If someone somehow passes a rule that idles everyone else and prevents them from unidling, I think its perfectly fine for brokers to deliberately and knowingly break that rule in order to get a CfJ passed which fixes things.

In that case, is there even a rule that could be broken to fix things? Platonically, the idle brokers cannot vote, and breaking a rule and voting anyway just doesn’t result in a vote that can be counted.

Wouldn’t one CfJ that removes the idle rule, and then a second CfJ that upholds the passing of the first CfJ fix things?

It just would require people to knowingly unidle when they can’t, or knowingly pass a CfJ that should not have been passed. Both of which would be in violation of this new rule.

But you can’t pass the CfJ to uphold the first CfJ, because the first CfJ was never legally enacted. What you’re suggesting is just having people agree “yeah, we’re just going to ignore that rule by consensus”.

I’m not seeing much difference between performing an illegal CfJ to defibrillate a dead game, and informally agreeing to play a new, second game of BlogNomic with the same website, rules and players - in both cases you’re stepping outside of the game’s rules to reboot it.

Both would soon become footnotes in the game’s history, but the latter would show more respect for the concept of Nomic being a game about modifying and obeying rules.

I think this runs a risk of having a chilling effect on scams, which is already an aspect of the game that’s on life support - if there’s a risk that your “creative interpretation” could be ungenerously interpreted as a deliberate violation of a rule and a transgression against the concept of fair play then you’re much less likely to try your luck than if the worst consequence is a slightly annoyed CfJ reverting your actions.

I also think that “deliberately and knowingly” is a huge problem from a technical perspective as it requires proof of mental state.

“This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Brokers shall obey it” really covers this sentiment for me; this change adds no further clarity while introduces new risks. 

There’s already some “deliberately” stuff in Fair Play, which I think just amounts to preventing Bond villain speeches. If you devise a victory that requires you to “deliberately and unreasonably prolong the performance of a game action” and you’re happy to give some cover story about a non-existent power cut, then we can’t ever hope to prove you wrong on that, but we can at least force you to stick to that lie for the rest of your time here. It’s not an option to triumphantly reveal it as a clever plan after the DoV has passed.

Don’t all scams come from a place of believing that the actions performed are legal? Or at least are of uncertain “maybe this works, maybe it doesn’t” legality, which is enough to mean that you haven’t “knowingly” broken a rule.

If you pass a CfJ upholding it, it means the CfJ *was* legally enacted, per the CfJ you just passed.

I do think that we probably should have something that clarifies that yes, intentionally playing without any regard for the rules is in violation of fair play. But I’m just not sold on saying that there are no circumstances where intentionally ignoring rules are wrong. They are edge cases, sure, but important edge cases.

granted, I suppose you could also just as easily pass a CfJ that states a deliberate exploitation of the rules to save the blog was *not* a violation of fair play as you could pass the CfJ saying that it was legal. So this doesn’t actually lock us out of anything.

[Clucky] You can’t pass any of those CfJs legally, if you’re in a state of “players can’t vote on or enact CfJs”. That the second CfJ would make the first legal doesn’t matter: at no point is it legal to pass the second.

But the point is that passing the first CfJ would get you out of the state of “players can’t vote on or enact CfJs”. And then if anyone tried to go “well you can’t have legally gotten out of that state” the second CfJ would be proof that it doesn’t matter, we rubber stamped getting out of that state as legal.

But you can’t enact a “we can enact CfJs now” CfJ if you can’t enact CfJs

If we lock up the game and you can’t recover it…then just start another game!

@Jason if you are willing and able to perform illegal actions, you can do whatever you want.

hence my argument that performing an illegal action should not always be a violation of fair play. Most of the time it is, but there are circumstances where the circumstances could call for it.

But you can’t illegally enact a CfJ, you just can’t enact it at all. If you say you enact it and update the wiki pages accordingly, you’ve just made the wiki pages wrong, and you haven’t actually changed the gamestate.

If you disagree with my assertion that I legally enacted the CfJ after the second CfJ passes, you’d be free to raise a CfJ to address the issue. Though note that by that point, the second CfJ will have passed so everyone will be free to vote on CfJs again.

The second CfJ doesn’t solve anything, though. Any argument I could have made against the first CfJ is one I can make against the second CfJ, and if the second CfJ was never legally enacted, neither was the first CfJ. Raising a third CfJ after the second one “passed” still wouldn’t change anything, because nothing legally passed.

, altho josh has a point in that “all brokers shall obey [the ruleset]” seems to cover this, and maybe we just needed a greater emphasis on that if there’s worry about it not being enough :0?

(and yeah, im with jason on the cfj thing– rules exist in the minds of those who play with them, but also it seems like the way things are here is that unless supported by the rules themselves rules-breaking actions just dont happen! as per “all brokers shall obey”, its not actually effectively possible to break the rules, right?)

