Background

A lot of online Nomic games share a common problem - after assigning all sorts of interesting and strategic variables to players (points, location, hit-points, diseases, money, etc.), it's often awkward to keep track of them.

Usually the only solution is for players to declare intentions to a mailing list ("I spend ten thousand Credits to increase my Influence by five") and wait for assigned, human data-trackers to notice and manually update the records; perhaps fair enough for some games, but restrictive and destructive to most.

Solution

The Generic Nomic Data Tracker was created in 2001 as a tool for simplifying data-tracking aspects of an online Nomic game. The required data types were set up for a given Nomic, and each player assigned a password which allowed them to log in and edit the variables of any player, with or without explanatory comment.

All updates were logged and identified, making it easy to see who changed what at what time, and simple to reverse illegal alterations. Once the GNDT is recognised as part of a Nomic's gamestate, it becomes easy to write rules along the lines of "Any Player may, no more than once per day, change their Location", "A Player may take a Red Pill to gain a Life Point, at any time", "If a Player uses a smiley on the mailing list, any Player may dock them a point".

Real-time actions and transactions could be actively encouraged, for a change.

History

The GNDT was originally written in 2001, when there wasn't an easy solution to this problem. Nowadays, it's trivial to set up a free wiki somewhere and use that as a visible gamestate with tracked changes, so the GNDT is obsolete.

The GNDT was dusted off for BlogNomic in 2003 with code that allowed it to be embedded neatly in a sidebar IFRAME, and a copy ran on its server until 2019. The GNDT is no longer running on this site.