Nomic

I was heavily involved in various Nomic games (of that posted list, Agora and the Fantasy Rules Committee, and to some extent Internomic and I think Ackanomic as well; my site from grad school is one of the dead links under Agora) for a bunch of years during college and grad school, and it was deeply formative for me in terms of understanding how rules and systems work. And precise language. Agora was also the reason I learned Perl, when I got elected as the one who kept track of proposals and votes and inherited the perl scripts of my predecessor and had to read the man page (just one, it was Perl 4, excellently written but verrrry long) to learn the language to edit them. Which was also highly formative, come to think of it.

Agora still seems to be alive and well, though, and coming up on 30 years old, at agoranomic.org .

oh hey Vanyel! I may not have been as heavily involved in Agora per se, but I was a member for a time (as "Pascal") and absolutely feel the same way about internet Nomic in the 90s being a cherished formative experience for me, both in terms of igniting a love for playing with formal systems --- and also I think it was the reason I learned Perl. And about Spivak pronouns, and strange daylight-saving timezone exceptions in the united states. (Kelly being in Indiana --- come to think of it, was it em who you inherited the perl scripts from?)

I think I ended up experimenting with other more minimal-initial-ruleset systems later on, Micronomic/Macronomic? Good times in any case. Thanks a ton for your archival work, and thanks to everyone involved for making a kid's life more interesting in those heady early-internet days.

I was part of a gaming group in the 1980s that played Diplomacy on custom maps that we made (my wife worked for USGS Map Sales, which gave us access to a lot of nice maps) and some other games. We also had Nomic in the rotation.

My experience was that it was a lot of fun with five or six players, but it tended to run quite long (three to five hours) and it was exhausting.

I think it’s quite educational about the legislative process. After a few games of Nomic one no longer wonders why it’s so hard for legislatures to get things done. One also gains a certain respect for the sheer stamina (and bladder control) of people who do it for a living, rather than as an occasional amusement.

I like to tell the story of one game in which a player, annoyed with the tendency of the players to lard up every proposed change with endless amendments, proposed a new rule that anyone who proposed a fourth amendment to a proposal under discussion would be doused with a glass of water. Everyone else was similarly annoyed with all the amendments, and so the new rule passed unanimously.

So that curtailed the amendments some, right? Ha ha, no. Rather, in short order everyone was soaking wet and the word "douse" had been redefined in the rules to mean dipping fingers in the glass of water and waving them in the target’s general direction.