This reminds me of a concept I ran across while reading an essay about
Nomic one time called Fork World, where the guiding principle of play is
"no coercion". In Fork World, the group of players who vote against each
rule change and the group of players who vote for are sent to their own,
non-interacting universes where their rules hold power. While it is an
interesting concept, the author points out that after N decisions, the
playerbase would be split into 2^n different groups. In Agora's case,
this would be a number over two thousand digits long and I'm pretty sure
we've never had that many players.
The essay in question is here: http://shirky.com/writings/nomic.html
On 2/22/19 11:45 AM, Kerim Aydin wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 10:22 AM D. Margaux <dmargaux...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Feb 22, 2019, at 12:39 PM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@uw.edu> wrote:
Every so often, someone decides "we're not really playing Agora
anymore" because (in their perception) we improperly papered over some
platonic truth that made everything freeze.
That point of view makes me think of the “sovereign citizens” who believe that
their view of the law is
somehow platonically right, and that it means they don’t have to pay taxes or
whatever.
Never made that connection! Given that, unlike countries, Agora is an
entirely voluntary organization, my personal worry about Agora is not
a "full ossification that almost everyone agrees happened" nor "1 or 2
people saying we were playing wrong" but a situation where two
similarly-sized camps disagree with an aspect, and end up trying to
run two entirely separate games (separate reports, etc.) on the same
list while arguing that theirs is the One True Way. The oldest
existential crisis from Nomic World ("Lindrum World") was a crisis of
this type, and it was only ended when both camps agreed to a method to
converge the gamestate while never agreeing on which was the "true
path" they took to get there, with lots of arguments and rage-quits
along the way.
--
Trigon
