Nomic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

by eugeniodepalo • 14 years ago

242 84 14 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

opminion• 14 years ago

Tried, for years, to get my lawyer friends to explain to me the legal system(s) in terms of Nomic rules, but they find it difficult to abstract law.

dysoco• 14 years ago

Interesting concept, I might try it.

altschuler• 14 years ago

Reminds me of Lisp...

tjic4• 14 years ago

Just typed out a long story about playing Nomic once...and then deleted it.

I think I should get an upvote or two for sparing all of you the details. ;-)

loboman• 14 years ago

I would have preferred the story.

simonsarris2• 14 years ago

A college friend named Zach Barth was incredibly into this sort of thing, a game where the rules and units were made up as the game progressed. He tried quite a few times to make such a game, usually called infini-something such as Infinitron[1] and later Infinarena. The [1] link talks a lot about the challenges that came up trying to make such a game and I think its a neat read if you're into this sort of thing.

It's very understandable why these sort of games don't take off very often, as Z. writes in the [1] link on What Went Wrong:

> Unfortunately, the things that made the Infinifranchise great are the same things that made them alienating and, at times, ridiculous. It’s very hard to be creative on demand, which can lead to games that are draining and not terribly spectacular if the players aren’t in the groove. As a result, the games tended to have a limited audience and be overly complicated, although this is most definitely also a consequence of me.

--------------------

Zach is also the guy who made Infiniminer[2], the sandbox mining game, and if it looks like a precursor to Minecraft, that's because it was.

I haven't talked to him in a while but Zach these days mostly makes indie engineering puzzle games, you should really check them out[3].

[1] http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=6...

[2] http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=7...

[3] http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/

rndmize• 14 years ago

He also made SpaceChem, which is possibly one of the greatest games of all time. I can't recommend it strongly enough. There's a demo on his site and steam. Go try it.

(OK, one caveat - programmers/logic puzzle types may like this game more than the average member of the public.)

tjic4• 14 years ago

Linked to from the Nomic article was this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_mutable_rule...

which I find fascinating.

dsr_• 14 years ago

Mornington Crescent.

pacaro• 14 years ago

And also Mao [1], which has been an unbelievably source of entertainment

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)

derleth• 14 years ago

> Mornington Crescent.

... can be made into a Nomic, but the way it's usually 'played' it is simply a parody of over-complicated games with no actual rules of its own beyond, perhaps, 'be funny' and 'confuse the new guy'.

anthonyb6• 14 years ago

Now if you really want to bend your brain, go look up PerlNomic ;)

whyleyc• 14 years ago

It sounds like "Calvinball".

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes#section_6

icebraining• 14 years ago

It was my first thought as well ;) But the article doesn't do the comic strip justice.

https://lh3.ggpht.com/_zRSvuGbL2L0/TE0I0GlkcTI/AAAAAAAAAg4/k...

http://littlebobeep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Calvinbal...

recuter• 14 years ago

Thanks for making my evening.

znowi• 14 years ago

Thank you. This is the best description of the concept :) I also think that the existence of the permanent rule in the game (unique moves) makes it more engaging.

arikrak• 14 years ago

"The fictional game Calvinball, played by the main characters in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, is sometimes compared to Nomic. However, Calvinball appears to have a permanent rule that the same rules may never be used twice; a nomic, at least in its initial state, has no truly permanent rules."

chrisacky• 14 years ago

If there is one thing that the "internet" has lost, it's games like this. I used to love playing #wolfgame on IRC. Even Ultima Online (although hardly a typical heritage game) definitely shaped the way MMORPGs evolved.

Anyway, back onto Nomic. After reading the Wiki and seeing the "Initial Rule Set" [1] then reading through a lot of the archives it became clear that "chaos" and administration was the downfall of this game.

Eventually, the constitution that formed became so unmanageable and untrackable that it was impossible to progress. Judges were needed to resolve the rule disputes on every single vote and rule loop-holes were hard to spot (albeit an intended point of the game).[2]

But guess what we have now... Freaking version control. Companies/governments are tracking their constitution on GitHub at the moment, so why can't we also track the constitution of games such as this on GitHub as well. Last month GitHub launched their "create a game" contest that incorporated some form of "Pull"/"Push" feature into the game.

Well how incredibly awesome (I'm getting giddigy as I type this), would it be if we implemented Nomic voting rules using pull requests (for the votes), and have contributors sign up if they want to play the game.

Tracking the constitution changes was clearly the biggest technical challenge back in 1990s, and now we have tools to solve this problem totally.

GitHub makes Nomic awesome.

