[possibilistic]

Wow, so many memories you've just unearthed. I haven't played a nomic-based game since I was a teenager.

My online friends and I had a series of mostly text-based nomic instances where we would creatively write and world build, but there was this one crazy performance art piece where we hacked a phpBB instance to grant every user admin privileges. The experiment was in relative harmony for a few days before the first rounds of deletes and IP bans. After one or two attempts to regain equilibrium, there were rampant impersonations, terrible javascript popup spam and redirect loops, and disappearing server files (the joys of using PHP prior to formal CS education and any form of engineering discipline...). Finally we acknowledged that the experiment had been a great success when all HTTP requests returned 500s--testament, at least in our minds, of the ultimate fate of mankind if ever given absolute and unlimited power.

Then there was that time we piped say yes to each other's terminals, somehow creating a pospositive feedback loop. Or those dotfiles that brought down the whole server... none of that stuff was very nomic related, but ah... teenage years.

The hosting company certainly loved us. :') I hope every one of them got a raise for having to deal with our endless support tickets as a result of our own foolish and stupid games.

Anyhow, very astute parallel to draw.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

I appreciate the memories / feels.

[zem]

my friends and i were briefly fascinated by nomic after reading hofstadter's column on it[0], but somehow never played an actual game. my favourite nomic fact is that long-running games have sent ambassadors to other nomic games :) i can't even picture what that would involve in practice, but i love the idea.

[0] collected in "metamagical themas", highly recommended.