The MMPORG Days

Virtual Gaming Origins

• My Town was a City Simulator that let players create avatars in a virtual city
• Players spent time honing crafting skills in game, did good deeds (or not), and was awarded personality points in 64 different categories
• Based on personality points, players were given options to take on different professions, and directed their character to make choices in the carrying out of their daily lives
• The game itself was not hugely popular, but it had a few hundred thousand subscribers
• It attracted the attention of a team of behavioral scientists, computer scientists, and social scientists who got the funding to pilot a community of 150 people who would agree to live by the decisions of the game AI
• Based out of Portland, Oregon, this initiative was called the Stride project

The Stride Project

First AI Community Test

• Was scheduled to last 12 months
• Was shut down after 3 months
• Multiple problems with data collection made the AI's decision-making unreliable
• Participants felt that the experience was unrealistic and awkward, as it required them to enter their activities in a tablet PC, which was both inaccurate and unrealistic
• Two years after it was shut down, it was restarted in Austin, TX
• Thirty million dollars went into creating more comprehensive and automated data collection tools that were wrist-mounted and required very little input from the user
• The project was renamed the Star program, and would be created for an 80 person community

The Star Program

Successful Second Iteration

• Much more successful than Stride, the Star program actually did the job of managing opportunity and resource for all 80 people in the project
• After six months, they added another 80 volunteers to join, and they too were quickly assimilated into the day to day life directed by star
• Developers and psychologists worked to update the rules to maintain balance for all 160 participants
• Many of the participants professed to exploring new talents and opportunities, and several permanently changed careers based on Star recommendations
• It was finally retired after 18 months, with mixed but optimistic reviews

After the Star Program

Expansion & Refinement

• After a year of code refinement, an upgrade to data collection, and an overhaul of rules, a third trial was started in Seattle, WA
• Still referred to as the 'Star Program', participants included a fifty/fifty mix of researcher-academics and lower income/out of work persons selected by questionnaire and psych eval
• A total of 1,200 participants were inducted into a three-year trial
• At the end, 31% of the lower-income participants had developed new skills and reentered the workplace with significantly increased earning potential
• The run was considered a qualified success, but there was intense optimism about the Star Program's future
• Another two shorter runs with fewer participants were conducted in Atlanta, GA and Lincoln, NE, both of which had similar successes

Federal Contract

Government Investment

• The United States Federal Government got involved and awarded a contract worth 50 million dollars
• Another 2 billion was obtained in three rounds of private funding
• They began constructing a massively updated AI engine, and renamed the project Stella
• Scheduled for a five-year runtime, the scope of the project significantly changed to include a list of invited businesses who would also be managed by Stella to operate with the citizen participants
• Based on the recommendations of computer scientists, economists, and psychologists, three boards were created to manage the rules under which Stella would run: Industry, Humanity, and Balance
• Each board had an equal number of participants and would convene to vote on rule changes to the system
• 50,000 people were asked to join, including a representative socio-economic mix of the population
• Rules updates occurred every three months
• The program was considered an overwhelming success

Stella Characteristics

System Foundation

• Cashless society
• Individuals were given job choices based on demonstrated skills/talents
• Different jobs came with different compensation packages. Everything in the compensation package was free, though limited in availability
• Successful schooling/personal improvement could immediately change the available job choices
• Arts, sciences, services, and entertainment were rewarded equally
• Businesses did not have to pay employees, but they did have to provide goods/services to individuals based on their compensation level
• For jobs/careers with fewer participants, Stella would automatically increase the compensation level to attract more people
• For jobs/careers with too many participants, Stella would automatically decrease the compensation to encourage retraining
• Businesses were allocated more/less workers automatically based on demand

Stella Reception

Public Response

• Overall was considered very successful
• 98% of the population had taken a job
• 73% of the population reported that they enjoyed their job
• For those who were employed, 84% reported to feeling less stress about work and working
• Nearly all felt free to explore their talents without the threat of losing their current employment
• Overall, employable skills for the entire group increased by 32%
• Overall, education level for the entire group increased by 58%

Stella Installed in Detroit

First Permanent Installation

• Stella was installed in Detroit on a permanent basis in a revolutionary move by the current mayor
• A conversion was made between Stella Credit and US Dollars so trade could be conducted between the city and the rest of the world
• Many businesses and people at first moved out
• Remaining business adoption was slow at first, but then quickly picked up when full understanding of the benefits were understood
• Within the first two years, population dropped by six percent, but steadily grew with immigration from other locations after that
• At year ten, population had increased by 68%
• Citizens reported vast improvement in circumstances
• Three other cities were chosen to be installed with Stella, all with huge success

Consolidation

Unified AI System

• Seeing this program continuing to grow, the federal government spent 60 billion dollars to consolidate all of the Stella instances into one massive AI
• The AI software company that won the contract was called Teragen, and it took over the full-time role of managing the Stella AI
• Massive increases in data collection were installed. This was seen as a benefit as it would allow inter-city trade
• To prevent fraud, the data collection devices were installed as implants under the skin
• A new application was created to view a much more user-friendly version of the Stella-Credits personal data
• The three branches (industry, humanity, and balance) were installed at the federal level, with their offices residing in Washington, DC
• The Federal Government opened Stella up to every city in the United States
• Given the successes, there was a rush by 36 cities to join, with many more trickling in over the next 15 years

