Game-direction

From Nomicapolis

Revision as of 01:24, 7 December 2006 by Simulacrum (Talk | contribs)

Nomicopolis is off to a pretty good start right now. It'll be a bit bumpy while we get used to the rules and the wiki format. This page is intended to be the "message board" for draft proposals and ideas for proposals. Feel free to add sections and comment on anything.

Contents

326

tucana25 wrote:

Before I vote, I was wondering if anyone could give me some feedback on rule 326. As of right now the statement declaring that a vote shall end at **date and time** is meaningless. Also, calling an election based on all registered voters includes inactive voters so I don't foresee any time in the near future when we will get 1/2 of all registered voters being involved. I would also like to see the '24 hour' rule on closing a vote be extended to 48 hours. Assuming this amendment is approved, is there any opinion on amending 326 in the future? --Tucana25 13:39, 4 December 2006 (EST)

I agree, the **date and time** wording on 326 is badly worded. The intent is clear, but it still provides wiggle room for word-picky Nomicapolis players. I don't believe it's really expected that we will ever get all registered voters to vote on an issue; that clause exists in the unlikely event that it does happen. As far as the 24-hour thing, I was thinking we might perhaps set a 3-day voting period after the end of the debate, rather than having an undetermined period for voting based on when the last vote was cast. Further comment? Applejuicefool 15:09, 4 December 2006 (EST)
Here is what I would like to see in an amendment to 303, 326 as well as any other rule with similar relation to debate and voting. Debate shall last between at least 3 days. At any time between day 3-7, the proposee can call to end or extend debate. If at 7 days, no extension has been called, the vote shall commence. Voting for a proposal shall last 7 days. If at any time before the 7 days have expired the vote can be called if the needed number of votes to pass/fail the amendment based on the number of active players at the start of the vote (so if there are six active players, if 4 votes for/against are cast the election can be closed). I think something to this effect will give all players enough time to not visit for a few days without totally missing a proposal, yet not have proposal drag out for up to 3 weeks or longer. I am out of time, but I think there were a few other suggestions I had, so I'll try to remember them later. --Tucana25 15:24, 4 December 2006 (EST)
I have another concern with 326. Part 2 states partially, "... Should the proposer fail to call a vote within 14 days, the proposed rule change shall be dismissed...." Does that mean that it failed? Could it fail without a vote? Or is it withdrawn? If so, would there be a change in point status for the proposer? --Simulacrum 20:24, 6 December 2006 (EST)

Quorum

We have rule 304 which states that quorum shall not be less than 2 players. I am wondering if that rule adequately defines quorum. Is it 2? 1/2 of active players? 1/2 of all players? Given the way things have been running, I assume we have been operating under a quorum of 2 method for all votes. Do we need to create another rule further defining it? --Tucana25 23:48, 3 December 2006 (EST)

IMO, 2 has been working well so far. If we start getting more active participation, we might need to revisit this rule. We have 6 active players, so 1/3 have to vote for it to meet quorum. That sounds about right to me, although i would not be adverse to a proposal setting quorum at 1/3 or 2 players, whichever is greater. Applejuicefool 11:57, 4 December 2006 (EST)

Call for Judgement

Decisions of the Judge is the new page for Judgements. Question however is where do you want the actual questions to go?

I generally read just about everything that comes up in Recent Changes (except usually not player pages or stuff like that), so I'll usually find it. It would be nice if they were all posted to the discussion page of Decisions of the Judge Applejuicefool 19:54, 2 December 2006 (EST)

Nomicapolis:Look and feel

I created a meta-discussion on how we can make the wiki look better. Suggestions and comments are welcome. --Simulacrum 16:28, 29 November 2006 (EST)

326

Important note: per 326 all players proposing a rule change shall set a limit on debate time at the time of proposal. This rule took effect today. I will move this comment to the Game Direction page soon. --TomFoolery 12:47, 29 November 2006 (EST)

Judge

Dayd is right, The Juice is the Judge, or will be as of tomorrow, and we will need to hold another election on the 1st. --TomFoolery 14:02, 29 November 2006 (EST)

