I love them but they seem to be mostly unused. > -o >
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