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Game Start

The game began on 12/2/98 at 17:00 GMT. The first players were Gavin M Doig, Head Apollo, JAMES MCGREGOR and mr stuart park. (A list of current players and observers is maintained by the speaker EnoBoy.)

Q's Omnipotence

A joke made by Black Francis about Q running a fascist game led Q to submit proposal 319 (Q later denied that this was the case and he had in fact submitted this proposal entirely on a whim (Q later recanted this denial when he found the emailed joke in question, or possibly just to make this sentence longer)). By a fluke chance of 2/(3^6) the electric ants voted overwhelmingly for it and it passed. Q then used his new found strength to pass proposals 337 and 346 which made him effectively omnipotent - i.e. he could change the rules at will.

Q used this power for good and not evil as outlined on the Q Omnipotence page. The morality of Q's actions were later questioned by The Army of the Twelve Monkeys.

These actions were not entirely popular though. The action defined : "I am causing proposals 355, 357, and 358 to be retracted, with no penalty to Green Blooded Sonuvabitch 1. (355 because "10 pts." does not appear in r270, and the other 2 because they create rules which have no titles.)", met with disapproval from Green Blooded Sonuvabitch 1 who resented his proposals being arbitrarily destroyed. He failed to realise that they would have been voted against by all other players and would have cost him 10 points each, as it turned out they cost him nothing.

The action defined : "I am removing the word "initially" from the first sentence of rule 221." , met with disapproval from Black Francis and Jesus Christ who had both championed the inclusion of this word by proposal 341. Q's laughable excuse that "it made no difference" if he removed it seems to support the idea that he was trying to protect the Electric Ants from extinction (Black Francis having already hinted at their possible destruction), and remains the only questionably evil act of this period of omnipotence.

Dollar Fiasco

Green Blooded Sonuvabitch 1's proposal 324 contained the immortal phrase : "The money can be used as the player sees fit to implement his plans". After altering this rule (through omnipotence) to make it work, Q used the money he received to repeal this rule (check Q's records of gloating). It remains to be seen whether Green Blooded Sonuvabitch 1 learned his lesson ...

Winners

Q was the first player to achieve a score of over 100 points. However, the rules indicated at that time that, "The winner is the first player to achieve a score of 100 points". Game custom dictated that a score of exactly 100 points had to be "achieved". Therefore, Q did not win.

Black Francis was the second player to achieve a score of over 100 points, but due to ambiguity in point allocation, it was not clear whether he had at any time a score of exactly 100 points. A Call For Judgement (CFJ 118) was submitted on this point and was judged true by Green Blooded Sonuvabitch 1. (Although his reasons contradicted his verdict, the reasons had no official game standing.) Black Francis became the winner and the Speaker for the next game. However, it was noted that the rules did not stipulate that play ended when there was a winner, so the first game continued with a winner and the original Speaker.

This last point is an example of a peculiarity in Suber's original rule set - we intuitively assume such things as play ending when there is a winner simply because nomic is a called a "game", even when these concepts are not explicitly rules.

Smartasses

Q's proposal 397 passed, thus creating an arbitrarily large number of rules. It was later discovered however, thanks to a post by Doug Chatham on his Nomic Bulletin Board, that all rules whose number exceeded the name length restriction were possibly invalid. Points raised both within RFN and on the Board included the possibility that numbers were not technically names and should count as a single character, numbers could be denoted in other ways (such as scientific notation) and thus their length could be reduced, but in the end it was decided that such debate had little impact on the rule set and Q set out to rectify this problem in his own time.

Under the guise of illuminati fnord, he eventually authored proosal 526 which actually seemed to work (this had much to do with rule changes which allowed rule names to be of any length).

Cycles

The first Major Cycle began and was christened by Black Francis as the Major Cycle of the Surfer Rosa. This cycle system, "liberated" from Ackanomic, cleared up some of the problems with winning which had previously threatened to end the game.

Donut Fiasco

... inevitably no. Green Blooded Sonuvabitch 1's proposal 375 created a rule with the following beautiful phrase - "These donuts can be used (as per the current rules) in any way the player sees fit". After much confusion as to when this rule took effect (see CFJ 105 n.b. this cfj is considered in RFN to be possibly one of the best judgements delivered in the game), Q eventually used his donuts to gain 2000 more donuts from the donut warehouse, renamed Green Blooded Sonuvabitch 1 as GBS1, and removed the last sentence of rule 375 (more gloating from Q backs this up). Some players complained of deja vu...

GBS1 had used the phrase "as per the current rules" (often referred to by him in the abbreviated form 'APTCR') to avoid a repitition of the Dollar abuse. Unfortunately, he failed to realise that rule 375 was a 'current rule'.

Proosals

Black Francis misspelled "proposal" in proposal 352 as "proosal". In a later Request For Comment (RFC) he did the same thing. This led Q to submit proposal 419 which passed, replacing all instances of "proposal" in the rule set with "proosal".

Yet More Omnipotence ...

Former rule 452 (now 605 caused itself to be amended with the following sentence: "All players are this rule." Q noted that rule 110 allowed the rules to be changed only when permitted by the rules themselves. Since he was defined as a rule he permitted himself to change the rules. Much groaning commenced.

Thanks again to the Nomic Bulletin Board, Head noticed a possible flaw in Q's attempted takeover and hastily sought to abuse this loophole for himself. There then followed much confusion as to whom was omnipotent, which was later put to rest when Head abdicated his position. Transcripts of the messages involved can be found on Q's page of evil.

Summer Drought

During the summer months of 1998, particularly around August, there was a massive wave of inactivity among the players of RFN. Many were lost presumed abducted, some were on holiday without access to email (and no system for vacationing players had yet been created), some were just lazy. At one point, when Head (and strangely coincidentally Pippito) was unavoidably detained elsewhere in the country, only two votes were cast on some proosals. Still, not as bad as Internomic...

Quorum Crisis

Owing to a change in Quorum requirements made by proosal 417 and the outcome of CFJ 140 it was discovered that it was necessary for exactly 50% of players to vote on a proosal for it to achieve Quorum. It was not the case that proosal 417 had broken the game, it was just too cunning and altogether too intricate for any of the other players to understand.

This problem was eventually solved, first exactly four players out of a total of eight voted for proosal 509. Unfortunately Jesus Christ voted against it. Then illuminati fnord authored Bug-Hunt 138 which retroactively fixed the quorum problem. However, this meant that proosal 509 had in fact passed. See what happens when you meddle with temporal mechanics?

Universal Domination

In a bid for supreme control of the universe, Radio Free Nomic officially claimed the newsgroup alt.games.nomic for its own on the 29/5/99 at 03:56. This was a result of proosal 582.