Dear list,
For a while links between and some concepts related to the game Nomic and
livecoding have been echoing through my head and I thought I'd share, hoping
to bounce these echos off some other people.
Let me start by explaining a bit about Nomic;
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm
Nomic is a game where each move is the sugestion (to the group of players)
of a new rule or rule amendment to be added to the game's rules. It's meant
to be a anology for laws where the writing of new laws is also governed by
law itself (idealy speaking at least...). Nomic gets defined by it's initial
set of rules that govern things like the turn sequence, the initial
conditions for who wins are intentionally boring in order to get the players
to change them. It's a facinating game if you can pressgang friends into
trying it out with you.
It's not dis-similar to programing, like all game design, but Nomic has the
added "advantage" that you can theoretically make self-modifying rules if
you'd like and can get your friends to vote for them.
Back to Livecoding. It struck me that this is also a case of modifying
"code" while it runs. My rough idea here is that Nomic could be adapted to a
sort of colaborative/ competitive sort of turn-based livecoding where
players would alternate adding (or modifying or whatever) a function to the
shared program. This sounds like good fun but here my train of thought got
stuck with regard to practical implementation. It would be nicest if the
program would start with some amount of code that would help govern the
turns and keep track of who would "win". Ideally this code would also be
editable in some way but it would be hard to get a equivalent of Nomic's
voting procedure (and thus avoid new rules like "if your name is "Kassen"
you win"). It would also be good to try to invent some sort of system that
would encourage musical end results. Perhaps a audience could be used as a
"judge" of both.
So.... That's what I've been contemplating and how far I got.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Mon Mar 12 2007 - 12:29:10 GMT