From malcolmr@ Tue Jul 23 20:45:04 1996 Path: news.bellglobal.com!worldlinx.com!torn!newsfeed.internetmci.com!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!munnari.OZ.AU!mel.dit.csiro.au!actcsiro!news.nsw.CSIRO.AU!metro!metro!unsw.edu.au!usenet From: Malcolm Ross Kinsella Ryan Newsgroups: rec.games.abstract,alt.games.nomic Subject: Nomic FAQ (Updated 15 Apr 1996) Date: 24 Jul 1996 00:45:04 GMT Organization: School of CompSci & Eng, Uni Of NSW, Oz Lines: 544 Distribution: world Message-ID: <4t3rmg$ot5@mirv.unsw.edu.au> Reply-To: malcolmr@cse.unsw.edu.au NNTP-Posting-Host: gamelan.orchestra.cse.unsw.edu.au Xref: news.bellglobal.com rec.games.abstract:4958 alt.games.nomic:169 The NOMIC Frequently Asked Questions List ----------------------------------------- Compiled by: Malcolm Ryan Last Modified: 15 Apr 1996 Contents: --------- 0. Where can I get this FAQ? 1. What is Nomic? 2. Where can I get the rules? 3. What is alt.games.nomic? 4. Is Nomic being played on the Net? Where? 5. What is this talk of Meta-Nomic? 6. What is/was Nomic World? Where is it now? 7. What other Nomic-like games are there? 8. Nomic related pages on the Web. 9. Books and references. 10. Acknowledgements. ANSWERS: -------- 0. Where can I get this FAQ? The FAQ will be, hopefully, posted monthly to alt.games.nomic, and alt.answers. New versions will also be posted to alt.fan.hofstadter and rec.games.abstract. It can also be FTP'ed from the nomic ftp site: ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/nomic/FAQ. An HTTP version also exists at: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~malcolmr/nomic-faq.html Any sites interested in mirroring this file are welcome to do so. Please contact me so that I can include you in this section. ---- 1. What is Nomic? Asking the question "What is Nomic?" is like asking the question "What is a hacker?" or "What is Zen?" - people tend to get all mystical and cryptic, and you end up with no real idea at all. :) Nomic is a game, and it is a lot of FUN! Unlike most games, the rules of nomic are not written in stone. In fact, the object of the game is to make changes to the rules of the game. Players start off following some "initial ruleset", which dictates how the rules can be changed. Once a rule change has been made, players then follow this new rule set. Most importantly, the rules about how rule changes are made can themselves be changed! This is where it tends to get mystical, because as a result of these rule changes, the game you are playing will change from moment to moment. The nature of the rule changing mechanism might change from democratic to capitalist, to communist, to whatever. Or the ability to chnage the rules might be removed entirely - perhaps the game will turn into chess, or tag, or snap. The future of the game is entirely in the hands of the players. Most nomic enthusiasts seem to enjoy playing nomic in order to experience the possibilities of different kinds of lawmaking processes, and also to exercise their ingenuity in trying to discover loopholes in the rules which give unusual results - mostly to the benefit of the player. (This is called "scamming", and is lots of fun! :) >> In my commentary on the game (only in my book? or also in SciAm?) I distinguish 'procedural' from 'substantive' games. In substantive games, players play to earn points and win. In procedural games, they try to tie the rules into knots, either for the logical fun of it or in order to win by paradox rather than by points. -- Peter Suber For the record, Nomic was conceived and designed by Peter Suber, and first published in Douglas Hofstadter's column "Metamagical Themas" in Scientific American in 1982, and later in Hofstadter's book, by the same name. Peter revised the rules and published them in his own book, "The Paradox of Self Amendment" in 1990. See section 8 below, for references. NOTE: The section on Nomic from the Paradox of Self Amendment is now online. Take a look at Peter Suber's Nomic web page at: http://www.earlham.edu/suber/nomic.htm ---- 2. Where can I get the rules? Peter Suber's original rules set is available on the Web at: http://www.earlham.edu/suber/writing/nomic.htm#initial set They can also be FTP'ed from ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/nomic/rules.txt They have also been published in several books, which are listed in section 8 below. ---- 3. What is alt.games.nomic? Alt.games.nomic is is newsgroup dedicated to the discussion of Nomic and related games. In particular, it is proposed as a discussion area for interaction between existing Email Nomic games (See Q4 and 5, below). Alt.games.nomic is suffering from poor propagation. Please encourage your newsadmin to carry it. If you can't get this group, Nomic discussion also takes place in rec.games.abstract or alt.fan.hofstadter, and most of the a.g.n readers lurk in these groups too. There also exists a newsgroup alt.games.nomic.unomic, for the purpose of playing and discussing Usenet Nomic (see Q4 below). A.g.n.u has even worse propagation