Part 3: On the spirit of the game
or, Foul Play (by whose standards?)
Hmm… so I was right. I wake up, and it is Over: Attn: CotC has been failed, not once, but three times! Although the blog software has mysteriously cut off posts so that we can’t see the last few votes, it seems that the arrival of rebelyellow, lass, and Phantom Hoover [looks like Phantom Hoover was ehird’s, see comments :/] was integral to the outcome. Fair enough, we also used meatpuppets. But since they signed up rather than deidling, where did they come from? Googling their names along with “nomic” doesn’t find anything.
Are they just random people, friends of BlogNomickers?
One of the crucial rules we [mostly, see comments :/] followed is that only Nomic players, current and former, could be recruited. I wanted this to make the invasion more in the spirit of Nomic, to ensure that “meatpuppets joining to vote FOR” and “people who will actually play once the dynasty starts” were reasonably correlated lists, and, most importantly, to make this a solvable game, to make the voters members of a relatively limited pool, who would have enough understanding of what was going on to be interested if partisan participants, rather than mechanical Turks. When each new player joined, there was a moment of bated breath as we saw which side he was on; after a while, we started to run out of players, and it became important to try to convince existing BlogNomickers to vote FOR (although we didn’t have much success) rather than just recruiting more people. I am not just saying this because we lost—for most of the voting period, this rule significantly benefitted BlogNomic, as while BlogNomic has always had more players than Agora and has a large set of idle players, I have 190,000 Twitter followers who might have been persuaded to submit some forms. But that would be stupid.
No defenders ever agreed to the aforesaid scheme, and in some ways “people who have played Nomic” is a quite arbitrary set, but I cannot think of an interpretation under which using random pure meatpuppets does not constitute upending the chessboard.
But I guess that’s the point: several players think that we have already upended the chessboard by invading in the first place, and just wanted to end the invasion by any means necessary, quite fine to proceed with anything valid under the rules. (Incidentally, if I am wrong about those three players, this argument is quite invalid, but I think the preceding statement is still largely true.) Kevan commented that the invasion is “incredibly boring” and “massively poor form” and we are “arrogant” and it’s “sad”:
> It feels like some kids with nerf guns have started shooting at our chessboard and telling us how fun it would be to start throwing the pieces back at them. Look, we’ve already made a barricade to hide behind! You could make one too!
I want to rebut this: not for any practical gain, as I doubt this post will convince anyone of anything and even if it did, calling a revote would be rather lame; but just to make certain players think. And after that, I will apologize.
His is a reasonable analogy, after all, and it’s true—in a sense we’ve come over and forced a largely isolationist game to play a game with us. But Nomic is not chess: Agora is not, BlogNomic is not. Nomic is *fundamentally different* from chess because it features the unique element of scams, where I can find a loophole that lets me teleport my knight to the other side of the board, and the other player will congratulate me instead of storming out of the room. BlogNomic deemphasizes scams, but they happen all the time and rarely feature digust and massive backlash and arguments about the spirit of the game; Bucky garnered nothing but praise for re-enacting a CfJ in clear violation of how they ought to work, and rightly so, as it was an interesting discovery: a strong Nomic tradition, which has not failed to take hold here, states that finding interesting uses of the rules is a welcomed form of gameplay. The invasion was received as it was not because of a fundamental difference in meta-ness, as Kevan would claim; but essentially because under various measures, an invasion is *more egregious* than a regular scam.
And of course it is. The reason the concept of an invasion is so famous is because it represents multiple extremes. It is probably the simplest (and most universal) possible scam; it requires more participants than any other scam; and it produces greater and more sudden intermingling of two little cultures than any other type of foreign relations. The first two suggest that an invasion is the most basic and least desirable of all possible scams, but its extremeness makes it rare and, thus, unique. In the 5-6 years I’ve paid attention to Nomic (not so much, I know, compared to some of the players here), I only remember Agora having two war-like events and they were both very minor*: certainly I have never seen anyone go full-on invasion on anyone else, and I have no records of it happening since the Risho-Agoran War in 1997. The hope is that these factors are countered because the uniqueness of a scam *makes* it interesting—makes people think about things they usually take for granted.
