Hi. I want an official judgment on who the players of this game are. It is not clear at this point who they are. For instance, the oft-discussed ~ does not fit any common sense definition of "player". The rules do not define who the players are. We have several who expressed interest but have never "shown up" so to speak. It is vital to this game that we define the list of players. I will not withdraw this request under any circumstances.
Thanks
A
GRRRRR I thought it was 1's turn. My intent was to invoke judgment on turn 2, knowing the !jim is a regular and active player. However, seeing as how xorry has shown up, i am going to let xorry decide who the players are as he/she seems to be the current judge.
I agree totally. Since it is now 1's turn (any objections to that?), that makes notJim the Judge. The question to be decided (correct me if I'm wrong): who are the players of this game?
We still need to get the question defined in a rule, since notJim's judgement will only last until it's AAAs turn, and we'll have to have another Judgement then if it's not permanently established.
I suggest that until we get a rule, the "players" are: (those who voted on 301) + (anyone who votes on 302). That drops the questionable people, but doesn't bar anyone from joining now in case they were dropped erroneously or are newly interested.
That pretty much covers the common-sense description of "player" and lets us out of the legal nitpicking quagmire.
I don't believe rulings expire after each turn.
Well, they sort-of do, and sort-of don't.
Say we get this settled for this turn. Next turn, someone could invoke judgement again on the same thing. The new Judge is "not bound by the decisions of old Judges;" however, the new Judge must "consider game-custom... before applying other standards."
So an activist new Judge could rule differently ("consider" does not necessarily mean "follow"), unless a rule explicitly governs the question. But he could only do that if someone raised the question. Not that the new Judge is prohibited from raising his own question (provided it meets the requirements to invoke judgement), and then ruling on it.
So we should codify our practices in an actual rule, but we don't have to.
Additionally, we have the power to overrule an activist judge by unanimous vote.
Re; unanimous vote: Ha!
Anyway, hopefully we get a ruling on this. !jim, were it up to me, I would include players who voted on 301 as "the players", but it is not my decision to make.
I agree with Mister_A, that makes the most sense, but it's up to notJim to decide.
Who is it up to? xorry? This is the problem with not having appointed a judge; we can't get out of the starting gate.
It's up to notJim, as we're now on turn 302. Right now the only question before him is who counts as a player.
Can someone explain to me how we moved on to turn 302? I'm not sure I disagree, but I don't follow the logic used to get there.
mosessis, one version of the logic is here:
http://blogshares.com/mefino/node/6#comment315
Thank you, gerryblog.
I agree that we can safely say all eligible voters have voted, that this requirement has been fulfilled.
I still have two issues/questions though (that I'd be happy for someone to argue me out of!).
1) Judgment has been invoked. It was definitely invoked at least once, in clear terms. Now that person has rescinded their call, but we're unsure exactly what that means. The rules state that "When Judgment has been invoked, the next player may not begin his or her turn without the consent of a majority of the other players." [212] To me, this means we now need a majority of players to vote that we can continue.
2) Has !Jim added up his score? From 202: "Players subtract 291 from the ordinal number of their proposal and multiply ..." To me, this means that the player whose proposal is being voted on must do the subtracting. The rule does not say "291 should be subtracted from the player's proposal" or "someone should subtract..." I realise this is incredible pedantry (english teacher and all etc). If someone can provide me an alternate explanation for why this isn't true, I would be gratified.
I'd like to close by saying that I am anxious to see this game move on and am not raising concerns solely to delay the game. I'd just like to ensure that we are following the rules to the best of our ability, so as not to taint the game.
Fair questions -
2) is easier. notJim declared his turn over, implying that he had performed the required action to make that true. I suppose it would be better if he explicitly stated that he has calculated his score.
1) is tricky. The problem we're trying to move past is, we have no working definition of "player". If we need a majority of "players" to vote that we can continue, we're back where we started. We could have a Judge decide what a player is, except that the whole concept of who the Judge would be is defined in terms using the definition of "player."
The reason we're (well, speaking for myself, I'm) trying to hand-wave the game into turn 302 is not to avoid the issue, but to better confront it. In turn 302 we have a clearly defined Judge who meets every conceivable definition of "preceeding player." In this way we can decide the issue without falling into recursion hell.
You know, until you brought that up, I had been subconsciously reading that clause as "When Judgment has been invoked, [and not resolved]...," but now I see that that's not what it says. Argh.
Well, the way I see it, we could either allow "take-backs" on the invocation of Judgement, or we have to get majority consent to continue. By our largest player count, we have 35 players. So really, if we get 18 go-aheads we can be assured of having a majority without knowing our exact number. I think we could do that - we'll just have to hold off on turn 302 (and our Judgement on the player list) a bit longer.
Still, I'm not objecting to allowing take-backs and moving on since the Judgement didn't actually happen. Just saying.
Rule 105 says that all eligible players must participate in every vote. If we don't even know who players are or what it means for them to have participated then we have no way of knowing if this has been fulfilled and I don't see how we can just ignore it and jump on to proposal 302. We need to either sort out the judgment that was invoked already or be upfront about the fact that we're happily breaking rules right from the get go and that this is how the game will proceed.
I'm not happy about this as a precedent. My quick check shows at least four people who have signed up here who haven't voted so it can be argued that they are eligible but haven't participated. Blatantly ignoring that because it seems to make things easier leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The whole point of the game is to follow the rules, so convince me that that's what we're doing here.