Stella Goes Global

• After a series of treaties were signed, Berlin was the first city outside the US to install Stella
• Hundreds of cities around the world followed
• A new global (for Stella) currency emerged - the holographic credit, or holocred
• With Stella driving the economy in the participating global cities, discovery increased at a rapid pace, with innovation in medicine, science, industry, technology, and a new field-cybernetics
• The lives of the people inside the Stella-enabled cities continued to improve while the living standards of those outside began to experience a sharp decline
• Goods produced in a Stella economy were cheaper, better made, and more plentiful because profit was not the goal, doing a good job was
• It became increasingly difficult for communities outside the Stella societies to sell their products to Stella-enabled communities

The Great Hack

• Becoming more and more disenfranchised by the exclusiveness of the Stella-enabled societies, those who chose to live a life outside of Stella continued to struggle
• A renegade group of hackers developed a virus that, once launched, quickly spread throughout the global Stella network
• Stella and Stella online backups were corrupted, and the Stella system crashed
• It was only down for 9.5 hours, but in that time, the entire society came to a halt
• After the system was back up, the Stella legislation bodies immediately created emergency rules to put in place more protections against malicious intent
• National governments around the world, already feeling Stella's impact, saw further decline as Stella instituted a concept of Stella citizenship
• Passports and Visas were issued. It became more difficult for non-Stella people to enter the Stella system
• Outsiders wishing to join the Stella system would have to take and pass a skills and talents assessment to determine if they were likely to fit and "thrive" in the Stella system
• More and more applicants were being turned away

Governments Push Back

Formation of Opposition

• The remaining world governments were not happy about the Stella-enabled societies effectively declaring themselves a singular sovereign nation
• Forming together, a few of the governments became the United People's Unification Republic, with the intent to negotiate better terms with Stella
• An agreement to relax the Stella society borders was signed, initiating the second major migration of people into the Stella System
• A few new cities joined, but mostly individuals from the countryside came to get included
• There still remained a sizable population outside of the Stella system that did not trust it, and did not want to join under any circumstances

The Vienna Accords

Sovereignty Agreement

• The Metrofederacy and the United People's Unification Republic signed the Vienna Accords to define clear boundaries of each government's power
• The core agreement established that the UPUR would have no authority or responsibility within the borders of the Metrofederacy
• Similarly, the Metrofederacy would have no authority or responsibility outside of its borders
• Both entities were recognized as completely separate and sovereign nations
• The accords specified that neither party would interfere with the other without direct invitation
• The agreement established formal diplomatic channels while maintaining strict separation
• The accords would later become a source of suffering after the Avarice Wars, as Stella interpreted them rigidly
• Without updates to the Vienna Accords, Stella considered anything outside its borders to be off-limits
• This strict interpretation meant the Metrofederacy bore no responsibility for humanitarian crises outside its borders, regardless of how egregious

Stella Militarizes

Defense Force Creation

• A trade dispute between the Stella city of São Paulo in Brazil and the farmers union who were negotiating prices on produce broke out into a briefly armed conflict
• A group of São Paulo's with earth-moving and loading robots were able to quell the conflict
• Inspired by the São Paulo uprising, multiple other Stella cities were briefly attacked
• This resulted in Stella Legislation to create a military career classification
• Within six months, Stella's fully-automated military grew from zero to 100,000 fliers and ground assault vehicles with the ability, via hypersonic transport, to mobilize on any location in the world within six hours

The Avarice Wars

• Feeling more and more pressure, voters around the world elected more and more leaders who were pro-war
• The first fighting broke out in Bursa, a Metrofederacy city. Attacks on other cities followed in rapid succession
• A lightning attack, the world governments planned to wipe out Stella quickly before it could muster its defenses
• They underestimated the processing speed of a world-spanning AI
• Stella had not been sitting idle. Dual-role unmanned transports had been modified to carry munitions
• Within thirty-six hours, the world governments had surrendered, suffering a crushing defeat

Free Cities and Holdfasts Arise

• With nobody maintaining global infrastructure, and Stella economies not sharing with the outside, individuals outside of Stella began to cluster in loosely-governed cities
• Power grid collapses for most of the non-Stella world
• Water and sewage are spotty in the non-Stella world
• Life in the Wildlands became increasingly difficult with clean water, food, shelter, and healthcare hard to find
• The cities that sprang up were not able to support the population
• Many groups and families, with nowhere else to go, banded together and formed holdfasts in the countryside, near rivers and lakes, with plentiful sources of food

Stella Population Crisis

• The total population of the Metrofederacy reaches 2 billion. Outside, billions of people have died by violence or starvation
• 100 years goes by, and the Metrofederacy population has been growing at a glacial pace for decades
• Too many people were on the Stella system for the software to keep up with
• At the same time, the number of categories Stella tracked for each person around the world, 24 hours a day, had grown to over 32,000 unique indicators
• Developers at Teragen rushed to optimize software, but the AI began to have difficulty in determining differences in nuance of human behavior
• The Humanity party, led by Giles Montague, lobbied and won the ability to temporarily include a human component to augment Stella on more difficult determination through crowdsourcing
• Now, they just needed people...