than a.g.n. ---- 4. Is Nomic being played on the Net? Where? There are currently, to my knowledge, four Nomic games being played by email (sometimes called ENomic) at various sites on the Net. Their players describe them as: * Agora (aka Yoyo) Agora Nomic is the largest and most dynamic game of Nomic ever played. It has been in existence since July 1993, and since that time has voted on proposals at an average rate of about 50 per month. At time of writing (August 1994), there are about 190 active rules, and this number is growing, albeit quite slowly, since most proposals now concern themselves with amending or repealing previous rules. The "feel" of play in Agora Nomic is somewhat akin to being a member of parliament or congress, with all the social interaction which that implies. Hence Agora Nomic can seem formidable to the inexperienced player. However, this is largely offset by the uniquely welcoming and encouraging attitude Agora Nomic and its constituent players take towards new participants. Agora now has four mailing lists: - For distributing official mail (rule sets, proposals, phone books etc). All players must subscribe to this list. - For conducting business (points transfers, protoproposals, annotations to official reports.) All players must subscribe to this list too. - For discussion only. No business should be conducted on this list. Not all players are necessarily subscribed to this list, as it is often very high in volume. - A backup list, in case of failure of any of the above, otherwise it is not used. Subscribe to the teleport mailing lists by sending a message to with the body: subscribe nomic-official subscribe nomic-business subscribe nomic-discussion Subscribe to the yoyo mailing list by sending a message to [Ed: I think] with the body: subscribe nomic * Tabula (aka Reed) We are conducting a dignified Nomic game at a relatively leisurely pace, with the intent of giving the participants plenty of time to take care of the other details of their life (work, classes, whatever). The game is designed to continue indefinitely, with Speakerhood passed on to a winner whenever some players receive 100 points (at the moment). Subscriptions to the mailing list and the Ruleset may be obtained by mailing . We are currently limited to <= 8 players; to join, listen to the list for a while, and then petition the current players for entry. * Fantasy Rules Committee (aka frc) The Fantasy Rule Game is a Nomiclike Game which is, played via a server. People propose Rules of which the only requirement is that they are consistent with all valid earlier Rules. The last Player succeeding in posting a valid Rule wins. Of course the Game stands and falls with a little bit of cooperation. A (first) Rule like "Rules are only valid if posted by me" is legal, winning and No Fun. (Still, varieties of the above with loopholes can be.) Rounds may last from either a few Rules and up to 40. The latter record was set for a Round were the theme was the creation of a new board game. Other themes were (4D) Scrabble, Logical puzzles, Strange planets and the Hellympics. More than 20 Rounds have been played since the game was invented about one and a half year ago as a `Committee' on the defunct Nomic Mud. If you want to play, you have to subscribe to the server: a message to will do. The subject doesn't matter and the body should contain a line like "subscribe frc". If the body contains "help" on a line of its own you'll get instructions. If you send mail to you'll get back instructions specific to frc. The server itself has for address . Any message sent there will bounce to all people subscribed to the list. For more info, check out anonymous ftp at ftp.nvg.unit.no:/pub/frc. * Valparaiso (aka valpo) c/o: Paul Nord Our nomic game has been running for about a year and a half now. Going on the 30th proposal. It started independently of the knowlege of any other game. It is therefore properly called "The One True Nomic". For information about our game, I suppose that you can write to me. None of the other players want their names disclosed at this time. The game operates out of Valparaiso University in Valparaiso Indiana. Initialy it was started by a few VU alums and some students. The rules are not made public. We have a shared account that we use to hold the rules. Valpo now has a WWW page at http://kepler.valpo.edu/nomic/index.html * Gnomic Information provided by Garth Rose (Former Ambassador for Agora Nomic): I have made contact with another eNomic through our own former Member and PROSIRUP Founder Delphin. It is called Gnomic, and its address is gnomic@FHI-Berlin.mpg.de. One subscribes via gnomic-request@ the same address by sending: HELP SUB gnomic REV gnomic in the body of the message. There is a gnomic ftp site at denver.rz-berlin.mpg.de. It has the Ruleset, among other things. It's in German - enjoy! There is also a gnomic WWW page at: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/gnomic/gnomic.info.html. * Fascist Fascist is designed to be completely