To repeat my thoughts from the other post: I suppose the idea of “a blog” with an RSS feed is quite outmoded now, and this might be a barrier to entry for some people. BlogNomic has a basic Twitter feed which we could make more prominent in the sidebar, to catch the eye of players who don’t have a context to keep up with a blog.

There’s also the inertia that if the last dynasty was a quiet two-horse race, the players might not see it as a problem if the current one is. I’m not sure what we should be doing when we see that happening, though. The last dynasty tried an incentive to recruit friends, but the mechanic was never invoked. Perhaps a more thoughtful mentor/pupil system (tied to no particular dynasty) would help encourage the more cautious lurkers.

I’ve shown blognomic to some people i know in real life and on other sites I visit recently to try and grow the current player base but I agree that maybe a few site updates could help. Twitter has become quite the social outlet and using the games Twitter more could get the eye of others who are looking around for a game to try out.

I understand and share your frustration at low-activity dynasties. I would have liked to participate in this one, but Blognomic typically takes up an hour per day of my time, and I just don’t have it to spare right now. We were at pretty high player numbers back in February—I wonder if part of this slowdown is just people having a busy social summer. (Or the player base getting older, having family responsibilities, etc.)

A dynasty that had bring-a-friend as a requirement for entry (or victory) might be interesting, though it might also produce plenty of signups or unidles and then still not enough activity to move the queue. In terms of lowering the barrier for participation, the vague idea of letting the twitter bot take votes or tying some other mechanic to it comes to mind, though I’m not sure what to do with it.

For my part, I only have a limited amount of time and attention, and Blognomic doesn’t always make the cut.

As for suggestions, the process of registration might need some streamlining, now involving (for perfectly valid reasons) an email to Kevan, a post to the blog, and separate logins for the blog, the wiki, and the GNDT. Then again, the ruleset is presumably still the biggest hurdle to cross for any new player and I’ve been here way too long to have a realistic perspective on how problematic this is.

Other than that, some sort of open discussion forum might help to keep some noise going if the game isn’t providing any fireworks and also keep lurkers engaged with the site, the community, and the game. The IRC channel used to be this years ago, but a livechat isn’t an optimal channel of communication for a relatively small group of people with limited schedules who are spread around the world. Some sort of comment stream (not necessarily twitter-based) that appears in the sidebar might be cool for this.

Or we could start a Stone Crusher Dynasty and invite all the Chinese spambots to join.

Heh, I remember the spam bots. But out of curiosity now, how world spread is the current active player base anyway?

Tasmania, Australia.

Also, a non-blog discussion solution would be much appreciated.

I’ve been thinking about replacing the GNDT with something autogenerated from the wiki (displaying the contents of a particular page in the sidebar, with the most recent edit summary beneath), but haven’t had time to look into it.

I did go through and put an explanation of BlogNomic at the top of the sidebar, for logged out users, a few days ago - also clarifying that it’s fine to join halfway through a dynasty, which may have been underplayed before.

Replacing the first stage of signup with a simple web form would probably help - we could add whatever questions we wanted to that step, perhaps asking the player how confident they are about the game and if they had any questions. And yes, some kind of embedded sidebar discussion would be good for helping new players out and making the players look approachable. Anybody know of any good ones?

Slack is everybody’s favorite thing right now, right? Similar functionality to IRC with a much lower barrier of entry. I think creating a new Slack site is free, and it looks like there are some widgets that would expose a given channel in a sidebar.

I think BN’s speed is both its blessing and its curse. As you’ve noticed, I’ve been inactive for the past few days—I’ve just been too busy to check the site. And now I’ve come back and the dynasty’s over. Perfectly understandable, but not necessarily engaging. But for those who do have the time to stay involved continuously the excitement can be a draw.

Similarly, the dynastic model keeps things fresh but after going through a dozen or so resets the novelty has worn off for me. I’d be in favour of increasing the length of dynasties and the complexity of gameplay, though I can see how this might repel new users. More radical revamps would also be in the cards for me.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, I think player volume is self-reinforcing. All else being equal having more players will result in having more players and vice versa.

Also, I think it’s worth bearing in mind that we have a very high turnover rate among new users and in my experience the more active users tend to be the older ones who keep coming back. Retaining those users is probably even more important than attracting and keeping new ones.

Finally, even though there’s been a clear downward trend in activity over the past few years, I’ll echo Brendan’s caution that we may be in a particularly unfortunate slump at the moment.

As for format, I sadly agree that blogs (and especially EE) are a bit archaic—it was the first thing I noticed when I came back earlier this month, and not in an “oh that’s quaint” way either. I’m still quite active on IRC myself but I think I’m in the distinct minority there too. The cumbersome wiki+gndt+blog thing has always been annoying and I’m sure it puts some people off. Something like Slack could be interesting—if we can get people to adopt it as part of their regular routine. I don’t use it normally but I’ve tried it and I think it’s pretty cool.

