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.

Comments

Re:OK, I'll bite

[Leadhyena]

It's REALLY weird but here's a quick summation... Nomic is a game where the game IS the collection of rules of the game, as sort of a metamathematical proof of concept of such a thing. There's no board or any game impelement involved (first set of rules I saw did have 1 six-sided die). People would present proposals and in turn you'd vote on them. If you vote for the winning side you would score points, and if you were in the minority you would lose points. If proposals were above a certain percentage they became new rules to the game and must be followed.

The rules for Nomic also have a distinction between immutable and mutable rules, kind of like a file-lock on really important system files, to enforce important restrictions (like a player may quit at any time, the game is not legally binding, you are never forced to perfore an action before being allowed to quit, etc) and keep them protected. However, it is possible to make immutable rules mutable in order for them to be changed, and that's when the game gets really weird.

Also, almost nobody wins by making it to 100 points (by the initial rules of the game). 9 times out of 10 the rules are ammended to allow another winning condition that is either easier or harder to achieve. A lot of times Nomic games are created just to keep them going for as long as possible. In many ways it's like a grown-up blend of AD&D and politics.

Nomic is really fun to mix with other games. Specifically my friends and I would play a mix of Nomic and Monopoly we'd call Nominopoly, and games would last for literally days or weeks. Mixing Nomic with a card game (essentially this is similar to Mao) is fun as well, especially if there's drinking involved.