Right now there are a lot of reasons why we should be rethinking our approach to society. With the meltdown of international finance has come a need for re-evaluation of our social structures. Not least here in the UK where we are in a very poor position.

It started a chain reaction of thought, that led from the outer edges of the nations politics, to the very core of socialism vs capitalism and then deeper still.

Ultimately it led to this question:

Does land ownership lead to fundamental inequalities?

In order to explore that question, we’re putting together a prototype game concept that explores the absolute basics of population. It starts off with a model of a single civilised dwelling space and then models the spread of population from there. Here are the rules so far:

• Each game update, the resources of a particular population center rises by a “productivity rate”, this is determined either randomly (for now) or by sampling the landscape (later).
• Each population center, at a given (semi random) rate, spawns a new member of the population.
• When enough new members spawn, an agent is sent out from the population center, these can either be foragers, defenders, attackers, or pioneers
• Foragers collect resource for the population center
• Defenders defend against enemy attack
• Attackers seek to destroy any nearby population centers (that have not been directly spawned by them)
• Pioneers set out into unpopulated areas and try to found a new civilisation.
• The amount of population in a center will be governed by the amount of resource available in inverse proportion.

These simple rules should form at least the basis of the starting phase of population. There are other small rules involved about how far pioneers travel and how big populations can grow, but roughly the idea is that a certain amount of population is sustainable, but the concept of “growth” which is used throughout capitalist economies suggests that populations inevitably rise. This should in theory lead to imbalances in the population and more importantly the rise in increased population density in a concentrated mass of population.

It really is just a simple little prototype experiment. No particular goal other than to see what happens. If it turns out anywhere near interesting we’ll try and make it available somehow (maybe do a unity web-player version).

Anyway, need to go and work on population growth now. Video soon!