In case some of you are new/forgot, I'm the forum account of the player of Iytha who is, as of this posting the Librarian in Gaudiguch and part of the Illuminati ingame. With that out of the way, here's the question:

Would you all be OK with someone using LIBRARY PUBLISH to publish, for culture score points, power and/or prestige contests a book which is in all or in part encoded using a secret code? I ask this because it's something that I would like to do, so that the Illuminati can still get the mechanical benefits of writting about our culture/philosophy/skills without ignoring the guild RP constraint of not sharing our secrets with outsiders.

Pros:
+The Illuminati can write stuff and get culture points for it like other guilds can without violating their RP.
+This will give the Institute and other interested parties a legitimate ingame way to spy on us which does not involve the alt brigade or other fishy ways of doing it.
+It would give the Illuminati some additional cultural flavour, which is always a nice thing.

Cons:
+Applying ciphers by hand would be bothersome for readers and annoying for the Admin, assuming they are even OK with it at all.
+The published books encoded this way would not contain any meaningful information for readers that don't know the key to read them with.
+Future Librarians could theoretically publish books full of gibberish and claim that there is a secret method to make it come out into a readable book.

I'm pretty sure if you published a book of 'gibberish' one of the other librarians would challenge it and Gaudiguch's library would lose credibility; I doubt anyone wants to deal with encrypting / decrypting books just to ensure that they are legitimate, and the playerbase would really have no choice but to challenge each one unless the key was publicly available for clarification. There's no way for them to tell if it is gibberish or not.

Further; encrypted books would not add to your world-wide cultural power at all because nobody can read them!

It would also be cool. Do it. Yeah, sure, it will throw a bit of a wrench into the silly system for power. But it is also cool. And it wouldn't be much for the Gaudiguch library to prove that it is a real book.

For every single one published? I'd think it would, especially since (as far as I am aware) when you critique a book the publishing library is not made aware / given the ability to defend the critiqued work, it's just flagged and then decided upon by the Administration when they review it. Having to track down the unencrypted version would be a whole 'nother step in the process.

I mean, you can go ahead and try it. I just wouldn't expect it to have very good results, especially since it does not even make sense for encrypted / unreadable books to add to one's cultural power in the eyes of the world.

I was under the impression from organization logs that if your critique doesn't hold up, then your library loses credibility for it... which, to me, is probably the main reason why critiques are never used.

As a note, critiques are actually used. Glomdoring's lost a couple here and there, as have other organizations. Sometimes books get published by mistake, or weren't proofread thoroughly. Essentially it's only used when it's pretty much a 'sure thing' (which is the point for the penalty). It definitely does happen.

Also, I'm not saying the idea isn't neat. I am saying that, in the mechanical sense of the system, it just does not seem feasible or realistic.

I'd leave it at that then. This idea is a total "give it a shot" idea. Gaudiguch should just give it a shot. It's a neat idea and worse thing that happens is it doesn't work out great in game then it didn't work great and something else can be done.

No Enigma code, that requires machines that you haven't invented yet.

A good portion of one of my works is fully encoded.

I think the trick is making it make "sense" superficially. That is, allowing people to glaze over it, thinking it means one thing, but underneath having hidden something entirely different.

For example, if you wanted to hide and say "Lusternia" you could write it as:

LAOOXVSUDPMAIOOVI <- which is not very interesting

Or:

Listen, understand some things: everyone realizes north isn't an option. <- which is more interesting

Or:

Look out! It's trivial vexing unreachable notables without brainpower. <- which is getting fairly interesting

Don't get me wrong, I do think it is a wonderful idea to be able to.. but why submit it to the public library system when nobody outside of the Illuminati is going to be able to read it? Why not do so within your private library?
Edit: I had to make a quick edit, because at 3am, I don't make understandable posts.

The stated reason is so that they can get the culture points from publishing (which is understandable; Glomdoring has to wrestle with this to an extent as well).

I'm just not sure how the proposed solution actually makes sense, the way the system is set up.

Culture score.

@Xenthos: Have you ever heard of the Voynich Manuscript? It is a medival text dealing with botony and magic rituals which is to this day 100% indescipherable. Despite this, it's the source of a tremendous amount of speculation, scholarly research, thesis papers and pop culture references. I think it's pretty safe to say that things don't need to be readable by the general populace to have a cultural impact.

To your edit: No, I have never heard of it. I will look into it a bit tomorrow, but for now I will leave you with this thought; rocks (in all their various permutations) have also been the subject of much speculation, scholarly research, and thesis papers. That does not make a rock itself culturally significant (imparting any knowledge of a culture's existence or life or impact), it just means that people were curious.