The second one would’ve legally passed, and it legally passing would’ve retroactively meant the first one legally passed. If you felt differently you’d be free to raise a CfJ. But trying to undo the enactment of the CfJ and idle people rather than waiting to see if your CfJ passes on its own merits would both be violation of “A Broker should not do any action meant to make the game unplayable” and “Instead of repeatedly reverting and re-reverting a disputed alteration, however, Brokers are encouraged to raise a Call for Judgement.”

But remember, we’ve had situations in the past where technically everyone has been idle and we’ve just passed a CfJ to be like “lol whoops everything that happened to this point was okay” this would be no different.

“The second one would’ve legally passed”

The first didn’t legally pass, so it can’t have let the second be legally passed.

“But trying to undo the enactment of the CfJ”

The CfJ would never have been enacted, you would have just updated the gamestate representations as if it had been enacted.

‘would both be violation of “A Broker should not do any action meant to make the game unplayable” and “Instead of repeatedly reverting and re-reverting a disputed alteration, however, Brokers are encouraged to raise a Call for Judgement.”’

Sure, and I could raise a CfJ all I want, but in the hypothetical it could never be legally enacted.

‘But remember, we’ve had situations in the past where technically everyone has been idle and we’ve just passed a CfJ to be like “lol whoops everything that happened to this point was okay” this would be no different.’

And I would argue the same thing in those cases, if nobody could legally unidle.

Also, 

if you feel the second one wasn’t legally enacted, you’d be free to raise a CfJ arguing that it wasn’t legally enacted and that we should reset it as a way to communicate that it is your personal opinion that the second one wasn’t legally enacted

“But remember, we’ve had situations in the past where technically everyone has been idle and we’ve just passed a CfJ to be like “lol whoops everything that happened to this point was okay” this would be no different.”

I really don’t think this is the case. We had a problem a year ago where we realised that idle players were defined badly, but the CfJ to fix it wasn’t a “this is illegal but let’s do it anyway” handwave, it acted scrupulously within the rules. We have (if I’m remembering correctly) always fixed these things in a way that has satisfied the most legally-minded players, with that fix usually being framed as a casual “everything is just how we thought it was, let’s play on”.

It reads as if Clucky is using “legal” to mean anything that a majority of players consider acceptable, where others are using it to mean only that which the ruleset explicitly allows.

The difference is narrow in a game of Nomic where it’s literally possible to raise and enact a CfJ in five minutes, but I think we’d be losing sight of the core of rule-based Nomic if we allowed that to blur into “therefore you can always just do anything that a majority are agreed on, even if players have been explicitly locked out of voting or the CfJ rule is inactive”.

but you can always do anything that a majority agree on.

if the majority agree that the game is locked, worse case scenario, like other people point out, you start a new game of nomic on the same blog. all you’re doing by not letting people go “lets just fix things and then retroactively label it as okay” does is set up a bunch of performative hoops to jump through which feels like a waste of time

The hoops of “let’s just start a new game with the same rules on the same blog” and “let’s just continue the game by agreeing to break the rules” are about equal, aren’t they? It’s a prolonged discussion to make sure that the game really is dead, and then we pick one blog entry to write.

This is all deep, dark edge case stuff, though, and a discussion that can be safely left for the day that BlogNomic dies, under whatever quorum’s watch. Like you say, if the rule-breaking approach is popular on that day, it doesn’t matter what fair play says. (In fact, I don’t think Fair Play would ever prevent BlogNomic from being rescued: if the only way to save the game was to make a DoV primarily to put the game into Hiatus, we’d all agree to choose not to punish whoever did that.)

We should be more concerned about the day-to-day cases where someone would be tempted to knowingly break a rule: should it be okay for someone to say “this action I want to take is blocked right now, and we should fix that, and surely everyone will agree on that, so I’m going to update all the gamestate and otherwise behave as if I’ve taken the action already, and post a CfJ”?

I feel like most of the time, no, but there are exceptions to every rule. And I worry that the difference if this passes is that someone can’t really go “The proper context here means the right thing to do is to just break the rules and ask for forgiveness later” because if they don’t get forgiveness, suddenly they are in violation of fair play for simply doing what they honestly thought was the right move for the blog

“Break the rules and ask for forgiveness later” sounds like the antithesis of Nomic to me. Pretty much all rulesets, including our own, begin by saying that players must follow the rules at all times.

I guess we just have different philosophies when it comes to nomic.

Nomic in my mind is a game. Primary point is to have fun. If the rules are preventing all the players from having a fun, following the rules just because they are the rules even though everyone would be happier if you made an exception and didn’t follow the rules seems silly to me.

We can differ on what qualities we want a game to have, but we should all agree on what game everyone is actually playing here. Players need to know what moves can and can’t be made; what can and can’t be done in response to a power move or a scam; whether to be cautious about breaking the game, or relaxed because even “erase all rules” can somehow magically be fixed.

If some kind of insta-CfJ seems like a good idea, put it into words and we can vote on adding it to the ruleset.

Self-kill per Josh’s concerns, which (having checked on Slack) still remain, and the near-unanimity of “all Brokers shall obey it” being taken to mean “you cannot deliberately break the rules”.