See my response below in the "Dayd wins" section - the special election is not over yet. Applejuicefool 14:12, 29 November 2006 (EST)
I know that its not over yet, but you are the projected winner in the latest exit poll, so you should give your speech and decide what to do with the Decisions of the Judge page. I have also created a page to handle next month's election. --TomFoolery 14:17, 29 November 2006 (EST)
I notice a potential flaw in 321: There's no provision for removing judges from office without a supermajority vote. There's also nothing in that rule (or any other rule) that states that there can only be one judge. That means that each month a new judge will be elected, until we are all judges, unless one or more of the sitting judges is removed from office by vote or resignation. Applejuicefool 15:56, 29 November 2006 (EST)
Tonight at 23:10 (EST) you can request a judgment (You are an active player) from the Judge (Yourself) to clarify that position. I believe that the Judge will rule that there can be only one Judge at a time, and by electing a new judge each month, we are in fact removing the previous Judge from office. This will only work if there is a supermajority vote for the next nominee, or there is a proposal to address this issue. I would make such a proposal, but I'm at my limit (3). --TomFoolery 16:01, 29 November 2006 (EST)
The text of 321 says "the Judge" the implication being that by using the word "the" and not "a," 321 limits the number of Judges to 1. Since 321 also calls for a vote on the 1st of every month, it implies that the previous Judge will cease to be Judge on the date of the election. --TomFoolery 20:35, 29 November 2006 (EST)
May we use the 'discussion' page on the "Decisions of the Judge" page to provide feedback. Such as in ajf004, there is (i assume) a typo: "Assuming neither of the first two criteria occur, the will continue to hold office until the next judge is elected". I assume 'they will' instead of 'the will' was the intent. Seing as how no position such as Supreme Grammarian is yet in place, what is everyone's opinion? Should the Judge be able to edit for intent, and if so, what is the time limit. Do we need to make a formal proposal to get this changed? And i guess back to my other question, where is the best forum for this discussion? --Tucana25 18:14, 1 December 2006 (EST)
Sure, use the discussion page to provide feedback. I don't see anything to prevent the Judge from editing his rulings. I would imagine this ability would only apply while he is judge. I will edit it now before midnight! Applejuicefool 21:30, 1 December 2006 (EST)

Citizens

As you know, I have a proposal in debate which would create Citizens of Nomicapolis. Some people have had questions about what the purpose of these Citizens is. Here are some of the ideas I had:

We could use them as the basis of a Nomicapolis economy. Citizens could be assigned roles to create materials, process those materials into products, and consume those products. Players could start businesses in which they employ these Citizens, possibly earning Nomicapolis money with which they could purchase points.

We could track players' approval ratings among the citizenry. That way, the citizens themselves might actually "elect" players to certain positions, based on this approval rating. The approval rating might depend on factors such as having one's proposals adopted, score, voting record, etc. We might say the player with the lowest approval rating has some penalty.

Population might increase and decrease through natural cycles and/or through vagaries of the economic system.

Simulacrum made the point that this adds a level of complexity to Nomicapolis, and worried about our ability to handle the increasing complexity. Nomic is a game which is all about increasing complexity. By its very nature of changing and generally increasing rules, Nomic is intended to become more complex as it goes.

That said, this rule doesn't dictate that anything needs to be done with the citizens; it simply puts the "raw materials" in place, giving us something to work with should we decide we want to mess with it. Applejuicefool 11:16, 28 November 2006 (EST)

Players

There are six active players right now.

If anyone knows of any people who may be interested, this game could easily take on a few more players.

As per rule 304 only two players are needed to do business

I think we better get more players soon, because it is getting harder and harder to introduce new players to the game since the game get's more and more complicated. I know a forum at utopiatemple.com where we might be able to recruit some. Does anyone think that is a good idea?
--Shivan 17:15, 16 November 2006 (EST)

I agree that we could use some new players, heck, I would be happy if all players listed in the census were active. However, I would caution against using forums that aren't nomic-specific or dealing with at least gaming in general. Any posting of links on sites otherwise might be considered spam and would be flagged as such. If you are already a community member of the aboved-mentioned site and are in good standings there, then I would encourage you to contact one of the moderators or admins and ask if it would be appropriate. I just don't want to give this wiki a bad reputation.
Having said that, I want let everyone know that I did a little search and found that we are currently ranked #28 on the list of most visited wikis hosted on editthis.info. I don't know if that is really something to proud of or not, I would assume so. Also, I entered the search terms: active nomic games on google.com and Nomicapolis showed up on the first 100 listings in the results (near the bottom of the page), so we are... out there. It gave me an idea, perhaps we could look through those search results and try to find websites that might be receptive of plugs or announcements of a game that is active and accepting new players.
I've also been mulling over an idea of maybe e-mailing political science and/or law professors and instructors at colleges and universities in hopes of getting their students involved here maybe for extra credit. But like I stated above, I don't like spam and that idea is as close as one can get to it. --Simulacrum 01:03, 17 November 2006 (EST)

Seeing how I am a political science major I have been putting out general feelers so see who might be interested in playing. I am considering doing some advertisement at least in my local realm. --Dayd 11:00, 17 November 2006 (EST)
Utopiatemple is deticated to gaming.

