BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

I dunno… I don’t really like the idea of items that can only be used by one player. What are your plans for future use of this rule?

  actually i don’t see why this is necessary.  if you’re going to have it restricted to one player, why should that player have to make proposals?  just allow em to change the description at will.

.

Either they’re useful, in which case this is unfair, or they aren’t, in which case this whole thing is a bit pointless.

This Proposal contains a bug that, were there a new Protagonist named “Angry” and an item who’s description starts with “Reserved by Angry Grasshopper”, it would be Reserved by both Angry Grasshopper and Angry, based on the way the reservation text was defined. An item, however, may only be Reserved by a single Protagonist, leading to a contradiction. Contradictions are bad.

This is yet another bug caused by attempting to provide a means to define the storage of gamestate rather than defining the game state itself. If the rule simply described what it means to be Reserved, and later Rules caused particular Items to be Reserved by particular Protagonists, and the way it was stored wasn’t normative, such a bug would be impossible.

_Currently_ there are no Protagonists who’s name is a prefix of another Protagonist’s, but were such Rules to become common, I would find some random person and urge them to start playing just to get this contradiction.

Regardless, I’m voting in the hope of slowly wittling the will away of suchly implemented Rules. ;P

(By the way, when a contradiction occurs, what happens? If the contradiction is really there, a Call for Judgement relating to it would just show that yes, the contradiction exists, unless people feel it didn’t or something… The original Nomic’s rules stated that the player that caused the paradox won, no? Why does this Nomic not have such a Law/Rule/Thing (What’s the super-term for these if not ‘Rule’, as they are all in the ‘Ruleset’?).)

Saurik, I disagree. The text :

‘An Item may be “reserved” for a single Protagonist.’

prevents an Item from being Reserved by both Angry and Angry Grasshopper. Further, [Lord’s name] is a string—in this case, the whole name is ‘Angry Grasshopper’. Your scenario works if there are two players, one named Angry, and another named Angry Grasshopper, but then there’s no contradiction.

What you should worry about is a player changing his name to use an item for a scam, though perhaps ‘a single Protagonist’ would rule that out. =)

Angry: That’s the definition of a contradiction. If a Protagonist was named Angry and an Item started with “Reserved for Angry Grasshopper”, there would be two rules that contradicted: one that stated that an Item can only be Reserved for one Protagonist, and another that stated that an Item is Reserved when it’s Description betweens with “Reserved by [name]”.

It is equivalent to having a rule that states: There can be only one Fire Marshal. All Protagonists are the Fire Marshal.

(Oh, and there’s an argument that there’s either a second contradiction, or a possible out to the first one, in that a new user named “Seventy-Fifth” wouldn’t be a narrator, and then wouldn’t be able to be an Item’s Lord accourding to the last sentence. This one _could_ be seen to limit as the “Restricted by ...” comment explicitely states that it is the name of the Item’s Lord. This might thereby not be bad. Technically, don’t votes count? He does TOO share power!)

The reason I required Proposals to change reserved items is to prevent open access to the Ruleset.  :P Otherwise someone could get an Item reserved, then change the Text to “Quazie may declare victory.” at their leisure. 

Saurik,

The place to stop the problem you’re talking about is in how and when Items are reserved, which is not dealt with yet.

If a Proposal reserves an Item in such a way as to exploit this rule, then you should vote against that Proposal, not this one.

And speaking generally, if this makes a Proposal worthy of failure, then you basically can’t have a Nomic in a verbal language at all, or else you have to use regular expressions AND arbitrary character restrictions on names in a decidedly not-writing-a-computer-program context.

Regarding Suber’s Ruleset, I don’t think it says “when any contradiction occurs, game over.”  It says “when a contradiction prevents gameplay from proceeding” or some such thing, doesn’t it?

notafraud,

My hope is that we can have items that are mysteries until they’re used, assuming the dynasty lasts long enough to find a way to do that without letting “When this item is used, Quazie may declare victory” become mystery descriptions.

