The Closed System

One of the limitations in trying to assess the way society works is that, due to our limited perspectives, we fail to see the earth as a closed system. We see a world of "stuff" that is "out there" and we limit our mental simulations to only cover the parts we are investigating. The point of abstraction is doing exactly that, reduction to see the salient exchanges that affect the system. The problem is that the devil is usually in the details and beyond a certain level of resolution, no more can be abstracted out lest you lose the overall dependencies that define a system's environment in the first place.

If I tell you a story about how I climbed the ladder of success and got better jobs, got paid more, started buying bigger things, consuming more resources -- this is seen as a generally good thing as if the financial resources of the world were infinite and through my ingenuity and hard work, I tapped that rich vein. Whereas if one were looking at the system as a whole you would see how my success limited the options for other people. You would see how the game of financial 'musical chairs' actually worked, and how the opportunity for success was there for everybody, but not everybody could win. The game has compulsory "losers" built-in and by my success I removed a card from someone else's hand. -- You also may not see the other effects that the job may have had on my life. You wouldn't realize that along with the $50k in salary increase, I had to deduct 25 happiness points from my tableau, and -15 time tokens that I could have spent with people I loved.

In our games and gaming simulations, we fashion them with the same short-sighted principles. If you get more points, guns, money, lives, they all come from this endless digital supply which will never run out. Even the basic concept of using randomness in games defeats a major universal principle of cause and effect - that some fixed set of rules determine the end result, not a weighted roll of digital dice. (As we know, computers can't calculate "true" randomness anyway and randomness can lead to unrestrained resource bloat or deficit.)

So the challenge is: create a game that is a completely closed system. Like the Law of Conservation of Energy: "energy can never be created or destroyed, only changed into different forms." The initial parameters and rules would have to be created in equilibrium and only injected with imbalance during the game's set up, as the central conflict to overcome. There could be no randomness involved in any of the game's elements aside from the starting conditions, and even those would be restricted to the resource limitations of the game. The intricacies of the game would be translatable illusions for the "energy" of the system: power, time, money, resources, distance, whatever - there would be options available to the player to convert one energetic "form" to another. With x amount of power, you can turn the cannon to a 45 degree angle and shoot the cannonball Y+ high, but only z- distance, or you can use a lower angle and shoot the cannonball Z distance, but only y- high. Every decision with its consequence, for the player as well as the system as a whole. Everything interconnected; as I believe life to really be.