Online Play
The game of Nomic is particularly suited to being played online, where all proposals and rules can be shared in web pages or email archives for ease of reference. Such games of Nomic sometimes last for a very long time – Agora has been running since 1993. The longevity of nomic games can pose a serious problem, in that the rulesets can grow so complex that current players do not fully understand them and prospective players are deterred from joining. One currently-active game, BlogNomic, gets around this problem by dividing the game into "dynasties"; every time someone wins, a new dynasty begins, and all the rules except a privileged few are repealed. This keeps the game relatively simple and accessible. Nomicron is similar in that it has rounds — when a player wins a round, a convention is started to plan for the next round. Several rounds experimented with an alternate form of ruleset made up of books and pages.
Another facet of Nomic is the way in which the implementation of the rules affects the way the game of Nomic itself works. ThermodyNomic, for example, had a ruleset in which rule changes were carefully considered before implementation, and rules were rarely introduced which provide loopholes for the players to exploit. B Nomic, by contrast, was once described by one of its players as "the equivalent of throwing logical hand grenades."
This is essentially part of the differentiation between "procedural" games, where the aim (acknowledged or otherwise) is to tie the entire ruleset into a paradoxical condition during each turn (a player who has no legal move available wins), and "substantive" games, which try to avoid paradox and reward winning by achieving certain goals, such as attaining a given number of points.
While Nomic is traditionally capitalized as the proper name of the game it describes, it has also sometimes been used in a more informal way as a lowercased generic term, nomic, referring to anything with Nomic-like characteristics, including games where the rules may be changed during play as well as non-gaming situations where it can be alleged that "rules lawyers" are tinkering with the process used to amend rules and policies (in an organization or community) in a manner akin to a game of Nomic.
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Famous quotes containing the word play:
“Play builds the kind of free-and-easy, try-it-out, do-it-yourself character that our future needs. We must become more self-conscious and more explicit in our praise and reinforcement as children use unstructured play materials: “That’s good. You use your own ideas....” “That’s good. You did it your way....” “That’s good. You thought it all out yourself.””
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)