Also, see my subsequent Proposal, “Proof of concept.”  There I’m creating a (rather lame) mystery; the reservation is to prevent other people from co-opting it and changing my descriptions, which would completely ruin my plan.

Maybe we’ll find a way to let other people have simliar plans; maybe not.

(Incidentally, for those reading between the lines: yes, I think the encryption widget might be used sooner or later)

In case people aren’t used to this terminology, I will explicitely state that ‘informative’ is the opposite of ‘normative’.

75th: Regardless of the _possibly_ working variant with the last sentence (which will likely pass, but whatever ;P), I believe just having an Item that states “Reserved by Seventy-Fifth Trombone” at the beginning of it’s Description and then a user adding himself named “Seventy-Fifth” is the problem.

And no, this doesn’t at all require regular expressions and other horribleness. What you do is you have this proposal store the Lord of an Item as a subsection of the Item. The subsection is named “Lord”, the text contents is the name of the Lord.

Done. There’s no room for ambiguity at that point. Descriptions should also be stored in a subsection.

Frankly, even if you had just said: “The Lord of an object is indicated unambiguously in the Description of said Item.” I would have no room for complaint. Then you could make arguments from English that “it said Grasshopper, so Angry is obviously not it’s target”. But you decided to mandate the exact string form of the information, and in doing so got bogged down in too many details and (once again, definitely without that last sentence, and arguably with) doesn’t work.

For that matter, I maintain that the rule needs only state:

An Item may be “Reserved” for a single Protagonist.  When an Item is Reserved for a Protagonist, the Protagonist is said to be the Item’s “Lord”. A Reserved item has the following properties:

This is completely unambiguous. If a Proposal later states: “Make ‘The Golden Egg’ Reserved by Angry Grasshopper.”, that’s it. If someone asks any of these questions there is a single correct answer accourding to the Rules:

Is the Golden Egg Reserved?
Who is the Golden Egg Reserved by?
Has Angry Grasshopper Reserved any Items?
What Items has Angry Grasshopper Reserved?

There’s _no reason_ for rules to explicitely state the low-level storage, any more than Magic: The Gathering describes the format of some sheet of paper where all of it’s incredibly large gamestate is held. (And it can get _hard_ in Magic, given the number of Sorceries and Instants that change gamestate until end of turn.)

To make things easier on Protagonists, the admins who admin things should keep, maybe on the Wiki somewhere, an informative statement of all current gamestate. They might have an area about Items, and it might be formatted exactly as you were expecting it might be formatted. But it isn’t normative. You can’t point at it and state “the Rules had a glitch in the way it formatted the gamestate serialization, and now the world is upheaved”.

Yes, that data might be wrong. If something in that database is wrong a Call for Judgement can and should be rendered, and people can argue about when it became wrong.

This is no different from the current state of affairs with the GNDT, only it’s less likely for there to be exploits in game rules. The GNDT is currently normative, but we’ve already had two points in this dynasty where it has been set to the incorrect value by admins. The first was “The Fortress of Cheese” incident that Salamander pointed out. The second was the admin that decided not to bother setting “Nothing” into Item Held and left the field at “-” because he was confused as to the outcome of an unrelated informative argument.

D’oh, I accidentally hit Submit once instead of Preview a while back. And now I can’t say this as the ability to comment seems broken. ;( Maybe now?

Ok, starting with the last two paragraphs, I meant to say this instead, but screwed up with the Submit/Preview while editing it, and then didn’t realize that the fact that my text box was now blank was probably a negative indication:

Yes, that data might be wrong. If something in that database is wrong a Call for Judgement can, and should (well, unless the Protagonist is waiting until e can exploit it with a Declaration of Victory), be rendered, and people can argue about when it became wrong. If I were playing (which I am), I’d double check everything that the admins did, looking for mistakes. If I found any, I’d attempt to use them to my benefit.

