Gnomic History

This is the Round history for Gnomic, a nomic run on Discord. Uploading a copy here for posterity.

Round 1: The first round of Gnomic started with a handful of players on a new discord server. In the early stages of the game, procedural rules were created and refined. Later, a currency of bananas was created to fund players and their actions. Soon after, the game board was created: a 25X25 grid where players were able to claim territory and expand their empire. Various items were created to let players improve their empire, explore faster, and gather resources more efficiently. Three elected positions were created to manage the game: The Scribe, The Groundskeeper, and The Head Banana Banker. The Scribe was responsible for managing proposals and the rule set. The Groundskeeper was responsible for maintaining the game board and ensuring all moves were legal. The Head Banana Banker was responsible for paying out salaries from the Central Banana Bank and facilitating transactions. These three positions formed the Panel of the High Monkey, which had power to interpret the rule set. There were two possible win conditions: gaining 80% of the game board territory or holding 90% of all bananas in circulation. Corporations were created, allowing players to form alliances with each other and pursue win conditions together. As the game progressed, two corporations emerged: Galactic Enterprises and Titan Industries. Both corporations fought for resources, with Galactic Enterprises claiming the center and northern areas of the board. Titan Industries claimed land along the east and south edges of the board. The game stagnated after game play proved to be repetitive and unexciting. Players became apathetic to the game state and mutually decided to let the game expire. A rule specifying that the game would end if no new rules were proposed over the last month of play was activated and the game ended with no winner. At game end, Galactic Enterprises controlled 11.4% of game board area and Titan Industries controlled 11.0% of game board area.

Round 2: A lot of the initial momentum was invested into creating an orderly framework for play, without any mechanics for actual play itself, aside from the earning of "points", which you needed an absurd amount of to win with. The direction the subgame should take was never decided although often discussed. Offices such as Scribes, Scorekeeper, Judges and Coder (for maintenance of a bot) were created and polished repeatedly.

Ribbons were created, awarded for achieving certain feats, such as being the "Yellow Jersey" - having the most points. A loophole was exploited between Noel and Cuddlebeam to pool points among each other to become the Yellow Jersey each (as skmmcj was the Yellow Jersey at the time with a rather large lead, and would continue to be it for the entirety of the round) and earn the corresponding ribbon. This abuse caused the Scorekeeper at the time (Sad) to resign from disgust.

Cuddlebeam and skmmcj eventually both became Judges. Cuddlebeam proposed in private to skmmcj to abuse the Judge mechanics to silence everyone but the Judges and force a proposal through to have them win. Skmmcj declined, wanting to wait for the round to continue. Before the end March (and their Judge term), skmmcj eventually accepted, seeing that the Round was going nowhere. Fingers were pointed at all other players except the Judges to Silence them for an absurd reason (merely existing) and make them unable to vote. Then they made a proposal to make them win and end the round. It was controversial due to wording if this silencing was effective or not but the playerbase at the time voted in favor of the proposal anyways. Notably, 5 new players joined the game at that moment (when nobody had joined for weeks) and they all downvoted that proposal.

Eventually, the proposal did pass due to skmmcj sniping in a last minute Supervote (a vote that counts as two votes) into the proposals, as it was allowed to Supervote and not disallowed to both Supervote and vote at the same time. With the proposals passed, the game explicitly ended with Cuddlebeam and skmmcj as the winners of Round 2.

Round 3: The Round ended early. Gaelan made a rule which allowed people to assign Levels to their proposals. The proportion of votes that a proposal needed to pass depended on its Level (the lower the level, the easier the proportion). Noel used the number 0.001 for the Level of a proposal to declare themselves the winner, and thus Round 3 ended with them as the victor. Round 4 continued with the same rules, except that exploit (although conserving the win) for convenience.