Nomic Positions

Minister of Order / Gamemaster (for lack of a better name)

Should create a position for what Simulacrum does right now, even though we give it to him? Keeping an eye on thresholds, making sure points are more or less correct and such...

Governor General?

I haven't yet proposed this, I'd just like to get some feedback on it.

Governor General:

  1. There shall always be a player designated "Governor General". This player's authority is activated when a player has the won the game or the game is unplayable or when there is unanimous consent for their powers to be activated.
  2. The Governor General is elected by a simple majority. The Governor General may be recalled from their position at any time by a simple majority.
  3. The Governor General may resign at any time without consequence.
  4. When the Governor General's powers are activated their role is to make the game playable again. To do so, they have the authority to repeal rules, amend rules and to reset any attributes such as point counts of all players to an equal amount. The Governor General should make the minimum amount of changes possible to make the game workable again and should make all players equal in status.
  5. Any changes the Governor General makes when their powers are activated is completely up to their discrestion, but may be over ridden by unanimous consent (excluding the Governor General in this vote.)
  6. Once the Governor General's powers have been activated and they have finished making the game playable and equalizing players, they shall no longer be Governor General and a new election for this title shall be called. This does not preclude this player from becoming Governor General again.
In theory I'm in favor of player differentiation such as unique roles for players. I had been toying with the idea of proposing the position of Supreme Grammarian whose job is to summarily correct grammar and spelling errors in the rules. I have an English degree and am certified to teach English (though I'm teaching science - go figure) and minor errors occasionally glare out at me. This game is the ultimate rules-lawyer game and these errors could potentially be abused. Another idea would be the Metanomic General. This position would rotate through the players - once its power is used, the position would automatically rotate to the next player on the census. The power is this: The Metanomic General would devise a meta-rule which provides some stylish limit or outline which rule change proposals must follow in order to be considered proper. A meta-rule would last a month, at which time the next MG would implement his meta-rule. Examples might be: Rule proposals must be in verse; Rule proposals may not use the letter "e"; Rule proposals must consist of a single sentence; etc.
Anyway, the Governer General is a good idea. I think that, if winning simply resets the game, then there should be some in-game benefit for previous game winners - that way there's some built-in incentive to win. Applejuicefool 22:06, 15 April 2006 (PDT)
I like those suggestions, especially the Supreme Grammarian. My nomic experience is pretty limited but I have seen well-meaning rules exploited by very minor loop holes, so someone who can copy edit would be good in keeping our rules tight. sinblox 19:18, 16 April 2006 (PDT)
I agree that the idea of a Governer General is a good one, I also think that the Supreme Grammarian would definately be worthwhile. I would prefer that the Metanomic General be contained into a sub-game with some sort of award for active participation. This is only because I am not good at that sort of thing but I am willing to try it out. Simulacrum 22:54, 17 April 2006 (PDT)

Governor General is defined in proposal 341 --TomFoolery 15:49, 29 November 2006 (EST)

Speed up rulemaking

I feel there is a need to make some rules regarding clarifications of rules. Sometimes a rule may be unclear or contradicting. There should be a possibility of having an ammendment of such a rule passed faster than normal rules.


I do not think any speed rules need to be introduced. I think the current system will allow for rules to be added quickly. Also part of the game is to create a tangled web of rules that do contradict so that you can "win" not that I really want to "win".
We could enact a rule where the game would go to "Committee of the Whole" mode, where we could enact ammendments by unaminous consent of players active within the last x days. This would address grammar issues, dead-references (which has been around since almost the beginning, and backwards implementation of certain rules such as rule 306. While implementing the committee we could just edit the rules in question and not have actually make new rules to replace them. The game could also go into committee as a whole in the extreme circumstance that a paradox is discovered and we wish to not go into the endgame. This idea is potentially dangerous though. Any thoughts?
Yes perhabs we could declare a state of "law cleaning". During the next few days laws that corrected minor errors and carified things could be passed very quicky. Or alternatively compose a big list of errorfixes into a "lawpackage" and then vote only once for all the fixes. (Maybe the items in the list would still be individual laws for the sake or order, but passed as one) --Shivan 17:31, 16 November 2006 (EST)

Rules with non-existant references

Rule 306 Refers to Rule 105 that was transmuted. NOT ADDRESSED YET.