Well, shellycat, I kind of feel the same way, but I don't have any good answers.
So what do you think we should do?
Is ~ the judge?
Who is that? [there's no ~ on MeFi]
How long should we wait if ~ doesn't show up?
I'm of the opinion that anyone who hasn't shown up by now isn't playing. I think we've picked up a few people who weren't on the original wiki list so it probably evens out. So then we lose ~ and are back to the same argument as yesterday (heh, not helpful I know).
I've also just found some comments over in the other forum, the listing thing is pretty bad about showing where there are new answers to read and it wasn't listing anything as new besides this thread. So that picked up two people who I'd seen commenting but hadn't voted as now having voted (wendell and flatluigi). I'm not sure if the remaining two on my list have commented (gnfti and fladablet), not sure how I can find that out.
If, however, we can show that everyone how has been active in the game so far has voted then that goes a long way towards covering rule 105 and should make any subsequent judgment* easier also - makes it pretty clear who's playing and who isn't. That makes me a lot happier than just glossing over stuff.
(*gah, misspell that every damn time)
I'm a scientist, I like rules and regulations and can be kind of anal. But it's Friday evening and I have a lovely bottle of red wine so that may not last anyway.
Perhaps the game is over, with !Jim the winner.
Or maybe we're just jumping the gun. Maybe every person on the list will eventually show up. By my counting we still need:
Burhanistan
enn
flabdablet
Freshwater pr0n (freshwater_pr0n)
goodnewsfortheinsane (let's make this eponysterical for me, baby)
klangklangston
vernondalhart
whir
~
Some of those should be easy to track down on MeFi (flabdablet posted just today, for instance). Others...
What? It's only Thursday here. There should be some rule against having a Friday before I'm ready. ;)
I think someone is just going to have to make a command decision to wipe out the player list, replace it with a list of people who have participated in the discussions here, invite the remaining contactable people to join in-progress, and call Rule 105 satisfied on turn 301.
Heh, we just need a judge so they can do that. It's what I would do if I was judge. I posted an update in the original metatalk thread in case it comes up on recent comments page and nudges someone, but I don't know how much everyone else uses that page.
And remember I'll be dealing with Monday while you're all still Sundaying, so it evens out.
It could be argued that player means "one who plays", not one who signs up. If this were the real world and a bunch of people showed up, but didn't participate in any way, shape, or form, I would argue that those people are not players.
Of course, technically, those people declared themselves as players. Perhaps a more analogous situation would be if this were the real world and we circulated a list of people who wish to join, but then some of those people didn't show up on the date of play. Certainly I would not consider those people players.
In a third scenario, imagine this was a meetup, and we all decided to meet at Xtreme Bean in Tempe, Az on March 27th to play a game of Nomic. People who said they were coming, but did not show up to the actual meetup would not be considered players (at least, I hope not).
If I were\am the judge, my ruling would be that to be considered a player, someone must have actually done something that constitutes playing, and that therefore, folks who registered for the site, but haven't done anything are not players until they do so.
Furthermore, I would argue that "something that constitutes playing" would be doing one or more of the following:
There may be others, but those come to mind first.
I found that you can track a users commenting history from their profile page and I think that everyone on the plater list who has commented has also voted. Someone else made the same assertion in the original 301 thread. This makes moving forward look a lot more likely and I think gives us our list of who playing. Probably need to go through that list carefully and make sure everyone who has voted is on the player list (as I think there are a few extras and I don't want anyone left out). Then hopefully 1 will arrive and start pushing things forward, or someone else will declare themselves judge or, um, something :D
!Jim, that's exactly what I was thinking. I can't figure out how to get us there from here. We need that decision to be made in order to authorize someone to make that decision.
Or I could just do it. The list of players on the wiki isn't "prohibited or regulated by a rule," [cf. Rule 116] so I could just change it. Believe me, the only thing stopping me is not wanting to be the asshole. Very tempting, though.
notJim has spoken, ctmf, do his bidding and edit player list as he has commanded.
I'm a bit iffy on this whole determination thing; for some reason I fell through the cracks and have never (to my knowledge) been on the list of players -- a situation of which I greatly disapprove.
At any rate, if the goal is to play the game and not just to wax eloquent about the rules, then we should probably go with !Jim's call here, say it's done, and move on.
On the other hand, this is Nomic. Waxing eloquent about the rules is the point. I sense a brewing conflict.
I've had enough wine by now to be fully for just editing the player list and moving on, particularly as I want players like offby1 (hi!) to be included. But I've also had too much wine for the attention to detail necessary to actually edit it correctly myself.
This is not really a normal thing, I don't drink much these days. Honest.
Bam. Done. Player list edited. Offby1, you have to vote on the right proposal now. Then we're done voting.
Okay, what's the current mechanism for voting? Not stars, now... I don't see poll options either. Just comment?
Yep. Just say yes or no in the comments. Preferably with context, so people can tell what you're babbling about.
The system everyone seems to agree on is starting a new thread with the finalized proposal text at the top and yes/no voting in the comments. Unfortunately we didn't figure that out before this vote started.
Good. I'm going to bed, then. I have to use my brain for financial gain in six hours.
A-ha! So we have a new list of players? Very nice. I hope 1 comes with a juicy proposal we can all get behind.
/innuendo.