On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Elliott Hird wrote: > On 4 August 2013 02:54, <com...@gmail.com> wrote: > > You may argue that after this long, there is probably *some* other > > reason why the platonic gamestate is wrong, and a few have been > > proposed over the years. But we try our best. > > If sufficient mail archives were obtained, I for one would find it an > interesting long-term collaborative project to attempt to reconstruct > the current platonic gamestate of Agora from scratch, with the goal of > figuring out how to align it with what we've been assuming the > gamestate is at the end.
I've never seen a better case for Deconstructionism as in this collective programmers' delusion over a "platonic" gamestate. If you go back and do this, you will come across some edge cases, where the rules are silent or inconsistent, where you must make some decision. The decision you might make, however logical, might not be the decision I might make, nor omd, Steve, Fool, or any particular person (or set of collaborators). Even the places where you choose to decide might vary depending on what you (versus others) might consider textually clear - one would think that even a cursory read over the CFJ history would be educational in this regard. You will end up with the "platonic" state of your collaborators, which will have no more basis in "reality" than the papered-over version that has trudged on for 20 years to today. I'm not going to tell you that you *can't* have the fun of reconstructing your own personal "platonic" state (to each eir own), but if it bogs us down and distracts us from actually playing based on our own current (non-platonic) consensus of the gamestate, then I'll go recruit some Postmodern Literary Critics to play. Just watch me. :P. -G.