I’ll vote twitter as I think it’s a bit fast moving and ephemeral to be a reliable game-tracking tool. I’d be unlikely to see the tweets.

We weren’t considering using Twitter for game tracking, just making it more of a thing than the auto-post bot it is now.

After my previous dynasty went so poorly, I concluded that I had no business winning any more dynasties, and therefore no business playing.  Also, I’ve been cutting down on my internet use in general.

From what I can see, it went poorly due to a low (for that time) player count, and the concept for the Dynasty kind of depended on that not being the case. It wasn’t your fault, not really. It could’ve been worse. It could’ve started a Metadynasty. You’re always welcome. And I’m not just saying that because I’m the Emperor of the next Dynasty. It’s true.

Agora had a huge slump a few months ago, but it’s mostly recovered since. (The problem then was that there weren’t enough active players who had enough time to keep the gamestate maintained, and thus nobody knew what was going on; and when some people start skipping updates, other people think it’s more acceptable too.)

I’d be very averse to anything that forced me to use a site other than blognomic.com to play (but then, BlogNomic moves too fast for me anyway given the frequency at which I have Internet access, which is a big reason I haven’t been playing much; so my opinions probably aren’t too important right now).

When there are few players, it may be best to have metadynasties (possibly via the Emperor resigning) so that more players can be actively trying to win. Having someone in charge of guiding a dynasty is fine, but only if they have someone to guide.

I’m okay with that, as long as it doesn’t happen until after this one. I’d like to see if my first Dynasty works out. By the way, should be starting soon.

I think the muted ending to Bucky’s Sixth was a perfect storm of player inactivity, an achievable (but not-entirely-guaranteed dice-based) path to victory for each player, and most of the gameplay happening in the GNDT. If you’re an active player and think you have a fair chance of winning in that situation, the best route to victory is to plod away in the GNDT and deliberately avoid making blog posts so that your opponents have less reminders to check in on the game. (Looking at the archive, I deliberately kept my head down and didn’t post to the blog for a whole week before winning.) The Emperor should try to make some noise when the game flags like that, since he or she is the only player with nothing to lose by doing so, but it’s just as much a tragedy-of-the-commons from the rest of us, and a mistake to have collaboratively built a silent-running ruleset in the first place. Definitely not a bad dynasty on Bucky’s part.

Dynastic speed is player-driven to some extent - Ienpw actually voted to increase the mining speed before becoming unavoidably busy, which is all part of the game. We seem to gravitate to a month per dynasty, which feels like the amount of time I’d be willing to devote to any individual round of an online game, however complex. Maybe that’s just me seeing each dynasty as a standalone boardgame to play once and pack up, rather than the kind of little societies that other Nomics tend towards - I don’t know how much that goes for everyone else.

Player retention is nice in that we have benevolent older players who know how to keep games interesting and can spot classic proposal bugs, but we shouldn’t be trying to work out how to make those people continue playing BlogNomic for the rest of their lives. I’d much rather see the next dynasty played and enjoyed by a dozen inexperienced and enthusiastic players, than three of the old guard. There are plenty of people out there who’d enjoy playing Nomic - we should do what we can to get them here, and make sure they’re not being turned away by anything.

Having more Metadynasties is a timely point - Brendan’s dynasty explicitly went this way and switched to allowing him to take actions, and I was an active (if hesitant) player in this one. Although it’s always useful to have a player with no skin in the game who can step up and tackle stagnation, it might be useful to find some middle-ground between a Dynasty and Metadynasty - perhaps a separate but meaningless victory condition for the Emperor (more of an “achievement unlocked”), so that they can play and work towards something, but have no reason to let the game fall silent. (A fun dynasty where the Emperor missed out on the Achievement is better than a boring one where they Achieved it.)

I’ve gone ahead and blagged https://blognomic.slack.com - it looks like I can only invite people to it if I know their email address, which seems a bit of a barrier. Or do logged-in users get given a link to request membership, if they visit the page? (I can see no obvious way to add a widget to the sidebar.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve started the last few dynasties then dropped out halfway through, and usually ended up regretting it - I do want to keep playing but I’d hate to be the kind of player who just logs in to vote, and unless I can think of actual proposals I struggle to justify holding up quorum. That, of course, means that the game ends up occupying more brain-cycles than I can usually invest.

But Kevan’s right - designing the game to appeal to the people who have been playing it for a decade is a loss-making proposition. Appealing to a new cohort is important, too. Do we have a subreddit, and do we want one? That seems like a good way of generating some activity and discovery.

Bucky - occasional terrible dynasties are not the end of the world. I would still consider a Bucky dynasty to be worth playing.

Kevan - I would like a slack invite please!

Subreddit: 
Slack Invite:     

[Josh] You don’t mention gameplay there - is the implication that somebody who plays the dynasty mechanics well, casts votes, but makes no proposals of their own isn’t really playing Nomic?

