This is a meta-game. I got curious about related topics in game theory once and found out about [1,2]. There are also a few papers directly trying to study calvinball and so-called minimal-nomic. It's pretty crazy how little we know theoretically about this stuff, considering how relevant games with dynamic rules actually are for daily life.

Of course, there's probably no clean solutions in this space short of lots of sims. Regardless of whether new agentic stuff works for everything else in AI.. agent-based modeling seems likely to benefit from some kind of renaissance and that should be really interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_economics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

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crdrost 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That's only sort of true.

The metagame within 1kbwc is that at the end of play people generally vote on which new cards to keep for seeding the next game, and which to discard. So you get a rush of joy if everybody liked your card and wants to keep it.

For an example of metagame play, one deck developed Angry Sheep, Sleepy Sheep, a bunch of sheeps, plus some rule card of "if there are more than five sheep, the person with the most sheep wins." People liked those, so they kept them. Then someone created a different card called the Sheep Herder, all of a player's sheep get stacked under the Sheep Herder, which passes one player to the left every time a sheep is played, so it slowly goes around the circle vacuuming up sheep. People liked this but started making Angry Goat, Sleepy Goat etc. so that they could have an alternate victory condition. Which led to the Goat Herder card that goes to the right as new goats are played. The meta-joke then reached its peak with the Herder Herder, which picks up Herders and moves them around the board, dropping the things that they are herding as it moves.

The key to 1kbwc is that anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun, not unless someone has a card called Counterspell that says "play me at any time to discard a card that some other player is playing, before it takes effect" etc. The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story and the players of the many rounds after rounds of it, are rewarded as the storytellers.

	▲	robot-wrangler 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun [..] The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story Yep exploring this question collaboratively is of course the real activity. Depending on your perspective it's barely recognizable as a game, or it's the ultimate / only game. Also kinda related here is Carse on finite and infinite games and Wittgenstein on language games[1,2]. It is "only" philosophy, but also feels ripe for more rigorous treatment Presumably a good theoretical treatment would try to look at how games and their meta's are related: how the number and stability of rules changes the richness of interaction, enjoyment, flexibility in strategy, average duration and tolerable length of game-play, etc [1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22379733M/Finite_and_infinit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)