a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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You could use roman numerals.
....or just not fiddle around with sticks making letters because your life only lasts a single hour....
I also think that making a big sign a filling it with alternating letters B and E should be a <sarcasm>meaningful</sarcasm> accomplishment.
The problems with making righteousness as a game mechanic: pretty much every rule ever has an exploit.
Trollface. Or devil horns. Or some other visual indicator of being a murderer.
Option #1: The scarlet letter
Once you have murdered, you have trollface for the rest of that life, and perhaps the next 1 or few, or for a time limit.
Option #2: Karmic trollface at a certain age.
Each account has a trollface age associated with it. This age is, by default, 60, the age of death.
Each murder performed lowers this age by 1.
Option #3: Percentage trollface
Account tracks a percentage, starting with 0, of having trollface.
Murder increases the percentage chance by 1.
Trollface cannot be seen by the player himself, only by others.
Trollface evidences somewhere in the age range 0-30.
I don't think of the game application (the binaries that I download and install and update on my machine) as the "product", as the OP seems to be talking about "the game" as.
OHOL is an experiential "product". You are part of a large piece of art, and that art is not simply the digital "things" that you "make" and are persisted temporarily on a server somewhere. If you think this way, you miss the whole point.
OHOL is a mirror placed in front of you. Within the game application itself, there is very little you can do to discern who else is playing with you. You are anonymous. Some have seen this as a lack, and have used external tools to fill the perceived "gap". But that sort of functionality was left out on purpose.
And being anonymous means that you are free to express yourself within the confines of the games rule. Maybe you'll be helpful, maybe you'll be destructive, maybe you'll be selfish.
Mostly you'll be selfish, because to the game you brought with you the concept of personal property. Outside of what is in your backpack and your hands, you don't own anything. This is part of the mirror, because it is true in real life as well.
You've been given metrics, like number of generations lived, so you perform to them, because topping some number gives your real life meaning somehow.
You've been given monuments and told that everything will go bad if you make them. The monolith was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil from the garden of Eden.
You split rocks even before there was a reason to do so, because you could.
At the time of this post, the stats say: 1,072,451 lives lived for a total of 156,420 hours 64,461 people lived past age fifty-five
If you do the math, that is 8.75 minutes per life. The average game lasts for less than 9 minutes. Just over 6% of the people make it to 55.
As a group, the players, who are the paintbrushes in the collaborative painting, are selfish. Kill the old, kill the young, don't feed boys, too many babies.
What has the mirror shown you? What did you like about what you saw? What horrified you about yourself and others? Just because the people are anonymous does not mean that they aren't really those assholes down deep.
I was once murdered for making carrot pie in a town that only made rabbit carrot pie.
I was once taken by my light colored mother out of the village and told I was a Nigger and didn't deserve to live.
What do I want out of the game? I'm getting it... a good, real picture of humanity.
But the game application is no longer the thing itself. How the dev has to navigate player criticism, because somebody with $20 thinks they are entitled to some sort of equity in the game, and how he modifies the rules to attempt to nudge the players towards the ends he is trying to accomplish with his game.... that is the experiential product as well.
...
Or did you mean something simpler, like "I'd like to see poop"?
I bet you meant something like that.
Ex nihilo, my general strategy:
1. Sharpened rock and basket asap.
2. Find a nice berry and milkweed area and subsist on berries while gathering the twelve stalks necessary for rabbit processing. The basket comes in handy.
3. First item: snare and begin using it as soon as you have it
4. Second item: hatchet
5. Last item: firebow
6. Somewhere between steps 3-5 I'll have more milkweed and plenty of furs for making pouches or clothes once I get my fire.
7. I prioritize backpack above other fur items.
8. If I do farm, it is short term. I raise enough carrots to fill up my backpack, and then I move on with my firebow, snare, and hatchet in my basket to another area, as I am nomadic.
My play style has changed from "make a farm" to "temporary hunting camp". I have little interest in cities paved with planks. If I wanted a to do a job, I wouldn't be playing a game.
Generally, though, whatever children I have tend to want to make a farm for some reason, so I usually move on as soon as I am too old to have more children.
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