In the old days, on the Graphic Omniscient Device (G.O.D.) dialup BBS (Bulletin Board System) we called them Organic Peripherals... a form of pseudo-random or quasi-random input device.
Nowadays they call them users, or players, or customers, or by other such "more Politically Correct" terminology.
On the G.O.D. BBS, almost every kind of error was an "Organic Peripheral Error", whether it be a malformed input or a bug in the code.
This fact has been recalled to mind by thinking about the whole "gotta go viral" obsession of the "Venture Capital" industry, at least as it pertains to the start-up of online "ventures".
Is it truly absolutely necessary to be so dependent upon signups; members; subscribers; customers; players... Users?
Even if one might absolutely need some minimum number of them, thinking of them as Organic Peripherals helps switch things up toward a possibility of considering the idea of your game or app or, in general, "venture" using, or hey, maybe even "employing", those whatever-you-prefer-to-call-them thingamajiggies.
In designing and building the Galactic Milieu I have perforce had often to face the fact that the whole shebang might actually take a while to attain a huge userbase, thus that ideally it ought to function just fine without them.
Thus, "users optional".
FreeCiv for example can run on full-auto, no players required.
So maybe the whole multiverse / metaverse should in principle be able to do so too.
That of course brings the whole "make money" project back into mind, since quite often the motivation to "bring in users" lies in a need for money.
In the old days of the internet (much later than the old days of the G.O.D. BBS before the internet came along) Makemoney Knotwork's page headers said "Make Money Knotwork: Toward a GNU 'make money'", the idea being to in effect use the "make" command to "make" money.
Bitcoin mining showed us that that was not such a far-fetched idea as it might have seemed, to some at least, way back then.
Money for Dummies put it this way: "This program MAKES money, so why would we need to CHARGE anyone for it? If we want money we just run the program, we don't need to ask anyone for money! We've already GOT money and the program that makes it!"
All the above taken into account, what for do we NEED users? We can WANT them, and LIKE them, and entertain them, and empower them, even cater to them, but if the game "needs" users in order to run, who is "using" who?
If anyone glancing from time to time at the Galactic Milieu or Makemoney Knotwork thinks to themselves that the project hardly seems designed to appeal to Venture Capitalists, the above might throw some light upon why it is designed that way.
Maybe the Galactic Milieu is a Venture Capitalist, and each and every Organic Peripheral that connects to it is a prospective Venture! :)
-MarkM-