Having an asynchronous discussion forum at Reddit or anywhere (as specific as “a place just for talking about BlogNomic”?) feels redundant when we already have one here, and unlikely to attract new players, unless I’ve misunderstood what you’re imagining. I’d think we’d get more players simply by talking about Nomic here and there (I’m still shocked at how few game-design friends have even heard of it), with or without a BlogNomic namedrop - we’re still one of the few games in town for playing it online.

Unrelatedly, I’m wondering if it’s worth establishing the mood of BlogNomic somewhere - when I mentioned it recently to a friend with a good approach to gaming, he said he’d given up on online nomics with strangers because of (his words) the “let’s interpret common language as something almost completely nonsensical so I can break the game and declare victory” thing. Which pretty much never happens here any more. Maybe we should nail that up above the door.

Kevan - I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of my post. I’m not defining what is right or wrong for other players. I am simply talking about what keeps me in or pushes me out of a dynasty. There was no attempt to be judgmental or prescriptive.

Sorry, that read a bit blankly aggressive, didn’t it? I mean when you catch yourself doing this, you think “well, this is fun, but I’m not really playing Nomic” and bow out?

Oh, yeah, for me, if I’m not proposing then I’m not meaningfully part of the game. It’s just such a major mechanic - you can use it to change the nature of the game to keep your opponents off-balance, introduce bugs that you can used as future advantages, or just use it as a test to see who’s paying attention. Playing nomic without proposing strikes me as being like playing scrabble without any of the score modifier tiles active - yes, you’re still playing, but one of the major strategic dimensions is just missing.

Agreed, it’s definitely not the full game. But a subset of players who vote thoughtfully and play to win through game mechanics, at whatever skill level, still add to the nomic experience for everyone else. I’d be happy if a busload of them turned up - the last dynasty would have had more meat to it with some quieter players fighting over the Wasteland, who’d have had to be won over by the players proposing changes.

Sure, which is what I meant by the comment that it’s not worth redesigning the game with me in mind. Manipulating the game through proposals is an intermediate skill; expecting players to get it in their first few dynasties is unrealistic.

On the subreddit, you’re right that the functional utility is not obvious if it’s run in parallel with the existing architecture. If we’re talking about sunsetting the blog, though - and from the implication of some of the comments above, we should at least be talking about it - then reddit seems like a natural platform to move to.

Oh, I hadn’t been reading any of this as sunsetting, but it’s worth a thought. I’d say a modifiable blog had the edge over a broadly uncustomisable subforum of an existing site, as it gives us more freedom to do strange things and improve the player experience, but I know Nomic always mutates to fit the space available. (Reddit data points: /r/nommit/ seems to have run for four years before moving to a wiki last year and apparently dying; /r/TheNomic/ started in March 2014 and hasn’t had a proposal since February 2015.)

Possibly of note that the top post in /r/TheNomic has one player asking if anyone knows of any other active online Nomics, and a second person shrugging. Maybe that difficulty in being found by people who actually want to play Nomic is worth some attention. Joel Uckelman’s nomic.net used to be a great centralised resource for finding active Nomics, but its wiki has been dead for five years. Joel was intending to put up a fresh MediaWiki install and transfer the old content across, when I emailed him back in 2012, but he was struggling to export useful content from whatever wiki software he’d been running, and it seems that nothing came of it.

Maybe some light advertising on bigger subreddits would gain the benefit of being on reddit without having to actually be on reddit? I don’t want to expose us to /r/Gaming but /r/Boardgames might be interested, as might /r/Sociology, given the Suber angle.

Advertising feels like a bit of a long shot, but we could give it a try. Joining and starting Nomic-related conversations might have better results.

I’ll drop Joel another line about nomic.net, so that it becomes possible to push the general idea of “play Nomic, it’s fun, here are some links” at people rather than a specific game of it. Maybe he’d settle for just linking the NomicWiki to an offsite Wikia page, or somewhere.

(Destickying this, incidentally - I think we’ve got enough feedback going, and we don’t need “The current dynasty is drawing to a close” at the top of the page right now.)

I don’t see a way to request an invite on the slack page when I’m logged in to other slacks. Maybe we should start a wiki page where people can drop in their preferred email addresses for invites, if there’s no easy way to export them from ExpressionEngine?

Kevan: I was a player on nommit and that’s inaccurate. Nommit’s been host to a succession of nomics over the years. The most recent iteration lasted probably six months but never had much player activity beyond proposing and voting. Even then, we maxed out at like 5 players and that was for a short period of time.

I’ve played other reddit nomics and if people are considering that I’d have to strongly recommend against. It’s not a good forum for this kind of gameplay, in my opinion.

Digging around, it looks like https://tlk.io/blognomic is a simple chat service that any passing human can join without having to sign up to anything, and which has an embeddable (and ugly, but CSSable) widget.