Paradox of Self-Amendment by Peter Suber is beyond the amendment power of Nomic. After Nomic was first published in Scientific American, a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get. The plurality of tiers prevents the logical foundation of the game, or the physical activity comprising play, from changing radically in just a few moves. Continuity is a virtue of both games and governments, but players have an advantage over citizens in that they can adjust the degree of continuity and the rate of change at will and intelligently, whereas in life these mechanisms are barely known and partially beyond the reach of planned action. All other games possess the continuity of unchanging rules, or at least of rules that change only between, and not during, games. Nomic has more the continuity of a legal system than a normal game: it is a rule-governed set of processes, systems, and directives undergoing constant rule-governed change. The "game" for the purposes of presenting it, as in this appendix, is the Initial Set of rules. But the "game" is equally the dynamic rule-governed change of the Initial Set. The continuing identity of the game, like that of a state, is due to the fact (when it is a fact) that all change is the product of existing rules properly applied, and none is revolutionary. If exceptions to this continuity can be cured for states by acceptance or acquiescence or subsequent ratification, I leave it to players to decide whether breaches of continuity in Nomic may be cured by an analogous social practice. Nomic includes provision for Judgment (Rule 212), not merely to imitate government on another front, but also for the reasons that government must make provision for judgment: rules will inevitably be adopted that are ambiguous, inconsistent, or incomplete, or that require application to individual circumstances not specified in the rule or not anticipated by the framers. "Play" must not be interrupted; some agency must be empowered to make an authoritative determination so that "play" may continue. Judgments in Nomic are not bound by rules of precedent, for that would require a daunting amount of record-keeping for each game. But the doctrine of stare decisis may be imposed at the players' option, or may arise without explicit amendment as successive judges feel impelled to treat like cases alike. Without stare decisis players are put upon to draft their rules carefully, make thoughtful adjudications, overrule poor judgments, and amend defective rules. This is one way in which Nomic teaches basic principles and exigencies of law, even while it vastly simplifies. The Initial Set must be sufficiently short and simple to encourage play, but sufficiently long and complex to cover contingencies likely to arise before the players get around to providing for them in a rule. It also needs a certain complexity to prevent any single rule-change from disrupting the continuity of the game. Whether my Initial Set satisfies these competing interests I leave to players to decide. Players who think not may wish to change the Initial Set before play rather than rely on amendments during play.[Note 5] They will then play "constitutional convention" more than "legislation". There is no single AC or amendment rule in Nomic. Rule 116 permits amendment only when "a rule or rules make [amendment] permissible", thus allowing the complete extinguishment of the amendment power in principle. Rules 104 and 114 satisfy 116 by guaranteeing the continuing permissibility of some form of "rule-change", which is defined by 103 so as to leave no rule literally immutable. Rules 202 through 206 presuppose that amendment is permissible; a game-judge may well decide that they also satisfy the need in 116 for rules affirmatively permitting amendment. Rules 202 and 203 articulate the basic procedure of amendment: proposal and ratification. Rule 115 explicitly permits self-application. Of course all these rules are (initially) subject to change. Many rules would have to be amended or repealed before amendment could itself become impermissible, and even then a judge (if there were still judges) might find an "inherent power" to amend before that too is extinguished. I leave to players the challenges of ascertaining (1) whether any rules can be made truly immutable while preserving some power to amend, and (2) whether the power to amend can completely and irrevocably be repealed. Are games sufficiently different from legal systems to render the analysis of self-amendment in Part I inapplicable to them? Without pursuing the question to the lengths it deserves, we may note that a game is so much simpler than a legal system, with (almost?) all its rules explicit and in definitive form, that the inference model might apply without distortion. For these purposes we may want to distinguish games like tic-tac-toe and chess from cricket and sand-lot baseball. The former are finite and fixed rule-governed games that lose nothing by interpretation under the inference model, while the latter have a large element of uncodified custom and indeterminacy that may be oversimplified and distorted by the inference model. Games like sand-lot baseball, moreover, seem to contain a kind of meta-rule that permits changes in the rules authorized by consent or acceptance rather than by explicit procedures. On the other hand, a game is not something we are born into; we expressly choose whether or not to play. Hence principles of contract or acceptance are peculiarly applicable to games. The elective nature of games and the comparatively small space they occupy in our lives suggest that the authority of game rules derives from the agreement of players and not from other rules from which the players cannot escape without great difficulty. If so, then Hart's acceptance model would apply to games much more perspicuously than Ross's inference model. In addition to teaching many basic principles and pressures of a legal system, and allowing more intelligent adjustment of the degree of continuity and rate of change, Nomic has turned out to have many other unique and intriguing features. In other games, inept moves are their own punishments. Either they create a less interesting game or they increase the risk of defeat for their perpetrators. Initially the same is true for Nomic, but it need not remain true. The ineptness of a move may be measured along many parameters. A measure of ineptness may be instituted by rule, and then "inept" rules immediately met with punishment, price, or prohibition. In this way Nomic —like law— allows the blurring of a 189