Poor “dead. The player named Clucky has achieved victory” gone but not forgotten.

A rule criminalising… interpreting a rule in a particular way?

In general there is a requirement when playing games to interpret the rules according to their actual meaning. I try to adhere to that even when it doesn’t benefit me. (Note that my votes may appear to conflict with this – that’s because votes on DoVs don’t have to match your belief about whether the player has won, and votes on CFJs don’t have to match your belief about whether the CFJ changes anything.) One primary exception to this is that, to reduce conflict, I sometimes go along with everyone else’s interpretation of how something works even when I think it’s wrong, rather than endlessly arguing into a void (an exception that occasionally makes it hard to post DoVs, which are currently and inexplicably belief-based).

Suppose that a rule accidentally introduces a Nomicer’s name in a situation where the word would otherwise be meaningless, but this doesn’t appear to be intended. I think, in that situation, that the only reasonable interpretation is to interpret it as the Nomicer’s name. This rule would criminalise interpreting it like that, which would therefore criminalise the act of trying to interpret the ruleset at all.

Although this situation is fairly unlikely, I also think it’s pretty much untenable and not a situation that we should risk ever coming up.

“A Nomicer should not interpret any text in the ruleset as being the name of a Nomicer unless it clearly and unambiguously is intended to refer to that Nomicer” is not criminalizing the interpretation, it’s guiding it. There’s no consequences, other than trying to perform an action under the incorrect interpretation. This happens all the time: someone interprets a rule incorrectly while performing an action, the illegal action is reverted or a CfJ corrects the situation, and we move on.

The second part of that sentence is definitely a prohibition, because it directly describes an action that should not be taken.

Although I’m fine with the second part of the sentence, I also think it’s unnecessary – names can only be changed by proposal, and if some future sets of players collectively passes a proposal that does that, it is probably their own fault.

(The only time I can remember something like that happening is the JeffSheets incident, which Josh perpetrated and Kevan turned around on him. A summary is available on the dynastic history for the Fifth Metadynasty; scroll down to the section about JeffSheets to see what happened. In general I don’t think it’s desirable for the core rules to block that sort of thing – it was fun gameplay and the players voted for it.)

@ais https://blognomic.com/archive/joining19

@Josh: I don’t think this proposal blocks that scam – the scam was presumably intended to inject text into the ruleset that would be interpreted as a rule, not to reinterpret rule text in the ruleset as a name.

Mild AGAINST for it feeling a bit strange to have an act of interpretation become against fair play. That gives a sense that if a player-alluding rule feels a bit ambiguous but I think I could argue that my interpretation would work, then taking any actions based on that would actually be un-Fair, and I should check with the group first to determine if it is “truly” ambiguous or not, so as to avoid a Fair Play breach.

(Would this still stop a Dead The Player scam? Creating a new account with a new name isn’t really an “amend”.)

I will say that there’s already plenty of interpretation in Fair Play - the prohibition on core scams breaks on what an individual thinks of as a scam (and we’ve already seen that in action this dynasty), and the prohibition on spamming pretty much says “you’ll know it when you see it”. Not that that’s a good argument for adding more - but I will be happy to see the back of “the player named” constructions.