Steemfield Ends in Time for the New Year

This is a particularly awkward timing to bring attention to a little game that only 3 people were effectively playing :), especially because I should have made better use of the referral system I proposed (it was only used once, and not by me).

But anyway, Steemfield is a make-up-the-rules-as-you-go kind of game with a voting system, and a bare-bones set of initial rules. LAND tokens are distributed every round according to the ruleset and the objective is to obtain 51 of them to win.

We initially started with this set of rules and ended up with this set of rules. And mainly, it was interesting to see how the game transformed over the proposal and voting rounds. By the end there was a 10x10 LAND grid laid out with rules that animated the grid a la Game of Life while affecting LAND distribution.

But poor @greer184... Every round he may have run the simulation by hand (unless he coded up something to script it. Hmm maybe that's likely too). And @lextenebris always had ideas for very interesting rules.

The game was bound to end once enough LAND redistribution rules were in place, and so it has. I happened to be the one to claim the 51 LAND this time. The winner gets the liquid funds of the totem account, which isn't all that much :). Maybe should go towards the next fun multiuser activity someone comes up with. So actually I would like @greer184 to hold onto those funds that were generated.

Maybe if there's enough interest we can start up another. It would be much more interesting if there were many more participants, that's for sure. But hey, if you happened upon this post, go ahead and flip through the recent posts of @statsplit where the game was run.

We eventually had maybe 6 people at the peak time but soon we were down to 3 active players, and then down to 2. Very early on @lextenebris snuck in a rule while nobody else was paying attention that took away land from any player that did not make a proposal and gave it to the other players. I then made sure to add notifications to the @statsplit account.

I even failed to make a proposal one round, but due to a loophole I was allowed to exploit, I dodged the penalty by making a proposal in the voting phase of the round. Whew.

I always figured that when such open ended rules were written there would be fun stuff like this that would come up. Ambiguities, and establishing a particular order for events... Fun stuff. All of that when unclear was decided by the player that controlled the totem.

The other commentary I would like to sneak into this post is that this kind of system/game looked to be a fun mirror of the wider Steem voting mechanism in terms of governance. Not a useful mirror without enough participants but theoretically could be used to run some experiments ;). I was having that in the back of my mind when coming up with proposals but nothing really stuck out in that direction.

And hey. Automate LAND rules and you basically got an SMT-lite!