The carrot analogy, implicitly postulating the Entropia player as an animal research subject in a Pavlovian conditioning experiment, might be a hint that this approach is on the wrong track. Indeed, it is the nauseatingly-stale polar opposite of any brand of development which might realize the ideal of what it means to be an Entropian. The Entropian is not a research animal chasing a thousand carrots for a year before burning out as their Entropian experience feels more and more like a job, NEVERDIE's proposal notwithstanding. The Entropian is the origin of her own ends, the synthesizer of her own means, the interpreter of her own meaning and purpose, the author of her own fun, creativity, and beauty, and both individually and communally, the harbinger of Entropia's future. To play Entropia is a liberating decade(s)/lifelong process of colonizing and co-creating the Entropian experience. It is both the birthright and the responsibility afforded by a sandbox built on the foundation of the Entropia concept.
No amount of psychological manipulation by A/B testing the perfect pre-defined sequence of carrots can substitute for this. The carrot barrage
is a very game theoretic idea, or rather, I would argue, it is characteristic of a certain naïve application of game theory not justified by the game theory itself. You model the utilities of all outcomes assuming players have autonomy to navigate through a game's strategy space freely, observe that some outcome Pareto dominates (if we're lucky, in even worse cases replace "Pareto dominates" with "outperforms on average") equilibrium outcomes, and theorize an external enforcement mechanism to "move to the better outcome" without explicitly modeling the enforcement mechanism as a player in a broader game or considering how its autonomy degradation impacts the utilities which were modeled without it. This may be fine for
literal prisoner's dilemmas, as the autonomy degradation of a mechanism enforcing cooperation is likely trivial relative to the utility degradation and autonomy degradation of serving extra years in a prison. I would already be wary of applying such an approach to advocate for destroying the A-B path in
Braess's paradox for physical roads, and I doubt I'd even have to argue against arranged marriages regardless of whether the enforcement mechanism can select the same or better partner as the autonomous individual would choose freely.
But maybe the most absurd application of this philosophy, despite the word appearing in "game theory," is to concrete games. No Chess player would be content with a machine learning algorithm training on ELOs, their time-derivative information, match histories, etc., (even perfectly) predicting the probability of each player winning a match, and randomly drawing the outcome of the match using those probabilities instead of playing out the game. Or even watching a generated game with the appropriate probabilities play out on video. Or even watching such a generated game with the occasional pause to prompt a player to make a decision out of a watered down set of two or three options. And I'm not appealing to the randomness-free property of Chess (or any specialized properties); replace Chess with Magic, Monopoly, or your favorite video game (with a few exceptions) if you like. Playing a concrete game is
not replaceable with an appropriately weighted realization of one of its outcomes. The player's autonomously authoring the outcome matters
a lot, as does the propensity for player growth in the ability to bring about more favorable outcomes over time, and the depth and structure of the player's strategy space is essential to cultivating such goods. It's about the journey at least as much as the destination.
In Entropia, this autonomy takes the form of Entropians authoring their own goals and user experiences, and requires developers to operate at a certain causal distance from those goals and experiences in order to give Entropians the space they need to operate and grow, focusing on enriching the space of options, tools, systems, and features over which an ecosystem of Entropians can engage in this creative process, not on lambasting players with the same old worn-out patterns of questified chores. The value potential of Entropia does
not lie in the sum of its individual outcomes, and developers cannot optimize Entropia by independently optimizing its outcomes. Rather, the value potential of Entropia lies in how Entropians autonomously transform a causally-dependent combinatorially-spanned universe of affordances
into outcomes, and those outcomes into the satisfaction of goals and phenomenal experience. It lies in a network of latent metagames (in the broadest sense of the term), waiting to materialize and empower Entropia to interface beyond itself so as to display the aggregate ingenuity of the community. Obliquity and systems thinking are sorely needed, especially by developers in aggregate, which would involve some significant corporate incentive restructuring. But maybe the community can be more agile in reharmonizing our thinking with Entropia's core principles. We should reject the conception of ourselves as animals myopically running on a hamster wheel struggling to catch a sequence of carrots, and demand a universe of affordances which merit calling ourselves Entropians.
that amp their is something completely wrong with it utter terrible but terra 6 terra 8 lvl 5 even lvl 12 was better tt return wise.
It seems that some forum posters are suspicious that I am an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm, generating my posts automatically with no sentience or human being cognition. This hypothesis is false. Rest assured that I am a human being typing my human being posts upon this human being forum, and so no further speculation of this sort will be required. I have even foreseen to provide photographic evidence of myself typing the human being posts in order to provide proof of their human origin.
