[BNomic-Public] ideas...

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 21:22:16 -0500

>>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 about "Gerontocratic Circle?" Or "Senior Citizens' Council?" Or 
"Perennial Association?" Those all sound a lot less powerful, and almost 
mask what they are.-
>
>>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.
>
-Indeed they could. Is there a "Dummies" version of what you just said?-

[[BvS]]

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