Clay Shirky’s latest essay is an edited version of a talk he gave last November at Beth Noveck‘s “The State of Play” [conference on Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds.] Taking the “Code is Law” equation at face value, Shirky wonders what it would take to design an environment where game players owned their game world, and could alter the underlying code? What happens when you play a game in which changing the rules is a move ..? ¬§
Nomic World: By the players, for the players
First published May 27, 2004 on the “Networks, Economics, and Culture” mailing list.
Shirky uses the words ‘player’ and ‘citizen’ interchangeably throughout;
There’s a curious tension here between political representation and games. The essence of political representation is that the rules are subject to oversight and alteration by the very people expected to abide by them, while games are fun in part because the rule set is fixed. Even in games with highly idiosyncratic adjustments to the rules, as with Monopoly say, the particular rules are fixed in advance of playing . . . One possible approach to this problem is to make changing the rules fun, to make it part of the game. This is exactly the design center of a game called Nomic. It was invented in 1982 by the philosopher Peter Suber. He included it as an appendix to a book called The Paradox of Self Amendment, which concerns the philosophical ramifications of having a body of laws that includes the instructions for modifying those laws.
Other designers have applied Nomic to social software development. Take for example, The Epistomat, where the authors propose Nomic as a model for generating community consensus around RDF Ontologies to construct semantic webs:
We believe that consensus negotiation of ontologies and rules – between business partners, or public service providers, to be briefly practical – is a critical and underexplored area. Despite the potential of topic-based trust mechanisms and collaborative reasoning systems, we believe that overt human feedback about belief is indispensible especially at this stage of the development of the semantic web . . . Nomic is a way of gathering those statements which is ‘fun’, and indicates the potential for an ‘epistomat’, a small but fully self-describing system, given a sufficiently composable rule language that operates directly on the application logic. Using the ontology composed by the Nomic game, we can try out different ‘perceptions’ – we hesitate to say ‘belief systems’ – represented as differently augmented graphs inferred from the same underlying base graph.
Incidentally, Terranova has a link to updates on China & Virtual Property ¤
