
Nomic - eugeniodepalo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
======
chrisacky
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/

~~~
johndbritton
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>

~~~
qznc
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.

------
simonsarris
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...](http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=629)

[2]
[http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=7...](http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=713)

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

~~~
rndmize
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.)

------
drewcrawford
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
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.

~~~
anthonyb
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.

~~~
Evbn
That is the same as Mao.

~~~
curiousdannii
Taking our glorious leader's name in vain!

~~~
glomph
The Chairman's game.

------
comex
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>

~~~
anthonyb
_> 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?

~~~
comex
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.

------
tjic
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
I would have preferred the story.

------
whyleyc
It sounds like "Calvinball".

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

~~~
icebraining
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...](https://lh3.ggpht.com/_zRSvuGbL2L0/TE0I0GlkcTI/AAAAAAAAAg4/kpmU0AfcOAA/s1600/Calvinball+5-27-90.jpg)

[http://littlebobeep.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/Calvinbal...](http://littlebobeep.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/Calvinball1.gif)

~~~
recuter
Thanks for making my evening.

~~~
Petrushka
This was also my initial thought. Mao as well...

~~~
alxndr
Mao was my first thought too.

I'll admit that my second thought was the "make a rule" rule of Kings...

------
mjn
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>

~~~
takluyver
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'.

~~~
jsnell
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/>

~~~
tjic
Zendo is great - I played it again with my nine year old godson last weekend
when he was here having a sleep over.

Tangentially: this kid is an awesome proto-nerd, and I fully expect that he'll
be posting at HN in another 6 to 8 years - for the last two years he's wanted
to program a computer game, and I told him that he and I would learn HTML5 and
JS together when he turns 10. We've already got the domain name picked out.

If you haven't engaged with an intellectually precocious kid, you can't
imagine how fun and rewarding it is.

------
tjic
Linked to from the Nomic article was this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_mutable_rule...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_mutable_rules)

which I find fascinating.

------
dsr_
Mornington Crescent.

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

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

------
TeeDub
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/>

------
cpeterso
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/>

------
dalke
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.

------
pjungwir
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>

------
anthonyb
Now if you _really_ want to bend your brain, go look up PerlNomic ;)

------
lambda
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.

------
ssapkota
I just lost _The Game_ \- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)>

------
altschuler
Reminds me of Lisp...

------
opminion
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.

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

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

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

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

~~~
vhf
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.

~~~
daliusd
Well, you left place for interpretation ;-) I was thinking that you were
talking about rules that are constantly changing because of democratic process
and that they are most clearly visible in tax area.

------
dysoco
Interesting concept, I might try it.

