User:マイキ/Content Civilization

The basic idea is that a person would have a civilization, populated by nodes of content brought in from feeds. The size and source of the content would be taken into account, as well as specific words. As a person's population grows, individuals interact with each other and create families, villages, cities, etc. Using APIs and an in-game buddy system, different societies interact with each other.

The game is mostly passive, simply generating "people" from the content created by the user elsewhere. However, certain events will trigger input from the user, so they will have some influence on the direction of their society. Metadata (usernames, pingbacks, tags, hash tags, etc.) can cause these, or other world events.

A quick idea of person generation would be a person per 70 characters of submitted content. The site would use something similar to how /Gwibber recognizes the same content in multiple streams to prevent gaming the system in that manner.

Mechanics
When a content stream is added, each node (blog post, micro-blog post, presence/status update, shared link, etc.) is compiled into 70 character chunks. If a node has more than 70 characters, then it creates a family (at least two "people"). The family name is determined for all the members of that family at this time, derived from the most used word in the node, falling back on the user's favored word collection if none are found (such as with a photo, or if all the words are equally distributed). I haven't gotten to the attributes of individual people yet, but letters or some other pattern can be used.

Once created the person(s) are dropped into the user's society, either joining their family or creating their own, depending on a variety of factors (to be worked out, but may be able to be modified by the user).

Content streams

 * RSS/Atom (Any weblog)
 * Microblogs (Status.net, Twitter)
 * Social networks (Facebook, MySpace)
 * Aggregators (FriendFeed)

Inspiration
The idea for a simulated civilization that networks with friends' comes from an episode of Dennou Coil (FIXME more detail here). A passive approach to creating a society based on keywords/media and aggregation fits my idea for creating incentive in content creation. I play tactical RPGs for no other apparent reason than to unlock every feature, to level a small army of characters that I do not otherwise "interact" with. Wrapping this into a profiling site that scraps my web presence makes a lot of sense to me.