RE: Made of Modules - Nth Society design strategy
I did study software engineering but my interpretation of modularity in design tends to focus on the interoperability or reusability (e.g. the plug & play concept) rather than comparing it to the concept of monolithicness. I say this because even a phone is made up of different components, and the manufacturer can design the phone so that parts are replaceable (e.g. upgrade a camera), but I think that's getting too much into semantics and perspectives rather than trying to help define the design strategy.
I wrote an article a while back about the concept of identity, and I am curious as to if we might be able to explore this in some way as well on n-th society. I talked about there being different components to a person's identity, and what happens when someone loses their memory so that their identity is now made up of what is distributed through their interaction with a community:
https://steemit.com/makesteemitgreat-again/@plushzilla/the-steemian-identity-crisis-what-a-picture-of-you-holding-up-a-card-really-means
It made me wonder whether it would be an interesting game concept to have everyone interact with each other in this simulation, then for everyone to lose their memory of themselves and try to discover it through interaction with other people to piece it back together.
Then you know where I'm coming from with those distinctions even if you want to extend the idea of modularity to concepts of fluidity. Btw I'd like to hear more on that if you want to write about it.
That's an interesting idea about memory loss in the game, though not one I would consider core. How would you imagine it working?
I haven't thought about how the concepts of modules within the game can create the fluidity that creates the variations and complexity of the characters and group dynamics... those were just thoughts triggered by your post actually. I suppose in the process of designing and playing the game these ideas will probably become clearer but I am still trying to get my head around it :p
And the point about memory loss, it was just an extension of the idea of how identity is used and maintained within an online/digital community. The idea of a memory loss event is a potential way to explore what our identities means. It was something I thought deeply about after watching a documentary about a man who lost his memory and had to reinvent an identity for himself (which was somewhat different from his former identity). The documentary is titled "Unknow White Male": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436864/
I think we will probably have the opposite problem than memory loss - memory which spans lifetimes, kind of like being able to remember your past lives. I do see that as a genuine problem and I wonder what potential tools there are to offset this.
I think if a person immerses themselves into the character (e.g. RPG games or The Sims) then they tend to only use the information and environment that is available to them to 'play' the character. I guess it depends on how the lifecycle ends (since you have hinted at different stages of life and disease) and how the game resets or starts over again (i.e. if you can 'continue' or have to restart). These are interesting questions to consider but hopefully we get more discussions and ideas about it :)
That's true, people do get into it, or what's the point. My concern is that multiplayer aspects could disrupt this because you might be playing with your friends / clan / crew and talking to them outside the game with TeamSpeak, Discord or Mumble. So it's something to consider.
Very interesting questions posing interesting problems with hopefully interesting answers!