Law

About

(Shamelessly copied form www.atitd.com)

The Steps of Creating A Law

If you wish to write up a new law and have it enforced over Egypt, here are the steps you will need to follow:

1. Achieve citizen status.
2. Go to the University of Leadership, click to create petition. Type your petition into the dialog box.
3. Walk around and talk to people, ask them to sign your petition. They can sign by clicking on you. You can also share the petition.
4. When you have enough signatures, go back to the University of Leadership, and turn in the petition.
5. The developers will now classify the petition: either it is a feature request, or a petition for a law.
6. If it is a feature request, the developers will put it into the feature request manager on atitd.info.
7. If it is a petition for a law, it will appear at the voting booth in the game. Players will begin voting on it.
8. After the voting, the petition with the most yes votes will become a law, as long as the yes votes were more than 50% of the total votes.
9. After a petition becomes a law, the developers reprogram the game to enforce the law.

The Law Library

A good way to start is to go to a voting booth and view all the laws that have already been written. You can view the law library by clicking on the booth and selecting the "Law Library" option. The laws are classified according to whether they passed or not.

Help writing laws

If you want assistance in writing a law that is likely to pass, post a draft copy of it to the forum "Laws - Lois - Gesetze" on the ATITD Forums (see the links menu at the left). People will offer help and criticism about important details that you might want to consider to make the best possible law. Some developers read these boards, and their advice is always very helpful. If your law is unclear, ambiguous, or is based upon false assumptions about the game, it has less chance of passing. If you consult with many people and take their advice; if your law is brief, concise, and respectful; if you work to understand criticisms and re-write your law to address them; and if you get advice from people who have been playing the game for longer than you have, your law will have a good chance of passing.

The Signature-Gathering Process

Any player can ask another for a copy of a petition. When you get a copy of a petition, you also get a copy of the signatures. So if I have a petition with 5 signatures, and you copy it, you also have a petition with 5 signatures - the same 5 signatures.

Suppose, then, that you take the copy out in to the world, and collect signatures. You gather 3 more signatures, so your petition now contains 8 signatures: the 5 I originally gave you, plus 3 more you collected yourself. Meanwhile, I go gather another 2 signatures.

We can now meet and share signatures. To do so, you click the same button you originally used to request a copy of the petition. When you do, you will gain all of my signatures, and I will gain all of yours. The result is that we will both have 10 signatures: the 5 that I originally had, plus the 3 you collected, plus the 2 that I collected.

Is It A Law Or A Feature Request?

After turning in the petition, the developers will classify it as a law or a feature request. The way we decide is simple, but subtle: there are things that real-world governments cannot do. If the petition asks to do something that a real-world government could not do, then it is not a law, it is a feature request. What follows is a short list of a few things that governments cannot do.

Governments Cannot Grant New Abilities

Imagine if the US Congress were to pass a law declaring that people can run faster. This would not suddenly enable Americans to run any faster. Here is a proposal that violates this rule:

Small and light buildings such as chests, forges, kitchens, tents, etc. should be relocatable by the owner. This would allow reorganization without destroying things.

Players do not have this ability, and governments cannot grant abilities. Therefore, this petition is not a law, it's a feature request. To rephrase: if there is some activity you would like to do in the game, and there is currently no way to do it, adding that ability is a feature request, not a law.

Governments Cannot Conjure Knowledge Out Of Thin Air

Imagine if the US Government were to pass a law stating that from now on, all Americans shall have the knowledge of any terrorists in their vicinity. Nothing would happen - governments cannot magically grant knowledge to their subjects. Here is a proposal that violates this rule.

Since this proposal grants people knowledge, it is a feature request.

Governments Cannot Negate Challenges

The Stranger has challenged Egypt - he has given us several tests, and dared us to try to accomplish them. If the government declares his tests "too hard" and substitutes easier ones, then we have not lived up to his challenges at all! If a law tries to simplify one of the tests, then that is simply a concession that we are too weak to do what he challenged us to do. Here is a sample law that violates the rule:

Each citizen will (automatically) send a personal messenger to their mentor to advise them of the completion of their mentor shrine. The mentor will receive an EgyptMail message telling them that the mentee has built them a shrine.

This violates the rule because it makes mentorship easier. Mentorship is intentionally hard - it's a test of character. Anything that makes it easier, or automates any part of it, is diluting the challenge. So this is a feature request, not a law.

So What Does Count As A Law?

Laws in Egypt are just like laws in the real world - it's a way for you to limit the behavior of other people. For example, if you say that "nobody may cut down trees in the lakeshore region," that's a law. If you say "nobody may use the university unless they first pay their taxes," that's a law.

What happens to your petition?

After you get signatures on your ballot. Be sure to turn it in to the University of Leadership. Petitions with more than twenty-one signatures will be considered for ballots, but you want to get as many signatures as possible. If you gather more signatures, go ahead and turn in your petition at the University again. If people take a copy of your petition, be sure that they know to turn their signatures as well. The petitions that have the most signatures will end up on the next ballot.

How do Laws Pass?

For each ballot, only one item passes: the petition that gets the highest percentage of yes votes. However, any petition that does not pass but gets more than 50% yes votes will be carried over to the next ballot. Petitions that get less than 50% yes votes will be removed from the process, but a re-written petition can go back through the signature collection process.

See also

code of conduct
Rules of Conduct