Thursday, September 13, 2012

Ascension Address: Syllabus

Welcome to Nomic 104.  The purpose of this class is to teach you how to avoid a stagnant midgame such as the ones from the past few dynasties. 

First, on many occasions poorly chosen victory conditions have made the route to victory obvious too early in the game.  Once there is a victory condition, and some means of reaching it through solo play, players generally stop making proposals that don’t apply to the victory condition.  If the first reasonable path to victory is boring and repetitive, the remainder of the dynasty will be as well.  Therefore, over the course of the semester, students will be required to practice writing victory conditions.

Second, once a stagnant play pattern develops, some players actively avoid breaking it.  They prefer protecting a narrow, optimized strategy from proposals to open the game.  Therefore, starting with this course, the grading criteria will be selected so that the optimal strategy is not narrow.

Repeal all dynastic rules except “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”.  Replace “Baker” with “Student” and “Simon” with “Professor”.

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