BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Rule 1.1: The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset

Glossary:  Can -> “is able to” and by extension can only -> is only able to

Rule 1.1 does not just bind you but the Ruleset itself.  So, wiki vandalism notwithstanding, you haven’t successfully changed the ruleset.

per Bucky

Plus, from “Victory and Ascension”: “This rule cannot be overruled by Dynastic Rules as it relates to Declarations of Victory”, so even if you managed to change the dynastic rules, they still cannot require me to vote FOR DoV’s.

Thank you for the input Bucky, I massively appreciate the insight. This is what makes Nomic interesting!

I’ve chosen to procrastinate the obligation to follow that rule. For example, according to this analogy:

Imagine there is a guy called Bob with a garden and us, the Villagers. There is a rule that says:

“Bob’s garden can only be changed by using a hedge cutter.”

I’m not Bob, but I decide to change his garden anyways by using for example a shovel (and procrastinating the obedience of his rule), bypassing the rule that says that it only can be changed with hedge cutters (as per Bob’s specifications) to modify the garden regardless.

Another, separate defense idea is that if we take the the Ruleset as an entity that can be bound to rules like people, according to the rule in “Ruleset and Gamestate”: “This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Villagers shall obey it.”, the Ruleset itself is not obligated to follow the rules in the Ruleset (only Villagers). Ruleset itself as an agent doesn’t have the ability to be part of the Nomic’s active gameplay anyway, similar to how an Abacus isn’t explicitly part of the calculations made within it as an abstraction, it’s merely the substrate within it exists. Likewise, its never stated that the Ruleset has the ability to be bound to rules.

@ Quirck: I believe that your logic there is flawed. If you acknowledge that I’ve successfully changed the dynastic rules, even if you can ignore the requirement of voting “FOR” because of the rule you’ve quoted, that still means that I’ve won because the rules that you acknowledge that I’ve successfully changed say that I’ve won.

per Bucky’s arguments have been replied to above.

“The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset”. Choosing to procrastinate any rule must be backed up by a rule, or you are not allowed to procrastinate.

Here’s my take on it.

When the rubber meets the road, no “play by the rules” clause can really be airtight. Let’s say I get some random person (let’s call them Jon) to change the ruleset to say “pokes has achieved victory”. Jon’s not a player, so why can’t he just change anything on the wiki he wants to? He doesn’t have to obey any rules to not edit the ruleset, just like he could also open the Monopoly box and take all the hundreds for himself.

And as for binding the Ruleset itself, the Ruleset cannot be obligated to follow anything. It’s the Villagers who are obligated to perform only actions that do not break the requirements imposed on the Ruleset by the Ruleset.

@pokes
I think, Jon just won’t have the necessary rights to edit the Wiki, only Villagers can do so, if I’m not mistaken.

@quirck

Ah, well, then let’s say it’s a hypothetical wiki that anyone can edit; it doesn’t fundamentally change my argument.

I get where Cuddlebeam is coming from. I’d say that either you’re playing by the rules at any given time or you’re not, and the Cuddlebeam position is “I am playing by the rules in deferring actually playing by the rules for later” but I’m on the fence as to whether this is more sophisticated than getting Jon to give me the win.

Maybe we need a “repeatedly and willfully refusing to follow the rules"clause in Fair Play.

“the Ruleset itself is not obligated to follow the rules in the Ruleset”  - Of course the ruleset regulates how it can be modified; we wouldn’t be playing Nomic otherwise!

Furthermore, even accepting that you might procastinate in following the rules after joining the game, you wouldn’t be able to do so selectively after you start following the rules, which must have happened sometime before you posted your first CfJ.

Per Bucky’s first point and a handful of other things. It seems sufficiently implicit that when you play a game, you do so by obeying all the rules of that game (with “this is the ruleset, players must obey it” mostly being a cute opening line, here): you can’t really win at chess by pointing out that there’s no rule of chess saying that you have to obey all the rules of chess.

These head-of-a-pin arguments can be fun, but can be escalated indefinitely into ever stranger directions - you will never be able to phrase a solid “this is a game and I have won it” statement in a way that can’t be assailed by ever-more-oblique interpretations of games or people or time or language. It’s an entertaining exercise, but I think it stops feeling like a game quite quickly - others’ mileage may vary, but this isn’t what I play Nomic for. Historically, BlogNomic certainly tends much more towards scams at the nuts-and-bolts dynastic level, where a victory is plainly laid out as the largely undisputable consequence of mechanical loopholes in rules that the players have just written themselves.

@Bucky: I disagree with that. The Ruleset commands Villagers, and even if the Ruleset is forced according to the rules to follow its demands, it’s not obligated to follow the rules at all because only Villagers are forced to. The issue with the abstraction of considering the Ruleset another “agent” within the ruleset that can be bound and compelled by rules is that, it’s currently unknowable if the Ruleset is deciding to obey its rules or not - since it’s an inanimate thing I’m assuming that it’s unable to take any decision of the sort - leaving it entirely in a stalemate. (which would affect every other rule because if by your abstraction, the Ruleset isn’t obligated by the ruleset, Villagers can’t conclude that any legal action they’re performing is legal because nobody would be able to confirm that the Ruleset is obedient to itself, thus nobody would be able to do anything, ever)

This is a bit noxious of me to say but an escape to that second thing is that I could’ve not been following the rules at all since the beginning all and I’ve simply been pretending to, informally making CfJs and posts. (I’m not going to take that route though because holy fuck lol). My allegiance to a rule isn’t obligatory to be declared or not either, so nobody would be able to formally conclude that I’m following a certain rule or not or just pretending altogether. BUT YEAH THIS IS A LOW SHOT but fun to imagine.

@Kevan: I believe you could, although I’m starting to understand that Nomic (just like any human-operated rules, really) is a political game where the logical subtext of a scam or move is simply there to impress the player audience, there is no ‘magical’ force that will force player to follow the text of the rules (as I initially tended to think them as, without giving that previous fact much thought). So in the chess example, even if it could be entirely legal to win a game of chess like that, given that the rules are human-operated, if nobody acknowledges it, it just doesn’t matter. Another example is that if Villager John Doe claims victory with a completely valid argument that requires a certain strike of inspiration to understand which only he has had the luck to have obtained, (please don’t think that I’m being passive-aggressive here and referring to my own CoV here, because you guys have proven to amply understand it, this is just an example for the human operated rules phenomenon I’m pointing out!) the DoV isn’t obligated to pass. And it likely won’t pass because the “human operators” the Ruleset depends on simply don’t understand it. Same can happen with CfJs and pointing out illegal stuff.

So the rules are just tools of persuasion, they hold no real value of their own.

I should write an essay lol.

I massively appreciate the insights, guys, and I and very thankful to have been able to learn (and discover! like holy shit the phenomenon that have been uncovered here) more about Blognomic and Nomic.

(...I dunno if I can self-kill or if this vote will even count for anything but I’m doing it anyways lol just in case I’m missing something. I just want to get this out of the way sooner because I doubt I’ll be able to magically turn this around in time.)