Nomic
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Nomic
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Re: Nomic
#2It's sad how many of those finished game urls are dead today. (I remember visiting this maybe a decade ago and still being able to reach some of them)
Re: Nomic
#3RootNomic was one where the rules were implemented in setuid shell scripts on someone's spare computer.
Re: Nomic
#4What a neat thing I’ve never heard of. Is anyone aware of any active games online? I’d like to see one in action at least, if not play.
Re: Nomic
#5I played nomic once. Pretty early in the process, someone proposed something akin to gerrymandering, effectively preventing over a third of the players from having their vote counted. Although that proposal didn't pass (a few of the proposed majority understood that they would be next), that kinda set the tone for the rest of the game.
Sad to see a more subtle version of the same thing play out in "democratic" societies.
Re: Nomic
#6Nomic is a blast from the past!
My friends and I made a long series of Nomic games in our forums back in the early 2000s [1]. It was weird and very non-traditional (if you could call Nomic games traditional).
We were just teenagers when one of the members of our strange little online friend group discovered Nomic and introduced it to the rest of us. We thought it was interesting, and after playing with the basic rules a bit, we modified it substantially. We turned the base Nomic rule making into this weird improvisational fantasy ARG that we played over AIM and IRC. It was set up to have us conduct "real life" missions to stop imagined alien invaders disguised as corporate overlords. (This very much resembled the plot of the game "Perfect Dark".) The objectives, limitations on what we could explore, what imagined dangers we could face -- all mutable rules we dreamed up and voted on together.
On some weeks we'd put players up for certain tasks that defined our game world, like finding some place or object that became part of the ongoing mythology. It was essentially an append-only log of rules, lore, and journaling. I don't think any of this content exists anymore, not that it was any good. Before long that slowly morphed into a more permanent and recorded game on EzBoard (which also no longer exists) before we started hosting our own websites and forums (bits and pieces of this still exist on archive.org). We were weird kids, but it was all entertaining to us.
At some point we decided to transition the Nomic rules into the bylaws for a fake company that made products and had ambitions of "taking over the world for fun". We made games, short films, websites [2]. Lots of stuff. Some of our websites are still around today [3].
We got featured in Nintendo's E3 press conference one year, beat Anil Dash [4] in some SEO competition (as teenagers that didn't care a thing about SEO -- we just wanted to win prizes), and even made it on Slashdot a few times. All of this was conducted with Nomic rules that we had collectively voted on at some point or another.
There was even one time where the game led to us creating a sandboxed instance of phpBB where people could set rules, ban each other, wipe the entire forums, etc. It was a bit of performance art for a few months. When someone (never identified) SQL injected the website and deleted all the tables, we cheered.
I miss the early web and my younger years, but I have to imagine kids these days are exploring technology and doing the same crazy things in Discord, Minecraft, Roblox, VRChat, etc.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060213020409/http://wiki.merke... I don't even remember this one. We had a lot of people in our community making little Nomic games here and there.
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060831040053/http://dsmeet.com...
Re: Nomic
#7I think many more people were accused of playing Nomic in heated Usenet discussions than actually ever played Nomic…
Re: Nomic
#8It's sad how many of those finished game urls are dead today. (I remember visiting this maybe a decade ago and still being able to reach some of them)
Perhaps they are archived in the wayback machine?
Re: Nomic
#9Nomic is a blast from the past! My friends and I made a long series of Nomic games in our forums back in the early 2000s [1]. It was weird and very non-traditional (if you could call Nomic games traditional). We were just teenagers when one of the members of our strange little online friend group discovered Nomic and introduced it to the rest of us. We thought it was interesting, and after playing with the basic rule…
Just replying to save this amazing comment.
Re: Nomic
#10Wow I haven't thought about this in years.
I was involved in one game once, online. A bunch of rules were passed that required the implementation of a lot of infrastructure, said infrastructure eventually got implemented, and...everyone immediately lost interest.
I'd be interested to play a version with a base set that somehow kept it light and fun.