BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

I like this in principle, but I feel there’s a bit of a disconnect between the first and second paragraph.

The first paragraph talks about how changing the representation of the gamestate is an “attempt to perform that action”, but the second paragraph talks about “performing a legal action”. The problem is that “legal action” isn’t defined and the first paragraph doesn’t actually do anything to validate that the attempted action is in fact legal.

I think we need a section which actually confirms it. We need to say that if an action is performed on incorrect gamestate, and would have been legal to perform with the same choices were the gamestate correct, then the action is legal and the gamestate becomes what it would have been if the action was performed on the true gamestate.

I consider that to be a principle of Nomic generally, but you’re right that it should probably be expressed explicitly in the rules. I’ll think for a bit about the right way to word it.

And I’ve edited the proposal to take your feedback into account (the second-last sentence of the first paragraph is new).

I haven’t been watching the past few rounds, but I prefer the current version of the rule. IMO updating representations of gamestate should be auxiliary to performing an action, not tantamount to performing the action itself. Like, in my mind I don’t perform an action by updating the wiki page, I update the wiki page to communicate that I’ve performed an action. I also think defining how certain actions are performed, and what a legal action is might be a bit out of scope for this rule.

I don’t think I can support this as written. On its face it’s just too long, rambling away at an edge case, kicking the wordcount of the rule up by 33% in an attempt to legislate away an ambiguity that BlogNomic as a whole seems to be largely uninterested in. But there’s a couple of specific quibbles that I’m going to take issue with along the way.

“Performing a tracker update that is clearly intended to be an attempt to take a particular action” is a tricky one, as clarity is in the eye of the beholder, but in particular where an action requires what this text deems as ‘tracker updates’ in multiple locations. For example, in the current ruleset, placing a bid on an Opportunity is tracked as a comment on that Opportunity, but the amount of Wealth a player has is tracked in the wiki, so performing this action requires two separate gamestate updates that cannot be concatenated into one. How does that interact with “attempting to perform an action succeeds if and only if that action is legal in the actual gamestate”? A later sentence allows for actions to be performed over multiple edits but it is still the case that the game exists in an illegal state under this proposal, even if only for a short period of time, and it is not clear how those tensions are prioritised. Does the evaluation of legality change if the time elapsed between the first edit and the second is over a minute? Over twenty minutes? Over an hour? It shouldn’t change but under the proposed text it would have to for the game to remain playable.

In a broader game culture sense this also just moves the game in the direction of the overly punctilious. If you accept at face value the proposition that any declarative move to take an action automagically updates the platonic gamestate and that the game board and all the counters are just a metaphorical contrivance - the stalks through which the I Ching are divined - then it opens the door to, and I can think of no kind way of putting this, a lot of silly bullshit that repeated evidence suggests that no-one has any time for, in a way that contradicts the way that the rest of the ruleset is written. This is evident in a single substantial contradiction: this text says “the tracker merely represents the Gamestate tracked there, and is not the same thing”, but the Appendix defines gamestate as “any information which the Ruleset regulates the alteration of”. This is most important for the ruleset itself, which is gamestate under the glossary definition but under the text of this proposal is some sort of phantom reflection of a mythical ideal idea of rules that exists somewhere in magic space.

This may be how things woork in other nomics but I find it to be wholly unsuited to the way that BlogNomic’s ruleset functions.

For the reasons I said earlier.

@Zack: That would be a big change in how BlogNomic has always operated (or at least since I started playing many years go). At present, for actions that don’t have any specific way to perform them stated in the ruleset, the actions are performed by directly updating the tracker – there isn’t a separate step of specifying that you’re performing the action. However, a) that isn’t clearly stated in the current rules (it’s sort-of stated in the current version of “Representations of the Gamestate” but not in an obvious way), and b) it has lead to lots of inclarity about the details, both with respect to the exact timing of an action and with respect to how actions are performed in cases where the tracker is wrong.

Many nomics instead take actions by posting a message stating that you’re taking them in some specific location. BlogNomic operates like that some dynasties (e.g. in my coregency with Josh, actions were generally taken via making a Dice Roller comment) and for some actions where the tracker updates would be awkward for many players to do (e.g. non-admins idling themselves, which is done via blog post or comment). Having it operate like that by default would be a major change, though, and one that I don’t think there’s any particular desire to see – so this change instead tries to make the current method work correctly in more cases.

In any case, the current version of the rules is already considered by the active playerbase to work in the “perform an action by changing the tracker” style, and this proposal doesn’t change that; it just tries to make sure that more cases are defined correctly.

(My reply to @Zack above was to a few comments above, in the post which didn’t contain the voting icon.)

@Josh “‘tracker updates’ in multiple locations”:
I think this proposal correctly handles the “update Wealth and Bid trackers in two different places”, whereas the current rules don’t – it’s designed to ensure that partially completing the action is still taking the action (as the title suggests), and (as in the current rules) anyone can complete the partially complete action by updating the other tracker.

