Editing Round 9/History (section)

=== Simultaneity ===

On to the things we struggled with but eventually got right. It's always a good idea to specify the order that things happen in if they are to happen at the same moment in time, and it is absolutely crucial to do so if one or more action depends on the result of the others. The Simultaneity Scares (see {{Heading|The Simultaneous Proposal Scare}} and {{Heading|The Second Simultaneity Scare}}) serve as cautionary tales. If we hadn't resolved them, they could have spelled disaster for our understanding of the gamestate. The fact that we struggled with this at all is perhaps the fault of the voting period system which aligned many important actions around two crucial points in the week.

To take this one step further, while proposals which simply specify relative orders (e.g. "Event X happens after event Y; event Z happens before Y") can certainly solve the problem -- they did in this round -- it is not hard to imagine it getting very tiresome and progressively more difficult to specify the order you really mean when there are, say, five events at the same instant. idle and finsook's proposals to add more boilerplate for simultaneous events (also in {{Heading|The Second Simultaneity Scare}}) did not pass but indeed have merit for a round where even more actions take place at the same time than in Round 9.