RE: The Nth Society - A voluntaryist roleplaying game and decentralized project
I guess my pondering the life/death cycle in a game like this contributed to my nightmare last night... so thanks for that ;)
Have you considered inheritance when players die? This would seem important to keep things realistic, but I'm not quite sure how modelling love/loyalty between guardian and child could be done.
I was thinking that perhaps the genetic stakes could be emulated by the guardian acquiring a financial stake in the child life at birth (perhaps a gene token), and this stake would be perpetuated through at least a couple of generations. I understand this might go against philosphical materialism (which I don't subscribe to), but maybe in this way a dead player can continue to acquire some reward after their death. I think without something like this, we'd be missing an important biological incentive structure, and the outcome of a flawed model could be false lessons.
In fact, if when a new life was started, the guardian and parent acquired reciprocal (though maybe not symmetrical) stakes, then perhaps even sibling loyalty could be modelled. On the other hand, the kind of complexity this introduces could make the realisation of an actual game less likely.
I had to LOL 😂 That's why I call it "the life / death cosmic economy", complete with Lovecraftian cosmic horror 😜
We considered clan building and other things like this. It's an interesting topic, but up to the point developed in the proposal I concluded (@the-ego-is-you can speak for himself) that it would be perhaps counter productive to encourage clan building, as things work a little different than in real life and someone could easily use sock puppet accounts and collusion with friends take advantage of the system.
Just to be clear, there are no parents, only guardians. To quote from the proposal:
The Gene Token idea is interesting. You don't however lay out the rationale for such a feature. i.e., why should a dead player continue to acquire reward (based on the success of their guarded children, and presumably their guarded children, and so on) after their death? And what does this model?
I think you're correct to be concerned on legitimacy of the modelling though. What I first proposed does not model families exactly. Perhaps this is a problem. What I proposed is closer to A Brave New World, children are "made", but instead of being raised in nurseries, as in Huxley's world, they are raised in speeded up time by a single guardian.
I would like to hear more on your thoughts on why this might be inadequate.
I think you'll probably disagree on this point, but my personal preference would be to have the game require some greater degree of authentication to prevent sock puppets. In all honesty, I can't really imagine any realistic game or great crypto system working (in the long-term) without high transparency, and agree with this by Dan Larimer.
I guess in my thoughts, I'm modelling the game player as a kind of hybrid of a human and a gene (idea), rather than a pure human, and maybe my personal aversion to Huxley's world is what subconsciously seeded the contribution.
I don't disagree at all, so perhaps we need to discuss the thoughts in more detail. While I disagree with the argument in Dan's post, he is talking about complete transparency all the way to the physical self. "greater degree of authentication" does not have to go that far.
In fact I am working on ideas which have the side effect of greater authentication on Steem but the system is so designed against this and in favor of alt account that's it's proved extremely difficult.
This doesn't mean we need to inherit these problems though. I implore you to join the Nth Society Slack and brainstorm with us on it. I'm totally open to any alterations, this proposal is an explicit call for it!
Ok, I think I see what you're getting at. I'll join, and try and make a little time for it. :)