RE: The Nth Society - A voluntaryist roleplaying game and decentralized project
I don't think the direction you are taking it is important however. A careful abstraction is needed in my opinion. Something framed in concepts similar to game theory but perhaps re-dichotomized.
I would be interested to hear more about what this might be. Care to expand?
Many online games are essentially voluntary associations. Adding tamagotchi or sim elements doesn't add useful information unless the conceptual framework is general enough to be worth building on.
They are and they aren't. There is one common thread throughout games, even ones which are explicitly voluntaryist, that makes testing any realistic voluntaryism impossible - game world protection of property. They are magic in the truest sense of the word, inexplicable power granted and maintained by the universe. In the real world you cannot guarantee your "rights" to your land, to your vehicle, to your person. In the game I propose you can only do these things by agreement, or force, or not at all.
So while I agree that we don't need another The Sims, making and using virtual worlds as proper exploration tools is worthwhile.
Ok, I'll give it some thought. That's one thing I like about a good post is that it inspires thought. It may take a couple of days and it will likely be rough in form because the topic is deep and complex.
Regarding online games, some friends play Rust, and from what I gather, you don't really own anything you aren't carrying. Minecraft is the same. 2nd life has a bunch of aspects that count as voluntarian and some that are protected. Perhaps your experiment could be inserted into a wide variety of existing games that have a decent amount of 'public domain' resources as a group of players participating in it. The downside would be statistic collection, which would probably have to be done by subjective polling. Playing the 'game' with stake or without stake is likely to have very different results - probably directly counter in some areas. To give people stake, and in lieu of money, perhaps the players could be a voting block or political group in some way to tie more consequence to their in game actions by having a real world effect.
Gaming itself is voluntary and without an element of choice a game is nothing. But without a stake tying us back to reality, there is no substantially purposeful real world overlap and there is little simulation. In that respect, I think we are in agreement.
Giving users stake, means in our case first giving them a game life for the payment that they pay into the escrow. Our basic player creation scheme results in many incentives both in and outside of the game. If coupled with a an open style game world that has enough similarity to taking actions in real life, there would be many reasons to join and remain in game apart from supporting ones SMT/game life speculation by providing a a suitable enviroment for other investors. The reasons would in many ways reflect our reasons for making everyday choices in real ife.
In a future post, I will make sure to explain what might draw a new player into the game, as well as what opportunities might exist for developers and investors.
You may however be onto the same thing as we have discussed in our Slack, which is that having an initial "air drop" of something to organize around, spend time on and somehow benefit/profit from might be helpful to kick the game off with more force. Bitcoin did fine being boosted by pretty much crypto geeks and libertarians, but Bitcoin wasn't a game in the same sense as we are speaking of here. Yet having crypto geeks and libertarians ideologically interested in the project will certainly still help a great deal, and when it comes to an "air drop" of whatever it may be, the problem we are immediately dealing with is what sort of incentives it will create that could keep affecting the game world for a long time. This is true for picking a certain historic era for the game to be played in, as it is for dropping resources or encouraging a particular type of game play early on. I would be happy to discuss this further in our Slack.
This is one of the things we have considered and it would also be interesting to discuss further. Also cooperating with other non-Nth projects, new and old, would be of interest in my opinion. The same risks as mentioned previously above still apply then as it does with "air dropping" resources/mini games into a new game world. All these things we would appreciate your further thoughts on here or if it comes at a later time, maybe in a new post with the Nth-Society tag. Our Slack is open for the same purposes of course.
This is another reason to check out LiF. It is a full looting game, and even your land claims can be challenged and lost. Nothing is protected by the system completely. By completely I mean there are ways to take anything. It just may be expensive. You have to collect a ton of resources for example to put a "siege totem" down next to an enemy base. If they lose the battle, you destroy their base. Again, people have a huge incentive to be peaceful. War has severe consequences for individuals and groups alike.