These were the original rules of Fantasy Scout (published for the first time in October 2006):

The game will start 2007 January 1. It will never end. You can enter the game at any moment, just sending me e-mail to milivella @ gmail . com You will be given the adresses of all the other scouts. At any moment, you can buy a player from Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Germany, France and England (should we add Holland?) that has never played for his national team before 2007 January 1. To buy a player, just e-mail all the other scouts. The points of a player are given by his caps + his goals in international matches (i.e. in his national team). Your points are the average points of all your players. At any moment, you can buy/sell a player from/to another scout, exchanging him for players and/or points. The exchange will be official when both the scouts will e-mail all the others. These are all the rules. Nothing else.

In September 2009, just before the revolutionary reform (quite the oxymoron) that brought cycles and a new scoring system, the five rules still stood (slightly changed), but a sixth rule had been added:

6. Modifying rules Rules can be modified sending a proposal to fantasyscout@yahoogroups.com . If nobody of the scouts that entered the game before 2009 Septemeber 22 (tmporary measure) disagrees in a week, the proposal is accepted, and becomes rule.

I have few doubts about the worst rule out of these six: average as a scout’s score! Letting scouts pick players with any number of caps (as long as they had not debuted before 2007) would be the second worst rule, showing too much faith in the free market.

It’s more interesting for me to argue about which rule was the least bad. I still like the idea of using caps and international goals, but I don’t think this is the least bad rule.

I argue that the fact that there were just five or six rules was more important than the player scoring rule. In fact, if we still play Fantasy Scout, it’s because we have augmented and improved the original rules (see the two bad rules I just mentioned). The ruleset is now a bit more complex, but also substantially better. However, I argue that it would have been quite hard (if not impossible) to get the rules right from the start. Let me quote Gall’s law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

The original ruleset worked just enough to draw minds, and it was certainly so simple that it was easy to devise ways to improve it. So the fact that there were few rule may be more important than any single rule (I agree with myself here: note the emphatic comment to the original ruleset: “These are all the rules. Nothing else.“).

However, Gall didn’t mention just being simple and working as the features of the systems that eventually become working complex systems. He also says that the (working simple) systems should be patchable. And this is the effect of the sixth rule, which involves everyone in the process of changing the rules, and generally allows the rules to change. Just as in the case of programming languages, the most important thing is that a game must be able to grow. This is why I think that the rule about reform was the least bad rule.