I've been reading about Nomic for ~15 years now, but I've never played a game. It seems somewhat difficult to get enough motivated players to participate. I'm interested in playing though. Maybe we could try to put something together? My contact info is in my profile.
I was part of a gaming group in the 1980s that played Diplomacy on custom maps that we made (my wife worked for USGS Map Sales, which gave us access to a lot of nice maps) and some other games. We also had Nomic in the rotation.
My experience was that it was a lot of fun with five or six players, but it tended to run quite long (three to five hours) and it was exhausting.
I think it’s quite educational about the legislative process. After a few games of Nomic one no longer wonders why it’s so hard for legislatures to get things done. One also gains a certain respect for the sheer stamina (and bladder control) of people who do it for a living, rather than as an occasional amusement.
I like to tell the story of one game in which a player, annoyed with the tendency of the players to lard up every proposed change with endless amendments, proposed a new rule that anyone who proposed a fourth amendment to a proposal under discussion would be doused with a glass of water. Everyone else was similarly annoyed with all the amendments, and so the new rule passed unanimously.
So that curtailed the amendments some, right? Ha ha, no. Rather, in short order everyone was soaking wet and the word "douse" had been redefined in the rules to mean dipping fingers in the glass of water and waving them in the target’s general direction.
I played nomic once. Pretty early in the process, someone proposed something akin to gerrymandering, effectively preventing over a third of the players from having their vote counted. Although that proposal didn't pass (a few of the proposed majority understood that they would be next), that kinda set the tone for the rest of the game.
Sad to see a more subtle version of the same thing play out in "democratic" societies.
I was heavily involved in various Nomic games (of that posted list, Agora and the Fantasy Rules Committee, and to some extent Internomic and I think Ackanomic as well; my site from grad school is one of the dead links under Agora) for a bunch of years during college and grad school, and it was deeply formative for me in terms of understanding how rules and systems work. And precise language. Agora was also the reason I learned Perl, when I got elected as the one who kept track of proposals and votes and inherited the perl scripts of my predecessor and had to read the man page (just one, it was Perl 4, excellently written but verrrry long) to learn the language to edit them. Which was also highly formative, come to think of it.
Agora still seems to be alive and well, though, and coming up on 30 years old, at agoranomic.org .
oh hey Vanyel! I may not have been as heavily involved in Agora per se, but I was a member for a time (as "Pascal") and absolutely feel the same way about internet Nomic in the 90s being a cherished formative experience for me, both in terms of igniting a love for playing with formal systems --- and also I think it was the reason I learned Perl. And about Spivak pronouns, and strange daylight-saving timezone exceptions in the united states. (Kelly being in Indiana --- come to think of it, was it em who you inherited the perl scripts from?)
I think I ended up experimenting with other more minimal-initial-ruleset systems later on, Micronomic/Macronomic? Good times in any case. Thanks a ton for your archival work, and thanks to everyone involved for making a kid's life more interesting in those heady early-internet days.
Yes, also formative (I was extremely comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns by the time they went a bit more mainstream).
> Kelly ... inherited the perl scripts from
It was indeed! And we're still in touch—she got married to Lee (also from Agora) and both of them are still working doing tech stuff. Probably not many perl scripts though. :D
I was involved in one game once, online. A bunch of rules were passed that required the implementation of a lot of infrastructure, said infrastructure eventually got implemented, and...everyone immediately lost interest.
I'd be interested to play a version with a base set that somehow kept it light and fun.
My friends and I made a long series of Nomic games in our forums back in the early 2000s [1]. It was weird and very non-traditional (if you could call Nomic games traditional).
We were just teenagers when one of the members of our strange little online friend group discovered Nomic and introduced it to the rest of us. We thought it was interesting, and after playing with the basic rules a bit, we modified it substantially. We turned the base Nomic rule making into this weird improvisational fantasy ARG that we played over AIM and IRC. It was set up to have us conduct "real life" missions to stop imagined alien invaders disguised as corporate overlords. (This very much resembled the plot of the game "Perfect Dark".) The objectives, limitations on what we could explore, what imagined dangers we could face -- all mutable rules we dreamed up and voted on together.
On some weeks we'd put players up for certain tasks that defined our game world, like finding some place or object that became part of the ongoing mythology. It was essentially an append-only log of rules, lore, and journaling. I don't think any of this content exists anymore, not that it was any good. Before long that slowly morphed into a more permanent and recorded game on EzBoard (which also no longer exists) before we started hosting our own websites and forums (bits and pieces of this still exist on archive.org). We were weird kids, but it was all entertaining to us.
At some point we decided to transition the Nomic rules into the bylaws for a fake company that made products and had ambitions of "taking over the world for fun". We made games, short films, websites [2]. Lots of stuff. Some of our websites are still around today [3].
We got featured in Nintendo's E3 press conference one year, beat Anil Dash [4] in some SEO competition (as teenagers that didn't care a thing about SEO -- we just wanted to win prizes), and even made it on Slashdot a few times. All of this was conducted with Nomic rules that we had collectively voted on at some point or another.
There was even one time where the game led to us creating a sandboxed instance of phpBB where people could set rules, ban each other, wipe the entire forums, etc. It was a bit of performance art for a few months. When someone (never identified) SQL injected the website and deleted all the tables, we cheered.
I miss the early web and my younger years, but I have to imagine kids these days are exploring technology and doing the same crazy things in Discord, Minecraft, Roblox, VRChat, etc.