Ps. Ultima Online just made me feel all nostalgic. I miss West Brittania Bank, Felucca, my 24x24 Stone Keep (presumably fallen and reclaimed now) and my enormous Runebook library.

    [1] : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm#initial%20set

    [2] : http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/a/

TillE• 14 years ago

Sadly, UO didn't shape the way MMOs evolved, with the rare exception of niche games like EVE.

Current MMORPGs are almost exclusively of the DikuMUD / EverQuest / WoW lineage, just hack and slash with very few other options for interacting with or changing the game world.

unalone• 14 years ago

As a non-UO player: can you explain what was unique or different about it, or link me to somebody who writes about this?

MMOs bore me, and the thought that UO did MMOs somehow better intrigues me. I find it easy to believe, but hard to understand why.

bryogenic• 14 years ago

Anyone current versions of this on GitHub? I think it might even be fun to read the version history.

joelhooks• 14 years ago

UO was so awesome. I blew 5 years on it. Siege Perilous! SP was the right direction, unfortunately not many people seem to agree with me ;)

Kaivo• 14 years ago

When searching for nomic on github, there are a couple of nomic projects using pull requests to propose rules and fork to know who's involved. Yet, they seem empty at the moment. I'd be interested in seeing such project working though.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

The way I remember Nomic there was another rule, which defines an alternate objective function.

117. Any player who generates a contradiction in the rules automatically wins.

sirclueless2• 14 years ago

If you like the win condition, and others do too, it's a pretty straightforward rule to introduce early on.

zem• 14 years ago

yeah, i thought that was the entire point of nomic

bobobo1628• 14 years ago

If by '#wolfgame' you mean what we call Werewolf, where there are a bunch of 'villagers' and one or more randomly selected 'werewolves' where the werewolves get to kill a villager in the night and the villagers get to lynch someone during the day, we have a group who frequently plays this (or the Mafia variant) at uni through IRC or their forums.

sirclueless2• 14 years ago

Also, epicmafia.com is a great online implementation. There's a nice little community there, it's a great time sink.

Tyrant505• 14 years ago

I've stated a few times.. why can't we make UO in browser by now? Old rules of course.

munger• 14 years ago

Because apparently it is still up and running, costs money, and is owned by Electronic Arts? See uo.com - That aside, it seems technologically feasible.

Also interesting are the free/unauthorized reverse engineered UO emulators that continue to run today, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online_shard_emulation

sillysaurus• 14 years ago

It's not that easy. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's easy.

Sure, you could put up a Kickstarter for it and get a bunch of money behind the project. But historically, using the premise of building an MMO as a way of raising a bunch of money will result in failing to build that MMO.

A programmer who has experience and talent also has no incentive to recreate UO (think about the modern-day incentive structures for hotshot programmers), unless he was one of the original players. And sadly the overlap between "players of videogames" and "the best game programmers" is actually quite small. Carmack, for example, doesn't play games. Most of the talented gamedevs I know don't actually play them.

Maybe it's a challenge I'll take on.

johndbritton• 14 years ago

I just created a GitHub repo with the initial ruleset in Markdown format.

http://github.com/johndbritton/nomic

If you want to start a new game, you can fork the repo and begin accepting pull requests from your players. You can also see a listing of active games by checking out the network tab.

https://github.com/johndbritton/nomic/network

trevize• 14 years ago

bump. I'm playing

qznc• 14 years ago

I made a simplified german ruleset for playing it with some friends. Tried to translate it to english in a branch:

https://github.com/beza1e1/nomic/blob/english/rules.md

It also starts of with a "dictator" in the beginning, which removes judgements and should make it easier for beginners. Players can bring back the judges anyways.

trescenzi• 14 years ago

I feel like a tiny bit of js or something extra could be nice. Just something that makes it eiser to add rules and vote and maybe uses the github api to make pull requests for you. I don't know if that would be a waste of time though

spinchange• 14 years ago

Google Wave would've been great for this too.

drewcrawford• 14 years ago

There's a commercial game similar to this called Flux. It's not as free-form (there are cards with rule changes pre-printed on them), but it is easier to play with a group of new users.

One of the primary results--obvious to programmers but perhaps not obvious to the general public--is how easy it is for rules to interact in unexpected ways, often producing ambiguous gameplay which may go unnoticed by players for significant lengths of time.

indspenceable• 14 years ago

Not to be contrarian, but flux is nothing like nomic. Rules in flux don't interact in unexpected ways (there are a few variables that change, notably, draws per turn, maximum hand size, and win conditions which are generally what cards you have out in front of you in order to win) but the player has no freedom to make up new rules on her own.

anthonyb6• 14 years ago

A much better game is Bartok (sometimes called Bartog) - it starts out as something approximating Uno[1]. Each time someone wins, they make a rule.