@Josh “This is most important for the ruleset itself, which is gamestate under the glossary definition but under the text of this proposal is some sort of phantom reflection of a mythical ideal idea of rules that exists somewhere in magic space.”:

I think the ruleset already works in the “ideal idea of the rules” way, rather than necessarily matching the ruleset tracker. This is needed for, e.g, proposals to work correctly if the admin skips a step in adminning them. For example, suppose an admin enacts a proposal but fails to make all the changes to the ruleset that have been suggested. Under the “the tracker represents the ruleset” but they are different point of view, the proposal changed the ruleset but the admin just forgot to update the tracker, so anyone can update the tracker and we’re fine – additionally, future proposals can also be enacted (and use the correct version of the ruleset when doing so).

Under your point of view, if the admin doesn’t update the ruleset page then the adminning of the proposal is an ongoing action and remains ongoing for some time, and that in turn means that the proposal is still pending (because it has not been “resolved” according to the definition in the glossary). That in turn means that any future proposals can’t be resolved. This seems to just make the game worse for no benefit?

(Note that your point of view only functions at all if you consider illegal edits to the ruleset page to have no effect on the actual ruleset – otherwise anyone could illegally edit the ruleset page in a way that retroactively makes their own edit legal, even a non-player. As such, your point of view doesn’t do anything in terms of making the ruleset page necessarily a reflection of the actual ruleset – as it may contain edits that were ignored by the game – but it’s harder to reason about.)

(I just noticed the special case “If otherwise legally applied, the application of any status through the blog post editing form is sufficient to consider that votable matter to have been correctly resolved” – I assume that’s intended to work around the “a proposal was half-enacted and now the queue is blocked” scenario that would otherwise not work under Josh’s point of view, although I’m not convinced that it actually works. It may in fact make it impossible to resolve proposals and CFJs in the usual order; as soon as the proposal is marked as enacted it is considered to have been correctly resolved, so editing the ruleset after that point is illegal because the proposal was resolved already. Again, this is an example of a problem that exists in the current ruleset but would be fixed by this proposal, which considers the changes to all happen simultaneously as soon as the admin attempts to perform the “resolve a proposal” action.)

“for actions that don’t have any specific way to perform them stated in the ruleset, the actions are performed by directly updating the tracker… However, that isn’t clearly stated in the current rules…” I disagree that this is unclear. I actually think the current Representations of Gamestates puts it elegantly:

> changes to gamestate which is tracked in a specific place (such as a wiki page) do not take effect until the representation of that gamestate has been updated to match the authorised change

> the historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate, tracked in the history of whatever resource is used to track the gamestate modified by that action

Coupled with this core rule:

> The gamestate tracking page for this dynasty is the Life Goal Progress page of the wiki. Unless otherwise stated, all publicly tracked gamestate information is tracked on it.

I can see how it might be a little confusing at first glance, but it basically boils down to: If a tree falls in the forest and it isn’t tracked on the wiki, it didn’t actually fall. If it is, then it fell when the wiki was updated to say it had fallen.

@Zack: Your viewpoint implies that you can take actions without actually doing anything visible to other players, and they have a delayed effect later on, when the tracker is updated.

This messes with things like weekly actions (e.g. I can take an action late on Sunday, then update the tracker on Monday, and the action counts against the previous week).

More importantly, it also implies that a tracker update has to be fully correct for the action to occur. That generally makes it impossible to perform an action while the tracker is wrong (because the new state of the tracker is also wrong, as it was presumably based on the old state) – this proposal is intended to try to make that case work. I also don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t apply to proposals or CFJs – if a proposal “increase each player’s Wealth by 10” passes, and anyone’s Wealth is wrong on the tracker (or perhaps even if any tracked variable is wrong on the tracker), the proposal enactment would be considered to not have changed the gamestate. This would be a particular problem for CFJs as it would mean that they wouldn’t typically be able to fix gamestate issues, which is one of the things they’re most frequently used for.

> The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate, tracked in the history of whatever resource is used to track the gamestate modified by that action, where possible, or in the wiki page Gamestate Modifications if this is not possible.

You can’t take actions after the fact because the historical fact that an action occurred is regulated by the ruleset and must be tracked where the ruleset says it must be tracked. So if you didn’t track it the changes to gamestate that occurred as a result of the action you took when you took it, then you didn’t take any action.

If you didn’t track the changes to the gamestate that occurred as a result of the action you took when you took it, then you didn’t take any action.*

So whatever the feelings are on this wording, I do think the current rule does need an update from reading through it. If a change is made on top of a previously made incorrect change, then the gamestate can’t be said to be “updated to match the authorised change”, so the action will never have happened.

I’m voting   for now, but I’m definitely willing to consider other wordings that resolve that issue.

Dropping in a precautionary idle-AGAINST just to counterbalance Raven1207’s currently tiebreaking DEF-FOR.

@Kevan: thanks for that – I was trying to figure out if I could counterbalance it on my own by voting DEF, but having an idle player do it is much simpler.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I think I have to agree with both Josh and Kevan on this.