BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Relatedly, this video of a Prisoner’s Dilemma round in a UK gameshow is a fine piece of rule scamming, if anyone’s not seen it. Apparently they changed the rules to disallow any conversation before choosing, as a result of this episode.

I’d like to know your opinions on this dynasty.  Was it successful?  Was it fun?

It seemed a success from where I was sitting - a reasonable amount of activity, some new players, and the mood felt more like a traditional Nomic than the “build a game and leave it alone” that we’d been lapsing into previously, with some straight-up gamestate-modifying proposals, and Josh getting locked out by a proposal while tactically idling.

The player elimination might have been a little on the tough side, but it kept the focus on the players who were actually playing, and having the dynasty end within a week and a half of the new-player-lockout enacting seemed about right.

Kevan, my Math teacher told me about that once. It’s not a “true” Prisoner’s Dilemna, but it does more accurately mirror the situation we had with Attack attempts than a Prisoner’s Dilemna would.

For reference, in a true Prisoner’s Dilemna, if one Prisoner guarantees to the other “I will betray you”, it is STILL in the second Prisoner’s best interest to betray the first. In the example of the game show, this could be modeled by a small reward for both players if they both steal.

Is anyone willing to make the new blognomic header? I’m not confident enough in my graphic design skills to make it look nice.

I’m intending on having a renaissance papal election theme, so some kind of antiqua style typeface would probably work.

Kevan: Re your video, I hadn’t seen it before, but I had seen the show and independently came up with the same scam. (I’m not entirely sure what this says about me…)

The only difference is that I was planning to make the offer to split the money afterwards actually legally binding, rather than merely an unenforceable promise. (All the requirements to make a legally binding contract in the UK can be fit into the show’s format; and the TV cameras would ensure that there’d be no dispute about the text of the contract after the fact.)

Hello everyone,
I’m planning to join the next dynasty. I guess I’ll have my “official” introduction after the Ascension.

Thrawn, I just created something that could work as blog header for the theme you propose.

It can be seen here

Let me know if you want me to work more on it.

BTW, it’s been interesting to follow the action the last weeks of this dynasty!

And related to Kevan’s comments, I’ve realised that Kevan and I have fundamentally different assumptions about how other players will play.

Kevan’s assumption seems to be that in most cases, players will play to maximize their own victory chance. I’m pretty sure, empirically, that this is wrong (I personally normally play to win, but I think I’m in a small minority on this). Nomic players value several things, and wins (or the chance of them) are not really that high up on the list. (Some other common motivations: wanting to be able to drive the direction of gameplay in the future; wanting to generally cause chaos; wanting to be the centre of attention; wanting to “feel important”, normally via being a critical part of other players’ schemes.)

My usual assumption is that the remaining other players form maybe two or three conspiracies (possibly with some overlap), although many of them aren’t paying attention at any given moment. This is obviously unrealistic, but it helps guide a number of important nomic-playing principles (such as “as soon as it becomes publicly visible that you have a plan to win and are trying to enact it, that plan should take place within a minimum of time after that”; this dynasty, it was quarter of an hour from the alliance between anything happening to indicate an alliance between me and Thrawn, and the victory condition being achieved). The reason that this works is that if you can arrange victory even within these parameters, your plan is going to work in almost any likely situation; and if you can’t, then the chance of someone screwing things up (either in an attempt to stop you, or for unrelated reasons, or for just wanting to cause chaos) is quite high.

I like it. The classical look isn’t what I was expecting, but it works well for the renaissance too.