On 5/31/07, Ian Kelly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In a nutshell, a player named Annabel played for a few months in 1999 and again for a couple of weeks in 2001. A couple of years later, it was revealed that "Annabel" was in fact an illegal dual registration and was never an actual player, throwing the game state into a morass of uncertainty, which was somewhat complicated by a lack of archives from before 2000.
In particular, "harvel" held the office of Assessor for some time after "Annabel" deregistered, producing about 30 reports of adopted proposals. Back then we didn't have rule 2034, which pragmatises the resolution of Agoran decisions, and we had a long tradition, with occasional objectors, that players are persons, not avatars for persons. Together this suggests that when "Annabel" deregistered, "harvel" did as well, meaning that those reports were invalid and without effect. Ultimately, a plurality of Agorans decided to Pretend It Hadn't Happened to avoid a tedious recalculation of the gamestate. The lesson here is that while platonism may be Ideal, most of its shadowy instantiations are Bad.
Some contend that the fall-out from the Annabel crisis was never properly resolved, and that we are no longer playing Agora as a result.
This seems to come from a platonistic theory of identity. One could probably make an argument along the lines of Parfit's reduction of identity that post-Annabel Agora is ``close enough'' to pre-Annabel Agora to count as the same thing. -- Maud Lynn
