Hacker News Reader

Comment by squidfood | Hacker News Reader

At least one open game, Agora Nomic, has been running via listserv continuously since 1993 (arguably since 1992, when it started in a MUD/MOO environment): http://www.agoranomic.org/

Edit: hmm, that website is a bit out-of-date though the mailing list addresses are current. If you want to see what a 22-year old Nomic Ruleset looks like: http://pastebin.com/jxxCiY2Y

View on HN

As a current player of Agora - over the last year or so we've been a bit short on activity, so for anyone reading this, any new players would be highly welcome! My basic plug for it is that it feels sort of like collaborative programming in English, and, perhaps for that reason, a high percentage of players tend to be programmers. Among other things, this means that we prefer to explicitly define procedures rather than leaving things up to consensus, and that we're a bit more literal-minded than you'd see in a real legal system - if a rule clearly states something, it means it, even if it contradicts the intent, and trying to find bugs and "scam" them, often for the purpose of a temporary dictatorship over the rules or an unintended win, is considered a valid way to play. Other players like to write a lot of proposals, while some may be more interested in whatever non-meta gameplay mechanics are in place at the time (currently not all that much).

There's no obligation to read the whole ruleset (or any of it) before joining - it's only so big because of that tendency to explicitly define things, but most of those things aren't really surprising, or you can look them up as needed.

Basically to join you should subscribe to the three 'main' mailing lists linked from the homepage (agora-business, agora-official, agora-discussion - I really need to add a way to subscribe to them all at once or otherwise merge them, but for now you have to do it individually) and send a message to agora-business saying you want to become a player.

I'd really like to play Nomic, preferably online, and I'm interested in joining Agora. How do you keep track of who is a current player and get the game back in motion?

Agora's not stopped, just slowed. :) Most parts of the gamestate are kept track of by elected officers posting periodic reports to the agora-official mailing list (the amount of automation, if any, used to create these reports varies). Sometimes officers also maintain a web version - notably, this is usually the case for the rules, which are currently maintained at:

http://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/rkeep/current_flr....

(Until recently the ruleset history was being tracked in RCS - yes, really. I should try to convince the current rulekeepor to at least use Git...)

There's a link from agoranomic.org, but for the record, the agora-official archive can be found at:

http://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/

(agora-official is for reports, agora-business is for taking game actions, and agora-discussion is for discussion.)

For the list of officers, search for [IADoP]; for the list of players, search for [Registrar]. I post as "omd".

Just for fun, another link that I should mention, since the one on agoranomic.org is out of date (again, I need to fix this): almost 3000 old judgements on rule interpretation, most of which are long obsolete due to the relevant rules being amended or repealed, but some of which serve as (non-binding) precedent -

http://cfj.qoid.us

Reply on news.ycombinator.com