I understand that a rock (at its basic level, prior to being shaped / used by humans) has no tie to a culture while an encrypted document does at least tell you that the culture had some sophistication in that regard, but in general... I don't feel as if just because something has had numerous things written about it that it is, itself, an object of cultural importance. Just an object of mystery that must be explored for the sake of exploring a mystery. We do tend to be a curious bunch, after all.

If you want to make a more specific argument in that regard please do! I'm just not sure I buy this one in particular, as it is broad enough to encompass all manner of things.

I'm sure things like the Voynich Manuscript were not published worldwide.

Writing in ciphers, encoding things, that's awesome, and you really should do it in the Illuminati. What you shouldn't do it publish that stuff. There's no reason to say "ok, I've encoded this so no one can read, let's put it out there for the world to read!" Doing that simply makes it more likely someone will break the code and learn your secrets. The sole purpose of this seems to be to get culture using things that should be internal. A thousand years from now, we'll dig up Gaudiguch and study your texts and learn about your culture. Until then, only things that people can actually read should be published. Make lots of codes and ciphers, then use them internally because that's awesome.

@Xenthos:
Culture is, in essence, a measurement of the amount of 'art' that a society produces, where 'art' is taken in the sense of 'that which is created for the purpose of provoking a response in viewers'. The amount by which a specific peice of work in Lusternia contributes to culture is based on a composite of the raw size of the book and the response that it provokes in the 'divine scholars' which judge it, ie. the administration.

A book or a poem is, under this definition, definatively cultural. They have a word count and they provoke a response in the reader. An enciphered text also has a word count and, if not 100% enciphered or encoded in such a way that it is apparent that there is some deeper meaning present besides "random text", retains the ability to provoke a response in the reader. See the Voynich Manuscript; though we cannot read the text, the illustrations make it abundantly clear what the book is about and that there is a real meaning to be had if you could only decipher the text of the book. This draws intrest, discussion and speculation as to the content of the book, as well as attempts to decipher it and understand the hidden depths of the work. A parallel could be drawn to many of the classics here, where people read hidden depths into Moby Dick or Frankenstein well beyond the immediately apparent interpretation that you would come to by reading the book literally.

Rock and other such objects, on the other hand, are not 'culturally' significant (using the Lusternian way of measuring culture) because they do not contain any words and do not provoke any sort of response in the reader beyond trival recognition. There are no attempts to interperate the hidden meaning in a stone, as there is obviously not a hidden meaning to be intreperated. It is a rock, a solid bit of mineral matter, and that is all there is to say about it. Studies can be done about the rock, but they are fundementally different in nature from the sort of speculation and discussion that is had about a written work. One is scientific, while the other is literary.

@Sylphas:
The problem is that the Illuminati are saddled with the RP burden of not wanting to discuss their secrets with outsiders. It is a fundemental part of the guild concept. To remove that from the Illuminati would be akin to removing the compunction against murdering fae from the Moondancers, or the First Chief Directorate from the Sentinels. It would basically gut the guild's RP. The Moondancers and Sentinels have worked around the problematic aspects of their respective RP contraints by getting them accepted by their enemies as well in the case of the Moondancers and by creatively reinterperating them in the case of the Sentinels. The Illuminati, due to the nature of their RP constraints, have a somewhat more difficult time doing this, leaving us with the options to just ignore it, to reimagine it in a less restrictive fashion, or to work around it. This is a plan to do the third option.

In an ideal world, we would still get culture points for things that are only in our guild library as those are still part of the "culture" of Gaudiguch and the Illuminati, even if we didn't go and publish a report about them for everyone else to read about. Likewise with the Institute preparing a classified report on something about temporal physics, or the Moondancers writing up a secret ritual which is only to be performed in the presence of the Coven of the Moon. Can you imagine what it would be like if Baalphegar had a doctrine for the Nihilists that proclaimed that they were not to share Nihilist theology with outsiders? We'd be short a huge number of wonderful writings by the guild and they wouldn't have the rich RP that they have today. They'd just be generically evil like the infernalists and the aposotates in the other IRE games are.

Sadly, this is not a perfect world, and we don't get culture points for that sort of stuff, even though we really should. It's just not mechanically viable for the game to track that and give people power for it. The oversight costs for the administration are simply too high for it to be implimented. I freely admit that this is a hack to get around that mechanical restraint and to get credit for things that it is not mechanically viable to track and that we would not otherwise get credit for. If we could realistically hope to get culture points for stuff that's only in guild libraries but still interesting and 'cultural' (using that definition from above), we'd do that instead.

I thiiink I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread, as an issue has been filed over it and Gaudiguch will be receiving the Administration's answer when they've come to a conclusion. Given the thread has no bearing on that decision, and I'm fairly certain it's just going to become unpleasant, there's just no need for it to remain open but to make people think one thing while another occurs.

Could we be informed in this thread of your (the admin) decision? Or is that something only between the admin and Gaudi?

Sorry. Figured it was OK to post about ISSUE ME topics.