What’s important to realize, however, is that this is no different from the current state of affairs with the GNDT, only it’s less likely for there to be exploits in game rules. The GNDT is currently normative, but we’ve already had two points in this dynasty where it has been set to the incorrect value by admins.

The first was the “The Fortress of Cheese” incident that Salamander pointed out. The second was the admin that decided not to bother setting “Nothing” into Item Held and left the field at “-” because he was confused as to the outcome of an unrelated, informative argument.

In either of these cases, Protagonists who felt that the GNDT had correct game data would have been wrong, and Protagonists who kept track of mistakes and only rendered Calls for Judgement on the GNDT information when they had already setup a win condition for themselves would have an advantage.

Every change made by admins must therefor be checked, and Protagonists are strongly advised to keep their own logs of game state, whether or not the Rules are explicit about how the information is stored. There’s simply, flat out, more room for problems when that format is explicitely defined.

(At some point, probably very soon, I _will_ stop bothering people about bugs like this when voting on Proposals, so don’t worry. I _will_, however, start writing Proposals of similar form and start driving people crazy with Declarations of Victory. ;P)

Okay, you’re right.  If this passes I’ll amend it, stat.

In fact, now I see your point about the whole situation, because we actually don’t treat the GNDT/Wiki/whatever as normative.  People have successfully declared Victory based on semantic loopholes, but never (to my knowledge) based on clerical error (or clerical malice).

So what’s the ultimate solution to all this?  Do you just repeal all references to recording gamestate, and make it an unstated social thing?

This is not a direct answer to your question, but I feel it clarifies an important question that I noticed I didn’t directly address before, and might still be in some peoples’ minds:

If you want to record gamestate, that isn’t actually the problem. If this Rule had read:

When an Item is Reserved, it’s description is modified to begin with the string “Reserved by [name of Lord]”.

:, that would actually have been fine. The problem was that the Rule went in the opposite direction: defining the state of Reservation in terms of the Description of the Item, and then over-describing how that information is read.

Specifying how to save information is typically benign. Worst case is that you save unintelligible gibberish, mapping multiple things to the same result (like not Holdinng anything, and Holding an Item Named Nothing).

The problem isn’t until you want to take data and recover it. Then you are assigning meaning, and have to be very, very careful, or you end up saving that you aren’t Holding anything, and then looking at the field and retrieving that you are Holding an Item Named Nothing.

(And in case you still don’t agree with that case, I ask that you read my final comment on each of those proposals before replying here, as I feel I make a good case for why In My Hot Little Hands can’t be said to have mapped the string “Nothing” back to not carrying anything.)

The borderline cases are where the serialization/deserialization was technically fine. Location, Location, Location has nothing wrong with the way it stores _or retrieves_ Locations in the GNDT (and hence I didn’t have complaints about it and voted for it): it defines a very simple, almost impossible to screw up, two-way mapping.

However, for the reasons I went over in my more massive diatribe, it’s just needless wording. It doesn’t contribute any to the understanding of the gamestate, or to what can be done using that game mechanic. All it does is encourage Protagonists to trust the GNDT (which is prone to mistakes), and write Proposals in a similar manner that _are_ flawed, like In My Hot Little Hands.

The only problem with just removing all mention of GNDT field storage from all the existing Rules is that, if a Protagonist is allowed to make a decision on his own accourd, there’s no way to officially state that he did that. There isn’t even much of an unofficial means. Example: Goose Steps simply wouldn’t work. It allows Protagonists to often change their Location field. If it’s just changing their “Location”, then how do they announce that they did that?

The first (possibly preferred, given the theme?) option is to actually get Protagonists to use the text adventure interface, and try to get people to write Proposals that use it. You mentioned that could be hacked onto Goose Steps after the fact, but I don’t really see how without just rewriting it. If the only way to move was to enter a Command, then the act of entering a Command could be the event that causes the movement. If this were to happen, I’d seriously recommend, in the same proposal, removing the text that allows people to delete Commands. (I’m not entirely certain why that was there in the first place.) Otherwise you’d have to watch the History of the Wiki very carefully.

