Personally, I find that one rather grotesque, and pandering to a particular mindset.
Grotesque due to the contrived nature of the 'challenges' faced which turn one's whole life into a video game, and the apparent homogeneity of preferences, and pandering due to the implicit fawning over everything the things that actually run its world are capable of.
As for this one... the creation of sentient beings for an explicit purpose leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It feels like limiting their powers of self-determination, though I'm not sure if that's coherent. The exact particulars of how the solar system gets remade seem a bit arbitrary, though the hands-off safeguards are interesting. I wonder what sorts of 'gaming of the rules' are possible...
Grotesque due to the contrived nature of the 'challenges' faced which turn one's whole life into a video game,
Agreed. And a poorly designed video game, at that. If this world was made into a game today, I can't imagine it being as popular as Grand Theft Auto.
Today's post, Failed Utopia #4-2 was originally published on 21 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Interpersonal Entanglement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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