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RE: The Nth Society - A voluntaryist roleplaying game and decentralized project
Sounds like a great idea to use a game like this to experiment! I don't really play computer games though, so am struggling to imagine how it might look in practice.
I will follow the project with interest and will hopefully understand it better as time goes on. Have any existing games particularly influenced the idea (that I could read up on)? Aside from the crypto element, how might it be similar or different from Second Life for example? I know almost nothing about that except the name ;)
Many games have been on our radar. Several but not all of them have been linked in our Slacks "influences" channel. If you use this invite link, you can check them out there.
Differences would be in the organizational form, where Second Life is run by a company, has many simultaneously existing worlds in the same game and is essentially in that sense a monopolized multi-verse.
Further, in Second Life death is not a reality and even damage only occur in specific zones. The risks are very limited in that sense and for the same reason the opportunities to simulate life.
In our proposed basics of the game/simulation however, death comes at a tangible cost. It may be limited and finite as well, as it is not in fact real life death, but it stings none the less to lose both your valuable property and initial payment. This we think would help create an aversion affect similar (although certainly not equal) to a real loss of ones life, as well as disincentive some of the sabotage that has been seen in previous experiments predating our project.
When I say "our" project from here on, note that I mean not only the signers/co signers of the initial post, but all current and future contributors to the project in whatever form it may take.
I see... I didn't know Second Life wasn't one shared world, and that you couldn't lose your investment by dying. Have you any thoughts about optimal values for the initial payment? I realise it might be a bit early to be considering that, but am interested.
Nothing set in stone so far. It would have to be a sum that hurt to lose for most people, but also one that wasn't too large. Regardless, if not other conditions were constructed, a person with a lot of money could buy their way in.
Thankfully, there already are other conditions in the proposed system and the real losses would in most cases be higher than the initial sum thanks to player initiated "life staking" in game, which would produce both psychological and economic attachments the loss of which would be capable of acting as yet another deterrent for both current and potential players.
Hopefully, if we can design it well, sabotaging the game results in enough both money and opportunity lost that it would seem unattractive for the most part.
A little bit from a lot of sources, but I played a lot of the Day Z mod for Arma 2 a lot and it really give me a feeling for slow paced, realistic survival games. With zombies 😅 You need to keep yourself alive after "waking up" on a beach with almost no supplies and inappropriate clothes for the Russian (or Siberian?) landscape.
Minecraft is also an influence. A simple premise, simple graphics, simple crafting but which has huge possibilities, just like Lego (or how Lego used to be when the blocks were more generic).
Lastly, my influence is imagination based games. I played a lot of these as a child, I think most if not all of us did, and I'm intrigued to this day finding out about how the children around me collaborate on worlds. I was struck by a study I read once that claimed that kids spend roughly the same amount of time setting up and coming up with the rules for a game as actually playing it. I remember many upset debates over what was and wasn't allowed as a child. This is of course an undeveloped version of how we then navigate the world as adults and so I imagine the Nth Society game might be able to serve as a half way between this - doing and talking about serious grown up things, like how to do "society", while doing it using the tools of childhood, namely "play".
It could be really similar to Second Life, with one massive exception - you can't buy land in the Nth Society game. The economy of Second Life is build on the foundation of magic land purchase. It commented on this more in another comment.
is contextually correct, but just to clearify; Land could certainly still be dealt and sold in the game itself. It just won't be prepackaged and sold by a deified software developer, who would in such a case have ben acting as a super natural arbitrator of the game.
That is, as we early contributors have so far imagined this particular open source version of the game being developed. A fork of the project (or the same project if we left or ended up being persuaded by better arguments) would still be free to try any implementation of their own choice. I don't see myself changing on this particular point however.
Nor I. Thanks for the clarification, I'll make sure to remember to make this distinction in discussion.
LOL at this. I remember discovering my son playing AOE II for hours - without ever actually playing the game. He'd create a scenario and have fun destroying it. I don't know if he actually ever played the campaign.
I watched once as he created vast armies and, one by one, just killed each of the heroes. XD
In his defense, he's not some kind of serial killer now =p
Anyway, it is very true that kids are often more intent on creating the rules and scenarios than actually playing a game.
It's pretty interesting right?
I've played and enjoyed DayZ, but the cheaters and lack of development ruined the game.
Games have to have a way to allow conflict and conflict resolution. As in the real world, people will have a very high incentive to be peaceful and cooperative too! That's one reason something like Second Life would never interest me. It's basically a social club.
Ok, thanks for that. I'm unavoidably familiar with Lego and Minecraft :)
I agree a lot of children seem to spend a long time making up and changing the rules of their games. Often I think they do so to promote inclusion and increase participation which makes a lot of games more fun, but they also do it to deliberately exclude others. It's intriguing to realise that our adult politics often isn't much more sophisticated than this.
This is a really insightful comment. It is worth taking note of and could be very useful when constructing the game.