I guess my pondering the life/death cycle in a game like this contributed to my nightmare last night... so thanks for that ;)

I had to LOL 😂 That's why I call it "the life / death cosmic economy", complete with Lovecraftian cosmic horror 😜

Have you considered inheritance when players die?

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:

We use the term "guardian" to side-step the biological process of procreation. As guardian you are reasonably responsible for the survival of the new child player, but they are not your offspring. Thus only one person is required to bring a child into the game world, not two as in biological birth.

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.