And you must admit it’s not all bad. The third extreme, the intermingling of cultures, though it happens quickly enough to inevitably produce culture shock, is not all that bad. We got to know each other better. The process of getting people on board with one side or other and coping with a huge amount of activity is, to me, an inherently fun and rewarding activity. It tends to burn people out and shouldn’t be kept going for too long—but the 9 hours after the CfJ was submitted comprised probably the fastest sustained nomic play I’ve ever experienced, and I haven’t had as much fun in a long time. Meanwhile, like any scam, especially those with long critical timing periods, an invasion should invite people to plot counter-scams, the sort of “find interesting bugs in the ruleset” process that wasn’t involved in the original attack but might be in the defense—as we saw with Bucky. If from nothing else, I think many BlogNomic players got a kick out of what he did.
So yes, Kevan:
- You are supposed to be pleased at the excitement of the invasion.
- I do understand the difference in playing styles between the two games—as a rare player, not all that well, but well enough that I was not particularly surprised by the outcome. I’m sure ais523 and coppro understand it even better.
After all, even in Agora—even in B, I think, which once encouraged as much more silliness than Agora as Agora encouraged compared to BlogNomic, people have violently rejected scams as contrary to the spirit of the game, because regardless of your theoretical opinion of them, it’s natural to get angry when you appear to have been dominated. I’ve felt that way more than once—on the occasions when ais523 has taken over the game, I’ve felt powerless and trapped, tried to lash out, savored the ability, when it came, to tell the dictator to pack his bags—and I’ve been on the receiving end of it many times. I’m sure some of you would appreciate the sentiment of this comment:
In Monopoly, Risk, or any other game, no matter how well the rules are
written, if the game is ruined because you are playing with a sniveling
little rules-breaking shit, the game is ruined because you are playing
with a sniveling little rules-breaking shit.
In Agora, some of it is always due to tunnel vision and passes with time, and perhaps some of it remains. Perhaps more of it will remain in BlogNomic than Agora.
It’s unfortunate and a little depressing, because I don’t want to ruin the playing experience of anyone else—I’m not usually that kind of person. It’s only because scams have the potential to be so massively fun, where and when they work right, that I continue to try them.
So I (on my own behalf, as I can still hardly speak for others) apologize for those for whom this invasion was an unacceptable, degenerate form of gameplay; I hope that it was worth it for Darth Cliche, Prince Anduril, bateleur, Purplebeard, and Qwazukee, who expressed enjoyment at either the process of invasion itself, the potential results of an invasion, or at least the brief reunion of old BlogNomic players that resulted (without implying that those players are “on my side” in any way), and I hope the rest can forgive me.
Some other points:
- zuff (ehird) is great, but he made various arguments on the blog that I think most of us would disagree with. He argued that it was the easiest way to get BlogNomic out of a crisis, but I would never have said it was anything but the most fun way.
- Not sure what Kevan is referring to with “we are here to fix your Nomic and save you from yourselves, no don’t bother voting on that stuff”. ehird meant it when he said the first third of that; nobody said anything like the second two thirds. My incendiary post to agora-business stating that “WE, in our infinite wisdom, have decided to INVADE BLOGNOMIC, for the Greater Good of both nomics,” was obviously “in-character posturing”, but I didn’t see much else along those lines. I don’t think it is arrogant to suggest that an Agoran dynasty would be fun to play.
- I can’t believe you’re starting a metadynasty based on the idea of invasion after rejecting the invasion. Come on! :p
* although one of them ended with a B Nomic player accidentally personally surrendering to Agora. That was great.
per Josh, Clucky and Kevan.
I wasn’t aware this was a voteable matter. Looks like it is now.
omd:
although coppro says that ehird grabbed meatpuppets. meh.