(Note that this is, once again, true currently, if such a rule mapping Commands to movements were to be enacted, unless you really feel you trust the GNDT, which we’ve shown by example you shoudn’t.) The disadvantage of this is it loses the order of Proposals being enacted and game actions being performed based on those slowly altering Rulesets (without, again, careful scrutiny of the history). But fixing that starts to get really heavy in changing mechanics of the website and the current admin’ing procedure.

Scrapping the idea of using the Wiki to store Threads, I think it would be _awesome_ to do it this way:

Add a category to the _blog_ called Action. Official game actions that Protagonists’s take could be done by posting an Action (multiple game actions definitely allowed per post, otherwise there would be swarms of actions from the same Protagonist over and over again and that seems stupid). Then, Protagonists could actually do things like comment on whether or not it was a legal and/or sufficient game action, or worry about where that Protagonist might be going with their actions in the future.

The wording on the Rule that states that Protagonists must register their game actions using the blog could state that the text of a game action should be in the form of a Thread (as already, existingly, defined). That would then provide a better way for Protagonists to enter Commands that provides order between multiple Protagonists’s actions. And by defining it based on the existing Threads proposal, offers as much flavor text as people could possibly imagine.

It handles the weird feeling that the one Thread has by defining a nice context for causing Threads. Threads would be owned by a specific Protagonist, and would get that nice ordered quality the blog has when multiple Protagonists are each entering Commands. (The current Threads system on the Wiki either A) makes Protagonist information difficult, as you have to check the history, or B) creates multiple Threads for each Protagonist and makes timing information difficult, as you have to check the history.)

If nothing else, this would just be more fun that, for instance, the world of updating put forward by Goose Steps, in that I feel people would see the moves that players are making and get the fun of the weird descriptions that people might choose to apply to their moves. It also better fits the theme of _Blog_Nomic. I don’t get the feeling that people are that excited about dealing with the Wiki (especially given a comment I remember someone making about how WikiNomic failed, which is part of why this is BlogNomic).

An example Action (given a proposal that caused a “move” command and a “take” command; each of which was hopefully worded not as a parser but in simple English) might be:

Action: Race to the Finish

Waking up today you feel refreshed. Today, something great will finally occur.

> move to the ominous forest
Upon entering The Ominous Forest, a wave of laughter hits you as you realize the trees are _laughing_ at you today. You wonder why it is called The Ominous Forest.

> take sleepy toadstool
Ripping the Sleepy Toadstool from the ground proves to be more difficult than expected, but eventually it gives way. In it’s place is left what looks like a bottomless cavern.

> move to the floating castle
Consulting your magic spellbook, you see that Rule 2.4 let’s anyone carrying the Sleepy Toadstool ascend to The Floating Castle.
As you are very tired and feeling incredibly uncreative, a fanfare announces your having achieved the example Victory condition.

>

(I will now take a moment to explicitely state that this seems to solve all the GNDT problems we are currently discussing, but it doesn’t replace Logical Antecedent, in that there are still actions that Protagonists might be required to perform that they would be unable to demonstrate having performed. I was working on a new version of that Proposal last night, but then didn’t continue working on it yet today.)

Hehe, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much text in a single block without any voting icons.

Ok, when I typed that “_awesome_” I had actually started describing something else where the text adventure theme wasn’t in place and people just posted with the list of actions they believed they were legally allowed to perform. That’s the Magic: The Gathering Solution. You dialog what you are doing and the opponents have the ability to go “nuh uh! you can’t do that!”, and if you don’t agree the two of you call for a judge. I then added the text adventure theme back afterwards, but in the process it may have lost something. My version of Logical Antecedent that allows players to make choices in what they do is more like the non-text adventure version of this. I just thought I’d add this concept I deleted back. *Explicitely intends to actually do work today rather than get sucked into this game again, but sees he is already screwed on that regard.*

that was AWESOME, btw saurik