Nomic Economy?

I thought of starting up a nomic economic system? I very open to your ideas. The argument against an economic system is that the points already seem to rule the game. But of course we could just make a rule that allows money to be converted to points. Does anyone have any ideas? What could the money be used for?

About time (no pun)

I don't know if anybody else has come across this but I see that this wiki is displaying at least two different timezones. One is UTC which is the wiki software default, the other looks like the server's local time EST. I personally have no way of correcting this as it requires editting a php file on the server. I have requested that our host on editthis.info reset our global timezone to UTC (a neutral time, in my opinion). In the meantime, I would like to request that players do not propose any further rule-changes that implement a narrowly defined window of action of less than 48 hrs (though I'm not really worried about it,) and also be somewhat lenient in enforcement of the rules if there may be a question of lag or whatnot. I do not think that major problems exist but I just wanted to let y'all know.

Example of what I am talking about:

  • 05:10 is time in UTC as of this edit using {{subst:CURRENTTIME}}
  • 00:10, 18 November 2006 (EST) is a sig timestamp that is labeled as EST using ~~~~~.

I want those two to be the same so that there is no confusion as to if voting began to early or if some one missed the deadline etc.

By the way (sorry about the rambling), speaking of timezones, where is everyone else located? I am in Texas of US and my timezone is CST—Central Standard Time which is -6:00 (UTC). Simulacrum 00:10, 18 November 2006 (EST)

Hey! Me too! I live in Big Spring, which is about 40 miles east of Midland on I-20. As for the time thing, perhaps anybody with a time critical post (proposers, voters, etc.) should just add the CURRENTTIME thing to their posts. Maybe we should make that a rule? Or amend 306 to include it? Applejuicefool 10:10, 18 November 2006 (EST)

Well that's interesting...I'm located in Indiana EST and I changed my setting to display local time. Did anyone else do that as well? I mean it's hard for me to believe that my local settings are having global impact. Also since that wiki is set for UTC that is the offical game time. I don't know if that's understood, but that was what I was working with even though I'm EST. --Dayd 10:05, 18 November 2006 (EST)

Alright, after pulling my hair out over the past few hours I have found a work-around for the time issue. If you want your comments, votes, or anything else to be timestamped in UTC format, you will need to edit your preferences like so, in the text field labeled Nickname place the following text: 
-- [[User:<Yourusername>|]] {{subst:CURRENTTIME}}, {{subst:CURRENTDAY}}
 {{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}} (UTC)
Make sure to check the box that says Raw Signatures. To sign your username use three tildes: ~~~ This fix comes with a drawback though, those who implement this will ALWAYS have to save the page that they are signing TWICE. I will defer to the wisdom of the masses as to whether this should be codified. -- Simulacrum 08:17, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Maybe we should just use EST as the offical time zone. Since that is the "offical" time zone of the wiki. It would be easier to check the time since you can preview a page and it will give you the "offical" time. Course I guess the other would work too if you changed your sig. This way just sounds like more work. --Dayd 10:07, 28 November 2006 (EST)
That's a good point. I will revert my sig back to the way it was. Just to be clear, one of the reasons that I made a hassle about this is that I wanted to include a working clock on the Main Page but I can't do that with the way that part of the wiki is set up for EST. It's not really needed though. Simulacrum 15:00, 29 November 2006 (EST)

I posted this note last night on the JudgeElection page, but I thought I'd put it here since I'm not sure if anyone noticed it there. When the time is recorded using tildes, it is about 50 minutes behind EST. This post should be timed around 22:15 EST. --Tucana25 21:26, 2 December 2006 (EST)

I know... Though, I could of swore that it was only lagging about 15 minutes or so a week ago. I have no way of fixing it and it is really getting annoying. Anybody else have a take on the situation? --Simulacrum 02:42, 3 December 2006 (EST)


User:Chuck/Indivisible Rules (DRAFT)

I totally munged up the name, it was meant to be "Indivisible Votes" but I don't feel like deleting the page at the moment, and it's just a draft anyway. Comments would be appreciated on this draft proposal (just follow the the link in the heading) --Chuck 18:29, 6 December 2006 (EST)

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