User:Sbp/rules

The Rules

Definitions:

• The Encyclopaedia is the Ghyll Encyclopaedia hosted on this, the gamegrene.com wiki.
• The game shall be taken to mean the game of Ghyll as regards the Encyclopaedia.
• A phantom is an entry which has been cited but not yet written.
• A dib is the process of reserving a phantom with a short statement expressing the intention of creating that entry, in the place where the entry is to be created.

Turns:

1. A game consists of a series of turns.
2. The turns of the game start with "A", progress through the English alphabet to "Z", and restart at "A".
3. New players may join on any turn, at any point in the turn.
4. Turns progress according to the calendar maintained by the administrators of the game, which should be agreeable to player consensus.

Entries:

1. Scholars shall dib, and then write, one entry per turn.
2. Scholars that have dibbed entries must write those entries before the end of the turn.
3. Scholars may write, and revise, their entries at any point in the turn.
4. Each entry written by a scholar must have a title beginning with the current turn's letter.
5. Each entry written by a scholar shall cite two phantom entries. Each cited phantom may have already been cited by an existing entry.
6. Each entry written by a scholar after the first turn of the game shall cite at least one existing entry.
7. Each entry written by a scholar may, in the main body of the text, link to an unlimited number of existing entries and phantoms.
8. Scholars shall cite neither entries they have written, nor phantoms they have created.
9. Scholars shall not write phantoms that they initiated by citing first.
10. All phantoms for a letter shall be written before new entries are created for that letter.
11. @@ If a new phantom for the letter of the current term is created, players may choose to ignore the phantom.
12. @@ The self-citation rule (Entries.10) takes precedence over the write-phantoms-first rule (Entries.9).

Canonality, and Miscellanea:

1. Only entries are canonical.
2. Non-entries are not canonical since they may be updated at any time by any player, and hence don't obey the turn-based feature of the game which is there to aid consistency.
3. Scholar comments on entries, and scholar sections of user pages, may influence future canonical prose if they are consistent.
4. User pages shall not cite new phantoms.

Housekeeping:

(Tasks for the admins.)

1. All dates mentioned in the game shall be added to the timeline.
2. All people mentioned in the game shall be added to a Who's Who.
3. All new entries or phantoms created shall be retroactively linked from any existing posts which mention them.
4. All entries and phantoms shall be tracked on an index.
5. A summary of each entry shall be posted in a report after each turn.

Discussion of the Rules

The idea of drafting a set of rules that are extremely concise and extremely to-the-point is a commendable one, but I think we've overdone it by a huge margin. Here I'd like to explore some alternative methods that I can then propose to Morbus and the other players, in the hope that we can come up with something a little more inclusive of all the house styles etc.

The playing of the game of Ghyll consists of a set of augmentations over time to an Encyclopaedia describing the Ghyll world. There may be other, related, canonical activities, but these rules define play only as it concerns the Encyclopaedia.

(@@ Currently draughting this as a set of "truths", i.e. statements of rules that are as atomic as possible. Hopefully then some structure can be discerned.)

@@ However, if you've properly met these requirements, your entry can certainly refer to other terms in the Ghyll encyclopedia, including those you've personally written. These "other terms", however, MUST have been previously defined or created.

@@ Stuff from IRC, general mumblings of Morbus. Really, rule creating for Ghyll is somewhat of a Morbus observation activity since he seems to be pretty certain about what the rules should be (and with good reason since this is his idea, and he's read all of the initial rules and done the legwork in finding out how previous lexicons have done); the rest of us need to be just as certain as well.