[WDDM] Game trial: Initial proceedings

[Lata Gouveia <latalondon(at)yahoo.co.uk>]

[IN CASE THE ORIGINAL EMAIL ENDED UP IN YOUR SPAM FOLDER]

Dear Colleagues,
Thank you for showing an interest in participating in a trial run of "Citizen Mundi".

At the moment we have 5 players willing to join the trial. These players all came through the WDDM forum and have quite a high level of passion or/and expertise in politics. So much so that I feel that if I were explain every aspect, process and mechanism, we would reach a point of paralysis even before beginning the trial. The good news is that each of you is definitely perceptive and intelligent enough to work much of it out for yourselves just by observing what happens.

After the trial period I will reveal the full theory behind the game, all of its mechanisms and processes and all of the results that you were not preview to whilst playing (other people's results and strategies) and we can then pick it apart and assess how effective is was at delivering certain democratic outcomes like minority right protection, etc. Some of you will no doubt hate it, others might like elements of it. The point is for me to perfect it and for everyone to take something from it.

In theory this game is set up to deal with large numbers of players (up to hundreds of millions), however, I lack the automation systems to do that and I feel that somewhere between 11 and 16 players is a manageable number, since everything will have to be processed manually.

At this time I will stop accepting members of WDDM because I consider you to be "experts" and I feel that people from different walks of life would potentially give us more revealing results and make the sample group somehow closer to a real sample. So if you know anyone who is not particularly interested in political theory but who enjoys puzzles, games and riddles, please invite them to join. They will provide us our best chance of achieving anything like "interesting" results.

Once we have the numbers, I will distribute a calendar for proceedings. Don't worry it will not be very time consuming for you (although it will for me). After each round we play, I will reveal more and more about the game, the rules, the maths, etc.

Also, for the sake of people who find political theory boring (ie:most people on planet Earth) we should all attempt to use current language. Lets not get stuck into terminology. We are all anonymous in here so showing off your knowledge will not be acknowledged by the other players. We might be discussing cooking techniques, space travel or human rights, who knows. So you and I might become the non-experts, particularly if we succeed in making this initial group of 5 a minority of 5.

Thank you for your time. So, for now, if you could each try to invite 1 or 2 "non-experts", that would be great. They can join the same way you did, simply by contacting me here ( citizenmundi(at)yahoo.co.uk ).

Thank you
Lata