undemocratic, at least to start with. There are few initial rules, players propose new rules or rule changes and The Imperious Emperor says whether they are accepted or not. Rumour has it that they have become slightly more democratic in recent times, but I wouldn't bet on it. :) Fascist is played via a set of WWW pages at: http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/fascist/fascist.html The current rules and everything can be found at this site. The current Humble Scribe is Denis Howe . Contact him for more information. * Pokey Ed McGuire has is running an E-mail Nomic game, called "Pokey" using Suber's initial Rule set. E-mail him for more info. The first game began Sept 13, 1993 and is still going (10 Feb 1995). "We have decided to name our game Pokey, a label reflective of the speed of play." - Ed * Meta-game Meta-game is a nomic-like game run by Richard Resnick, through his own email account: . I am not certain of the current status of this game. An "Introduction to Meta-Game", forwarded to me from Richard, is included in the Nomic ftp site: ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/nomic/meta-game.txt * Unomic There are/were/might have been plans in the pipeline for a game of Usenet Nomic, or Unomic for short. I believe the newsgroup alt.games.nomic.unomic was made for this purpose, but it has yet to have got off the ground. There is a copy of the proposed initial ruleset in the Nomic ftp site: ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/nomic/unomic.txt People interested in pursuing this game might post to alt.games.nomic or mail Kelly Martin at: * RULES: RULES is a nomic-variant developed and set up by Oscar Montes. It has adopted a minimalist approach to the Initial Set of rules, and is still play-testing these. Oscar runs the game's mailing list by hand. People interested in participating in the game should contact him at: * Thring Thring is an email-based Nomic game, initally based on the original Nomic rules. It began at Adelaide University on December 1, 1994, with Speaker David Wilson. The current web page for Thring is: http://www.internode.com.au/~adrian/thring/thring.html The Thring discussion list is: Subscription to the discussion list is by sending a message with the text "subscribe nomic" to: The Thring Weekly is published by Luke Schubert, and can be found at: http://macpure.maths.adelaide.edu.au/lschubert/weekly/index.html ---- 5. What is this talk of Meta-Nomic? With the recent proliferation of Nomic games online, some people have begun talking about starting a game of "Meta-Nomic" - that is, a game of Nomic in which each of the existing games act as "players". The idea is loosely based around the mapping of nomic games to nations in the real world. So Meta-Nomic would make some provisions for trade and negotiation between "nations", somewhat like the UN. Of course, the most attractive thing to most advocates of Meta-Nomic is the possibility of Inter-Nomic WAR. ---- 6. What is/was Nomic World? Where is it now? Nomic World was a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) run by Geoff Wong and Steve Gardner at Monash University, in Australia. Its sole purpose was to run an extended game of Nomic. In its heyday, NW had over thirty players, from places all around the world, making it the largest (known) game of Nomic in the world! Nomic world lasted for about 9 months, before the wizards were forced to shut it down due to system problems and lack of time to administer it. In that time, several hundred rules were made, and multiple scams pulled off (with various degrees of success.) To find out more about Nomic World, read Steve Gardner's excellent game summaries, available from the Nomic ftp site: ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/nomic/summaries.txt Nomic world is currently in limbo. There has been some discussion of it being resurrected at another site. If anyone is interested in doing this, the old MUD code can be provided, and I would gladly give you any assistance I can. Please email me. >>I consulted the 'framers' of this game and suggested an innovation to the initial set of rules which (I believe) they adopted. Instead of having players propose rules in serial, they should do so in parallel, and then occasionally vote on some of the accumulated proposals. That would not only permit a much larger number of players to participate, but it would simulate a legislative body better than the original rule set. -- Suber The initial rules from Nomic World are available for FTP from ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au in the file: /pub/doc/nomic/nwrules.txt Steve Gardner's summaries of the history of Nomic world are also at that site, in the file: summary.txt ---- 7. What other Nomic-like games are there? [If anyone knows of any others, I would love to include them. - MALCOLM] * Bartok (aka Bartog?) A card game, which begins very much like Uno, except that each time a player wins a round, e gets to invent a new rule. Generally, new rules are restricted by