On Tue, 17 Dec 2013, Jonatan Kilhamn wrote:
> Two things:
> - I'd like it to reset every now and then, so that it's clear that the
> point is to really go to town. Either a fixed time interval, or when
> anyone wins, the entire Ant Farm Manifesto reverts to, say, that
> state.
Good idea; do you think this should be hard-coded in the Rule or soft-
coded in the Manifesto? What kind of interval do you suppose makes a
good game? (week/month/quarter/year).
> - It doesn't have the "make rules around physical law" thing I really
> liked with Fall of the Republic, and maybe without it (or something
> else) it might be too much just another nomic. On the other hand, such
> "hard" rules could be added later, by adding them to the Ant Farm rule
> in the ruleset, requiring the Manifesto to conform to them eventually.
> At its simplest we could have stuff like restricting how many beans or
> whatever someone can hold in storage; for more complex stuff we could
> define at a physical law level that beans grow when put in the ground.
> Then the Manifesto has to relate to that – maybe it will be illegal to
> grow beans in some situations, but always possible.
The manifesto I wrote was definitely a stub and I'm not too attached to
it (or the Ant metaphor, was just what popped into my mind in 5 min).
I went for "very simple way to earn points" to start, assuming it would
expand. We could easily go for "very simple nomic" (e.g. a couple rules
on precedence and rules change to start) or "very simple physics" (if we
keep the Ant Farm metaphor, maybe start by describing the Sun as producing
a max number of crops/week). So if you have an idea you want to start
with...
Key word being "simple"! (which I might define as <10 1-2 sentence rules).
-G.
