Identity

Dear Tim,

I’ve begun work to overhaul the major facets of Kalmany and its simulation. It’s currently in a lot of design and testing of how I will have it work and there are some major decisions I’ll need to make that will change how citizen perceptions work and how they are shown on the website. I thought I’d delve into a little of my design work of the new Time Update – also know as the Kalmany CCTV Upgrade.

This update is going to basically switch from a script that runs an election, and cycles through all citizens to determine what they vote for, to have them act on a periodic basis during the day that may or may not involve voting. It’s going to provide more detailed logic on how a citizen works in a day, what they are doing. This is so that I can facilitate an important chain of changes: citizens will age. If they age, they will need to die. If they die, they will need to be born. And if they’re being born, they need to form relationships.

So we’re introducing a lot – aging, daily activities, the formation of relationships, relationship status, and familiar relationships. We’re gonna end up in a SimCity situation. In fact, I was looking at Sims for some inspiration.

So my current design idea is to have daily activities operate in a state machine – I cannot hold historical data on a citizen’s state, so I can’t tell how long a citizen has been sleeping to wake them up at a reasonable hour. Instead, I’ll have them operate on five basic “needs” (like Sims) to help them make decisions during the day on what they’re doing. These five needs are currently: Hunger, Energy, Joy, Warmth (or Health), and Chi (or Chakra, or Feng Shui). Hunger will be our general survival value that needs water or food. Energy is our need for sleep. Joy will be just general happiness. Warmth will be the health of our citizens. And Chi is effectively our citizen’s purpose; centering in the universe.

With these, they will lower in usual tasks during the day, and actions will need to be taken to bring them up to speed. Other variables that will need to be at play are the citizen’s attributes, such as ethnicity (as vampires will sleep in the day, work at night), or industry (students will study and the unemployed or retired will not have work), or religion (as religions will need days for praying or attending sermons). Age will also affect how fast some of these needs deplete, especially Warmth. There’s going to be a lot of work involving managing the states and switching between them.

Now romance will also have a place in the states. During a romance state, we’ll be working out if the citizen is in a relationship, how the relationship is going, whether we’ve got any new citizens from it. Adjusting variables will be important to ensure the death rate matches the birth rate. However, one thing that’ll need an overhaul are the identity attributes in a citizen: Sex & Sexuality.

Currently, the two don’t have much importance in determining policy preference, so they’re mainly for colour. When relationship come into play, I’m considering reworking the whole thing, and if I’m reworking them, I’m going to use a philosophy that matches mine AND is more process friendly.

At the moment, every citizen is in a Sex category and a Sexuality category. But these are narrow-minded concepts – to try and categorise a citizen into a Sex ignores transgender. To categorise in Sexuality will ignore a create deal of categories because the list is growing ever longer. The question is, what’s the best way?

The current idea I’m playing with is keeping these categories, but they will act as self-categorised identities i.e. as if each citizen took a survey to what their Gender and Sexuality identity is. But then the backend in relationships will take a much more granular look into a citizen; we’re going to have to simplify it a bit, but we’ll designate a set of Personal Attributes, paired to Personal Attraction, and the Biological Sex paired to Biological Attraction. We’re going to create a set-collective of attributes.

After all, gender is more a collection of attributes, each of which can be considered Masculine or Feminine, or Neutral. So gender identity becomes more just which side you identify with more. Say all of your Personal Attributes are feminine, then your gender will essentially be feminine. I can see this being a problem with the attachment of Gender to Biological Sex, but my system will completely separate the two – it just kind of makes sense to separate them. After all, what is a Gender identity other than a categorisation of the self based of an idea of the two sides of that gender coin male and female. Or more accurately, the gender tri-coin of male, female, and neutral. There’s no reason for it to be binary. The citizen themself will decide their Gender Identity, but their Personal Attributes will then provide whether or not that citizen is attractive to others. And their Personal Attraction will provide the information on who they are attracted to.

In the same way, Biological Sex will provide the factual representation of their current sex. But Biological Attraction will operate on an array of all possible Sexes, with a value measuring their attraction on a scale of 0-100%. This way I can cater to all manners – a biological male, with 100% attraction to biological men, 0% biological women, will be categorised as homosexual. 50/50 would be true bisexual. 0 on everything is true asexual. And we’ve then got the fluidity of any and every biological sexuality being represented.

The complicatedness exponentially increases but provides a simplistic method for measuring a citizen’s attraction to another citizen. We can compare their Biological Attraction array to a citizen’s Biological Sex, for sexual compatibility. We can then compare their Personal Attraction arrays to a citizen’s Personal Attributes to determine their romantic compatibility. And from that we get a host of situations forming. We can delve into a rainbow of representations! And it’s far more interesting that having everyone designated as ‘male’ or ‘female’ and then just assigning them across binaries.

I can understand broaching a sensitive topic like Gender and Sex can be difficult, but my intention with the simulated situation is not to represent life accurately, or make social commentary. It’s to provide an intriguing random numbers generator, that provokes a curious story. And I’m all for making thinking interesting rather than accurate.

Anyway, I hear you’re now in Antarctica, dealing with a similar problem as last time, but on the other side of the earth. I hope it doesn’t end up having to travelling to the other orthographic centres. I’ve kept an eye on Cat in the meantime – she’s missing you. Plus she’s slowly driving me nuts; sneaking into my bed at night, pawing at me in the day, trying to grab my attention at all hours. If she wasn’t the love of your life, I’d be less complacent.

Yours,
Stan