ideas

=Ideas=

Agency Is the agency in this model inherent in the virtual world itself, or in NPCs that inhabit the world? Certainly there is agency in the human participants, and that has to be considered, but pehaps we look at the agency of SOV in these two ways, and indeed a third way -- that the agency lies in the world itself AND in NPCs that inhabit the world.

Determinism The elegance of self-organization is that is non-deterministic. So any formulations we might make regarding its outcome are purely speculative. That said, I posit a sort of 'trap door' in the virtual universe which allows some measure of control which is perfectly allowable, and in fact, a foundational premise of chaos theory. [|Sensitivity to intial conditions]: the butterfly effect is a way to inject 'seed' concepts into the mix that will have unexpected but potentially massive influence on the future trajectory of the system.

Non-Determinism Think about how the best ideas come to us when we aren't trying-- that the letting go required to truly foster creativity and innovation is foundational to the concept of Self Organizing Virtuality.

Architecture of Discourse Interactions of the 'players' are recorded and transformed into structures in the virtual world. These structures can be re-visited, re-vised, expanded, exploded, merged with other structures. This is a way for interaction, collaboration and thought processes to be made 'concrete' in a way, a kind of 3D mind-map that is not directly built by the participants but is constructed by the environment or emerges from the environment like a precipitant.

Magic In a self-organizing virtuality, everything is potentially magic. Action-at-a-distance, telepathy, levitation, alchemical transformations, all are possible and indeed likely if the initial conditions (see Determinism, above) allow for archetypal constructs. Also, since the virtual world can record absolutely everything that happens within its confines, it can manifest [|Akashic record] -like phenomena.

Ontogeny What if a virtual world were 'grown' from a seed, much like an organism, or for that matter, the universe? Initial conditions, the 'rules' of this virtuality, along with the contingencies of participants behaviors, would determine the development of the world and would also be woven into its fabric. How would this kind of intimate binding of the world with its participants (along with any outside resources such as data stores, knowledge repositories, graphics libraries, etc) effect the ultimate experience and interaction of the world with participants, participants with the world, participants with participants?

Miscellaneous In self-organizing systems, control is distributed throughout the state space. Local events can propagate across the state space, seeking equilibrium or 'attractors'. A local change in organization can propagate to the entire system, changing its global organization. A system with distributed control is more robust than one with centralized control. Local failures do not bring the whole system down (see Internet).