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PerlNomic - An Experiment in Cooperative Coding
Anonymous Coward writes "PerlNomic is a game consisting of CGI scripts which allow you to submit proposals to alter ... the scripts themselves. All proposals must be approved by a voting process--at least for now. The game is styled after Peter Suber's Nomic. Deep knowledge of perl is helpful, but not required." Nomic is a really excellent game if you like mental puzzles, but somewhat difficult to get off the ground.
A good starting place is suber's original nomic game:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm
The idea was to make a game out of making rules for the game. So each
turn, a player proposes a change to the rules, and people vote on it
and stuff. (This is usually done with people in a room writing on
index cards and posting to a bulletin board, though sometimes it is
played over email.) But when players disagree on the interpretation
of a rule, they call to a "judge" (who is just another player) to sort
it out for them.
Now think perl, and think self-modifying code, and think web forms
instead of index cards. No judges needed, because the script either
runs or it doesn't, and whatever the scripts allow are the "rules".
Now think obfuscated code, and hidden loopholes, and unfortunate
little bugs that allow you to get way more points than we expected you
would get when we all voted on your proposal.
That's the idea, anyway.
What a cool way to run a Nomic game!