[Nomic] Proposal - timing

[Adam Biltcliffe]

On Sep 23 2004, John-Joseph Wilks wrote:

> >And the clock struck thirteen
> >
> >A game action is any single change of the game state.
> >
> >Game actions are atomic (that is that nothing else can occur during
> >one), simple (they consist of a single change to the game state) and
> >take an infinitesimal amount of game time.
> >
> >Thus events always occur in sequence, never simultaneously.
> 
> Nah, that seems to make things far too uncomplicated, and disallows the 
> possibility that we might want or need two things to happen at once. 
> Also, I don't think that 'a single change to the gamestate' is 
> necessarily well defined. Is that a single word change in the rules? A 
> single character? A single 'update state' (and if so, what's the point of 
> this rule?). A player making some sort of action with Entities not yet 
> defined? That would need clarification a lot further if we were to have 
> something of this sort, I think.

I approve of the intent of this rule, but I agree with most of JJ's 
objections. I also don't like the term 'game action' referring to any 
change in the game state; I think 'action' implies that there is an actor, 
whereas this seems to also cover any changes which might happen by 
themselves. If you want a term for this, I suggest 'game transition'.

adam