the players' sense of fairness, and meta-rules are not allowed. The game is complicated by the initial rule that "If a player asks a question, e must pick up a card." This game is meant to be very silly, and can be lots of fun. I have put the a file containing the initial rules, and some suggested extras which I have played successfully in the past, up for ftp at ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au: pub/doc/nomic/bartog.txt [Research is currently underway as to the origin of this game, and the true spelling of its name. Any info would be appreciated. - MALCOLM] * Mao Mao is similar to Barto[gk] but with the following important variations: 1) New players are not told the initial rule set (which is slightly different from the Bartok one, and varies slightly (radically?) depending on which group is playing it) 2) When someone goes out, they invent a new rule, which they do not tell the other players. Gareth Rees has made a WWW page containing "the public rules of the game MAO" at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/gdr11/mao-public.txt Ted Helm claims that the name "Mao" is a corruption of "M.O.W." which stands for "My Own Way". Others say that "MAO" is a corruption of M-A-theta, and should be read as "Math". * Other Geoff Wong's home page contains some links to pages about various political games, which might interest a Nomic fan. It can be found at: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~geoff ---- 8. Nomic related pages on the Web. There are a plethora of Nomic pages on the net. Have a peek at the following: The NOMIC Frequently Asked Questions List (this FAQ): http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~malcolmr/nomic-faq.html The Nomic FTP site index: ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/nomic/index.html Michael Norrish's Nomic pages: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mn200/games/nomic/ Chuck Carroll's Agora Nomic pages: http://dfw.net/~ccarroll/agora/ Don Blaheta's Nomic Home Page: http://shamino.quincy.edu/~blahedo/nomic.html Scott Goehring'a Nomic Home Page: http://copper.ucs.indiana.edu/~sgoehrin/nomic-pages.html Geoff Wong's Nomic Page: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~geoff/nomic.html Valpo Nomic Home Page: http://kepler.valpo.edu/nomic/index.html Thring Nomic Home Page: http://www.internode.com.au/~adrian/thring/thring.html ---- 9. Books and references. * Title: "The Paradox of Self-Amendment, A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change." Author: Peter Suber Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing Date: 1990 ISBN: 0-8204-1212-0 Description (by Suber): PSA is the first (so far the only) book-length study of self-reference problems in law. It focuses on one such problem from American constitutional law, but in the discussion of it ranges widely over other problems and other jurisdictions. That one central problem is whether the amendment clause of the constitution can be used to amend itself. Alf Ross, a notable jurist and logician, argued that it cannot. I argue that it can, and show in addition that self-amendment has frequently occurred in fact. In the process of showing the permissibility of self-amendment, I discuss much of the law of the U.S. federal amending process, the theological paradox of omnipotence, the nature of paradox, legal rationality, and legal change. Nomic is Appendix 3 of the book. I can't recommend that every avid Nomic player buy the book, for it costs $70 US. But I can recommend that they persuade their local library to do so! The book would be helpful for anyone who took a serious theoretical interest in the game or in the logic of self-amendment. I can recommend this essay-length synopsis of the main argument of the book: Peter Suber, "The Paradox of Self-Amendment in American Constitutional Law," _Stanford Literature Review_, vol. 7, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Fall 1990) pp. 53-78. * Title: "About Nomic: A Heroic Game That Explores the Reflexivity of the Law" Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter Published: Scientific American, 246 (June 1982) pp16-28 Description: An early version of the rules, taken from the unpublished text of "The Paradox of Self-Amendment", with explanation and commentary by Suber about the purpose of the game and the possible directions it could take. * Title: "METAMAGICAL THEMAS: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern" Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter Publisher: Penguin Books ISBN: 0-14-008534-3 Description: A reprint of the his Scientific American articles, along with some extra discussion and feedback from readers. ---- 10. Acknowledgements. I'd like to thank the following in helping me to construct this FAQ. Karl Anderson Don Blaheta Paul Bolchover Scott de Brestian Chuck Carroll Doug Chatham Steve Gardner Ted Helm Peter Hollo Denis Howe Oerjan Johansen Ed McGuire Nelson Minar Michael Norrish Gareth Rees Garth Rose Cameron Simpson Peter Suber Bill Trost Geoff Wong