Chapter 4, Nomic

The first three chapters were fun. They got my head going around in circles chasing the demonic logic of sentence structure. Chapter 4 was viral though. It made me want to go out and get other people involved.

Chapter 4 revolves around a game called Nomic, conceived by a professor at Earlham College by the name of Peter Suber. The game in its original form was presented in appendix to his book The Paradox of Self-Amendment.

At its heart, the game of Nomic is based around the concept of Constitutional law and how the properties of self-amendment and reflexivity interact. For more information about nomic, you can get some details at the following locations:

http://www.nomic.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm

The game starts off with a base set of rules. Much akin to Calvin Ball (and the law in general), these initial rules form a mutable foundation upon which players propose new rules, modify existing rules, or nullify existing rules. The last of the above links contains the starting rules as originally laid out by Suber. The starting rule set includes a mechanism for determining a winner. The rule as stated is:

112. The state of affairs that constitutes winning may not be altered from achieving n points to any other state of affairs. The magnitude of n and the means of earning points may be changed, and rules that establish a winner when play cannot continue may be enacted and (while they are mutable) be amended or repealed.

As a note on this, while the rule itself states that "the state of affairs that constitute winning may not be altered...", it is in itself a rule. The initial starting state lays out that there are two tiers of rules, those designated with a number in the 100s and those with a number in the 200s. The starting rules designate that rules in the 100s are immutable, while those in the 200s are mutable. One of the immutable rules indicates that rules that are immutable can be made mutable by unanimous vote of the players. Once a rule is mutable, all bets are off.

And by the end of reading the chapter, I wanted to gather a group together and get a game together.