Playing it with Mathematicians/CS types is brain-hurty (think mod-13 arithmetic and prime numbered cards behaving differently).

---

[1] Some of the different rules:

- If you ask a question, you get a 1 card penalty

- If you have one card and don't say "bartok", you get your hand made back up to 7.

- We played with a bunch of broken decks all smushed together, so you couldn't count cards.

mjn• 14 years ago

I've been interested in this idea of games with modifiable rules on and off, but something about the voting aspect doesn't appeal to me that much. Not entirely sure why. I like the self-referentiality of the rules being modifiable, but it just being a vote, "what rule change do you want?", feels unsatisfying.

I'm not sure what to replace it by, admittedly. I did one experiment where instead of saying what the rules were, your actions were taken as an example of what you thought the new rules should be: if you did something not previously legal, it was inferred to now be legal [1]. But that just led fairly quickly to chaos, unless it were carefully restricted. So maybe not the right approach either. But I still like the idea that the game-mechanics changes themselves are related to the game mechanics in a cybernetic-feedback-loop kind of way, rather than a completely "outside the system" free vote. Now as to how to implement that in a way that makes for a playable/interesting game...

[1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/reflexive_rules.html

dorkrawk• 14 years ago

I suppose you could just make a new rule that says rules are decided on by something other than voting.

takluyver2• 14 years ago

My friends and I used to occasionally play a card game called Mao. The winner of each round (the first to get rid of the cards in their hand) could make up a new rule governing game play for following rounds. But they didn't announce their rule, instead punishing players who broke it by giving them an extra card. By watching the punishments, you had to try to work out their rule so you could avoid breaking it.

With the right group, it was quite fun, if rather tiring. You need to not take winning too seriously, because it's quite easy to make up a complex rule no-one will ever get - one of my friends had 'you may not play a prime number card on another prime number card'.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Can you do "You get a card at random"?

jsnell• 14 years ago

Mao belongs to a class of games called inductive reasoning games. They're mostly crap, but there are a few gems. IMO the best one of the bunch is Zendo where one player makes up a rule that determines whether a grouping of playing pieces is valid or not (usually played with Treehouse pieces, but e.g. a limited selection of lego pieces can also work). The other players then basically need to use an experimentation / induction loop to determine the rule. This can be really fun in a hackerly group. And once the players get experience, it's surprising how complicated rules are solveable.

The story of the Zendo design process is a great read: http://www.koryheath.com/games/zendo/design-history/

Evbn3• 14 years ago

I thought the point of playing Mao was to torture the new player, like a hazing ritual.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

Voting games can be painful. I remember Mafia, which is very crowd-dependent. People who slow-play/minimax games make Mafia intolerable. At 3:00 in the morning with 3 players left, the 30-minute discussions are painful. Just kill someone and lose or win already.

The variant I built (to give something useful to start the discussion, rather than blind suspicion) had a combat mechanic. You actually had to "buy" arms in order to do your killings. This meant that Mafia actually left a trace, because it was public information who purchased. (There was no in-game currency. The cost of buying arms was visibility.) If you were Mafia, you'd probably want to buy arms. On the other hand, the good guys also could benefit by arming up. The result of this was that there are two different strategies. You can not buy arms often (or ever) and evade suspicion during the day, but be weak against brawls and Mafia... or you can buy them at every opportunity and be strong in combat, but arouse suspicion and be more likely to die in the day phase.

There was also a brawling phase. If you thought someone was Mafia and wanted to go vigilante, you could. However, they could defend themselves. in addition to dying, you could end up wounded, which would make it obvious the next morning that you were in some kind of fight.

anthonyb6• 14 years ago

I used to play board games with people like that, and the problem is easily fixed with a kitchen timer :)

Timer goes off? Turn over, too bad. Given the average number of turns in a game and how long you want to play for, you can work out what to set it at (maybe with a 25-50% leeway)

An interesting variant is to put the timer in a box so that you don't know how long you have left.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

You should turn these rules into a G+ Hangouts game.

curiousdannii2• 14 years ago

Check out The Resistance: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/the-resistance

Advantages:

- Defined game length (max 5 rounds)

- No deaths

- Actual data to base your votes on (Mafia can be fun, but the games of it I play never have 30 minute discussions because there's just nothing to discuss -- we just pick someone semi-randomly to lynch.)

