[BNomic-Public] ideas...

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 15:03:11 -0500

On Tuesday, December 16, 2003, at 01:09 PM, Glotmorf wrote:

> While I see where you're going with the Council of Elders --
> it's actually what I envisioned doing with GR! -- you may want
> to choose another name, something like Maintenance Crew or
> Support Team, so as to not intimidate later new players.  If
> there's the appearance of rulership by a Council of Elders,
> new players may think the game is Senatorial Nomic (ruled by a
> Senate rather than an Emperor), which limits the amount of
> power a newbie might think e can acquire.

I like the sound of "The Council of Elders" much more than "The Support 
Team"... Perhaps we need a brief "new players guide" that describes 
some of the fundamental concepts such as this council.

> How did you have in mind to rotate duties?  Or perhaps I
> should ask, *did* you have in mind to rotate duties?

Alright, here's what I'd like the game to be like:
	A Guild of Programmers would be responsible for generating and 
maintaining scripts to run most areas of the game. Some of these 
scripts would be entirely automatic, taking web or email input and 
sending the results wherever they were needed. Others would be designed 
to track things with a Minister's input, but designed in such a way 
that anyone could use them, so that the nonprogrammers could be 
ministers just by periodically submitting data to the script.
	Those outside of the Guild would thus be able to take ministries as 
well, using scripts written for them by the Guild.

	With all this automation in place, there would be very little need for 
an Administrator, as everyone would be partially responsible for 
administrative work. However, there are some decisions that require a 
central authority, or situations where one would be useful, such as the 
designation of fora. For these decisions, there would be the Council of 
Elders, a group of four elected players. The Council would be 
responsible for everything that couldn't be handled normally - for 
example, they'd have to track the state of objects in the periods 
between when new objects are created and when they're added to the 
general ministry system by the Guild programmers. They'd also have 
certain powers, such as the power to designate fora, and the power to 
judge CFIs when the normal methods of judgment broke down.
	The Council would be presided over by the closest thing to a central 
authority in the game, the Administrator. The Administrator would be 
responsible for keeping the Council in check (but would be on the 
Council as well). E'd also have the final say on any matter which the 
rest of the Council couldn't deal with - say, if a state of Emergency 
arose, and the rest of the Council couldn't be contacted.
	Every five nweeks, a new Election would be held to decide the members 
of Council. All players older than three nweeks would be eligible to be 
Councilors, and all Veterans and Higher would be eligible to be the 
Admin.

The Council also might have the power to grant certain players 
exemption from the above guidelines; for example, if a Patriarch quit 
the game, then rejoined, e might be granted eligibility for Adminhood 
after three nweeks. This would not be regulated by the rules, but would 
be at the Council's discretion.

That's basically my view on the Council.

As for automation, I'd like to see a Guild of Programmers website, that 
worked like this:
	Each player would have a password, and could log into the website with 
said password to submit actions via various webforms. Some of these 
forms would feed the input directly into the scripts, while others 
might forward them to external scripts.
	Actions could also be submitted by email, using some sort of markup 
lanuage. Once upon a time, we frequently specified proposals and cfis 
and whatnot like this:
<proposal>
<title> Oops </title>
<body>
	Give each player 20 points.
</body>
</proposal>

A simple XML parser could turn that into a proposal object; such 
objects could also be generated by the website. The target service 
could be deduced from the website - if it was sent from the proposal 
submission page, presumably it's a proposal - or from the mail subject 
header, so that a mail with [PGo] in the subject would be sent 
automatically to the Political Go engine.
	Regardless, the created action object could then be sent to wherever 
it belonged, proposals to the prop engine, Tunnelers moves to 
Glotmorf's scripts, etc. The scripts would then tell the main Guild 
script who to notify about what.

The first step towards making such a system would be to write a script 
that could send and receive email to and from players. Such a script 
would need to do this:
	* maintain a list of which email addresses correspond to which players
	* Allow players to specify new email addresses that should be 
considered as "theirs"
	* Allow players to describe which of their addresses should be 
notified of things - while I'd want my nomic.net, cornell.edu, and 
bnomic.org accounts to be accepted as me, I'd only want one of them to 
receive notifications when something is sent to me
	* Given a block of text and a player name, identify which email 
addresses should receive in the that player's name, and send the block 
on.

Once that were in place, a great many things could plug into it.

-- 
Wonko