Omega Game Introduction

The Omega Game has its genesis in a trip I took with my dad to Boston about eight years ago. Since my dad is a writer (a poet and an English professor) as well as myself, one of the things we did during the trip was hit as many bookstores as we could. Bookstore number three was a dark little hole in the wall, with narrow aisles of floor-to ceiling bookshelves, the passages half-blocked by cardboard boxes of yet more books. It made your average Borders or Barnes and Noble look as sterile as an operating theater. Needless to say, we spent a couple of hours there.

In the stacks, where organization seemed to be by whim, I found a thick trade paperback called Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. The book was a collection of Scientific American articles
Mr. Hofstadter wrote between 1981 and 1983. The contents piqued my interest, since I’ve always had a fascination with puzzles and games.

Back at the hotel, reading the book, I discovered Nomic.

Early on in the book (chapter four in fact) Hofstadter reprints an article about Nomic, which was invented by Peter Suber for his book The Paradox of Self-Amendment. Nomic was invented specifically to
illustrate the theses that Suber was presenting in that book. From both the title of Suber’s book, and from the name of the game itself (the word is based on the Greek word for “law”) you may already have some idea of the nature of Nomic.

In a nutshell, Nomic is a game whose (initial) set of 29 rules specify, in large part, how the players can change the rules of the game. It is intended to model a legal system, specifically, a democratic, constitutional legal system; democratic in that it initially requires unanimous consent to change the rules; constitutional in that there is a set of rules that are much harder to change than the rest. (Among the hard-to-change rules is the rule that states that the players have to abide by the rules.)

Now, I wanted to play this game, but I couldn’t find anyone who was willing to try it. For a few years I let Nomic sit in the back of my mind, somewhat convinced that it was a neat theoretical idea, but that no
one would actually play it. If I’d still been in college I probably would have known better.

Since the publication of Suber’s book, Nomic had been popular in academia, used in classroom demonstrations, even producing Nomic clubs that ran long persistent games.

However it would be about three years before I would run across my first on-going game of Nomic, and it would be on the place where the game has seen its most varied flowering— the Internet.

It seems that it takes only a slight tweak of Suber’s initial 29 Rules to configure Nomic for playing over an e-mail server. Given the nerdy types that initially had access to e-mail in the eighties, the early Internet was a fertile ground for the breeding of Nomics. So fertile, in fact, that nomic has become more than a proper name for Suber’s invention, but a general noun describing all types of self-modifying games.

Suber’s initial Nomic has spawned mutant nomics that have dispensed with democracy all together, relying on an all-powerful emperor to approve rule changes, nomics that aim to begin with as small an initial set of rules as possible (the “nomic” in this novel can be considered one of those), there’s even a nomic— the “Fantasy Rules Committee”— where anyone can post a valid rule, the only restriction being that it be consistent with all prior rules (every round the old rules are repealed and they start from scratch.)

The nomic I became involved in was named Agora, and it is still going strong in its sixth year of continuous play. It started as a traditional Suberesque nomic, with less than thirty rules. The ruleset is now about 1/4 the size of the novel you’re about to read. Agora is, to my knowledge, the oldest continuously-played nomic on-line, and during its existence it had developed its own culture and to a certain extent, its own language.

Since the “invention” of nomic, nomic games have formed alliances, merged, split, suffered coups, schisms, and outright revolt. There have been nomic wars, an internomc whose players were individual nomic games, nomics have formed within other nomics, and one nomic had tried, unsuccessfully, to start diplomatic relations with Canada.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about nomic, and still does, is the way it can blur the line between Play and not-Play. Hofstadter describes it in his own article, but allow me to demonstrate how— Unlike any other game, where the tacit assumption is that the players know who they are and have made an out-of-game agreement to play, most nomics define the identity of the players in their own rules. Nomics, in this sense, are greedy. They assume the authority to tell the players when they can play— and when they can stop playing. In concrete terms, there’s a phenomenon used in a number of nomics that we can call “zombification.”  If players physically abandon a game, some games won’t let them stop playing. The player’s “zombie” still takes turns, makes moves, and so on— either directed by
specific instructions in the rules, or at the direction of another Player.

More interestingly, a nomic can arbitrarily declare someone to be a Player without their consent. Now this won’t matter much in the case of Agora. After all, the limits of Agora’s power is to assign Blots to
someone (an in-game score measuring how naughty an Agoran player has been) and Blots only mean something to someone who cares about the game in the first place. (Consider Drew Carrey on “Whose Line is it Anyway” handing out “points” to every person in Canada— “The points don’t matter.”)  Agora is, after all, “only a game.”

Suppose, however, that the nomic in question was armed. (Think now about the United States Government.)  Suddenly the rules mean a lot more to everyone, whether they want to play or not. No one, in fact, can “leave the game” without permission. Even criminals are “playing” in that they are subject to the penalties of breaking the rules.

When this game called nomic has the power to coerce someone it undergoes a paradigm shift from nomic-rules-as-game to nomic-laws-as-government. This book is about that cusp, where the “game”
suddenly takes an abrupt shift into reality.

I would, however, like to reiterate what I mention in my acknowledgments: The violence described in these pages is not inherent in what is an innocent and fascinating game. (Nomic-as-game, that is. Nomic-as-government, that’s another story…)

Steven Swiniarski
August 2000