Some collected notes on playing Peter Suber’s game of rule amendment, Nomic, on Github.
Nomic is a game invented in 1982 by Peter Suber, as an appendix to his PhD thesis The Paradox of Self-Amendment. In Nomic, the primary move available to the players is to change the rules of the game in a structured way. Nomic itself was intended as a minimalist study of procedural law, but it has been played very successfully by many groups over the years.
I first played Nomic through Agora, a long-running Nomic of a heavily procedural bent (as opposed to variants like BlogNomic, that have developed in much more whimsical directions). I’ve found the game, and the communities that have sprung up around the game, deeply fascinating as a way to examine how groups reach consensus and exercise decisions.
I briefly experimented with the notion of running a procedural Nomic - a mini-Agora - via Github, and produced these documents.
- This document is not part of the rules of a Nomic, and is present solely as a guide to the design of this initial ruleset, for play on Github. It should be removed before the game starts, and at no time should it be consulted to guide gameplay directly. Peter Suber’s Nomic is a game of rule-making for one or more players. For details on the rationale behind the game and the reasons the game might be interesting, see Suber’s own description.
- Immutable Rules Rule -216. All players must always abide by all the rules then in effect, in the form in which they are then in effect. The rules in the Initial Set are in effect whenever a game begins. The Initial Set consists of rules -216 through -201 (immutable) and rules -112 through -101 (mutable). Rule -215. Initially, rules -216 through -201 are immutable, and rules -112 through -101 are mutable.