The commercial release is very nice, but it can be played with regular cards too.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

BlogNomic is a nomic game that has been running since 2003. When someone "wins", they reset the rules and being a new "dynasty". New players are welcome, but most players have been playing for a very long time so the rules get quite tricky.

http://blognomic.com/

ssapkota• 14 years ago

I just lost The Game - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

vhf2• 14 years ago

The wikipedia page is said to describe a game, although it rather looks like a description of Switzerland's political system.

daliusd2• 14 years ago

Why not any tax related political system in real life ;-) ?

vhf2• 14 years ago

I was talking about direct democraty, not taxes. Political systems where citizens propose laws that are voted by citizens, and where citizens propose to suppress laws and make all citizens vote on this suppression, by example.

comex2• 14 years ago

BlogNomic has been mentioned, but here's a gratuitous plug for Agora Nomic, which is currently suffering from lack of interest (and could use a few more players) but is arguably the oldest still-living true nomic. The game sometimes has "actual gameplay" and sometimes doesn't really, but in practice mainly revolves around the rest of the rules - over 100 of them - including things like multiple privilege levels for rules, a court to decide questions and punish rulebreaking, assets that you can give someone to let them act on behalf of you, a bill of rights, offices, and, of course, proposals, all of which is written in a rather formal and pedantic style that's nevertheless the subject of much debate over interpretation. The whole thing somehow feels like maintaining a computer program written in English, and perhaps for that reason, many players are programmers; as a particular example, one valid way to play is to find bugs in the rules and try to exploit them to force through a proposal granting you a (temporary) dictatorship, which is like nothing so much as computer hacking. It's bizarrely fun.

http://agoranomic.org

The ruleset: http://agora.qoid.us/current_flr.html

An example call for judgement: http://cfj.qoid.us//1892

lambda2• 14 years ago

Wow, I remember Agora from back when I used to play Nomic. If it's still around, it is indeed the oldest living Nomic, as far as I'm aware.

anthonyb6• 14 years ago

> Agora Nomic, which is currently suffering from lack of interest

And deservedly so. I started playing once, and got chosen to be a judge. After a couple of hours reading the rules I passed judgement, and promptly got shot down/counter judged. Apparently I was technically correct, but there were a whole swag of "customary rules" which weren't written down anywhere.

If you're not going to play by the rules as written, what's the point?

comex2• 14 years ago

Not sure when this was, and I guess this may be very belated, but I'm sorry you had that experience. Nowadays at least, although the text of the rules is interpreted much more literally than any real law system, and the policy is always to follow it where it is clear, vagueness in the rules is often interpreted in a convenient way, and there is quite a lot of (often ignored) precedent to deal with it, so it takes time to understand them. On the other hand, the CFJ system doesn't always get it right (in quite a few instances, later cases have struck down precedent without any particular reason that the answer should have changed - some cases are paid more careful attention than others, and sometimes emotion affects it in the case of scams), and often facts that seem completely self-evident to one person end up getting disputed (I've had this happen to me and observed it in others). I've learned through experience that it's best to avoid taking adverse judgements personally or getting ticked off about what seems to be misguided judging, especially if you're trying a scam.

pjungwir• 14 years ago

A game that is similarly free-form, albeit less chaotic, is Eleusis. It is played with cards, and each round one person chooses a secret pattern, and the other players play cards, which are identified as correct or incorrect, and they try to figure out the pattern. So there are meta-rules about how the game is played, but the rules for "correct" cards change every game. It seems like a game many HNers would enjoy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_%28card_game%29

TeeDub• 14 years ago

The book that this game originates in ("The Paradox of Self Amendment") is actually a very delightful and thought-provoking book. If you're into self-amending systems (law, software, etc), you may enjoy reading it. It's all available online here: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/psa/

lambda2• 14 years ago

Ah, I remember playing an online game of Nomic back in high school. Someone actually keeps an archive of dead Nomic games, so the eye-bleeding '90s web design is still alive: http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/macronomic/. I take full credit for the painful color scheme. All static HTML hand-edited in BBEdit; I think I had a bunch of macros defined to help make it easier to maintain.

dalke• 14 years ago

We played a game of Nomic once in high school. One of the rules, quickly amended, was that rules needed to be in a specific meter. It wasn't dactylic hexameter, but I've forgotten which now.

We got bored with it after a couple of hours, so we passed a rule that would finish the game at the end of the round. I still had a chance to propose a rule, which was something like "We will raze all scores. After the vote, each person's scores will be raised by 10 points." Raze/raise are homonyms with roughly opposite meanings, and the rule proposals were written down but only read out loud for discussion and vote. It passed.

Yes, I'm still rather proud of that rule.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

How about a drinking game variant of Nomic: add an immutable rule that every rule must somehow contain a reference to drinking.

canadaduane• 14 years ago

Apparently that's what 21 is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(drinking_game)

Nomic

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