Conspicuous Consumption I: Lifestyle Evaluation

[The Sociologist]

You see Bill Gates, wearing nothing special, hide 1 billion iron shields under the bed of his mud hut...

Is that Cantr? Not quite. In Cantr Bill Gates would dispense with the bed. Is it real life? OK, so what is wrong with the model? We have in Cantr a society simulator that fails to simulate society. The answer, quite simply, is that Cantr has a model of production, but hardly any model of consumption at all.

And in order to develop a model of consumption, you need to understand what drives people, what motivates them. Which is a question not merely of cultural norms but of processes which operate even at the physiological level, feeding back into and reinforcing hierarchies. At the root of all this is how others perceive you and how you perceive yourself, but it has hormonal... actual chemical consequences.

I'd like to introduce the concept of conspicuous consumption. Yeah we know what "conspicuous" means but I'll give one of the dictionary definitions anyway: readily seen. Please people, think about that word "readily". How readily seen is the description page in Cantr? How often do you look at it per character? Once? Do you see it when you talk to somebody? And does "a man in his thirties" on the main page tell you anything about the objective (physiological) consequences of a character's lifestyle?

People admit there is hoarding in Cantr... and we are supposed to believe that "breaking stuff" will be some sort of magic solution. I can tell you right now that it won't be. The solution is to consume stuff, not break it. Because a model of consumption will spread stuff around through trade while absorbing surpluses. Breaking stuff in the current state of the game will merely make the hoarding and economic stagnation worse. But once you get consumption going, then you can start having things wear out.

Here is what I propose as a solution. It rather looks like a question of "marketing", but marketing hacks into very deep-routed mechanisms. The story, as before, is Edwina Evilguts of Castle Steel. She arises in the morning, puts on hardly any "special" clothes and quickly wolfs down some raw potatoes, as she has done for every day of her entire life. Yesterday she labored down the hematite mine since she dare not let anyone else hold her precious digging tool. Today, however, she decides to boss the mere shopkeepers and traders around. She types in her curt orders and sees the following:

938-4: You, a rickety poorly-dressed inferior woman in your forties, say to Delilah, a statuesque elegantly-dressed superior woman in her thirties: "Your donation to the temple is late. Pay up or it's jail".

And this is what Delilah sees:

938-4: Edwina Evilguts, a rickety poorly-dressed inferior woman in her forties, says to you, a statuesque elegantly-dressed superior woman in your thirties: "Your donation to the temple is late. Pay up or it's jail".

How long do you think Delilah will stand for it?

Note, there can be no question of the descriptions being optional. Right, so the programming department will whine and moan about too many lookups and server lag. But the point is, do you want a society simulator or not? If you do, then you have to reinforce the consequences of lifestyle choices.

How did Delilah get to be the way she is? Some quick hints. She eats not merely her veggies, but rather delights in balanced meals of proteins, carbohydrates and veggies prepared by a restauranteur from products imported from multiple sources; she also dresses to the max, and does no low-end manual labor at all, except maybe a little hunting with her bejewelled bow. Foxes and all that.

"Hahaha!" you say, "people will just ignore this."

938-4: Lord Mac Gregor, a rickety bare-assed inferior man...

Yeah, sure they'll ignore it...

And lower down the scale...

938-4: Angela Busybody, a scrawny wretchedly-dressed average woman in her thirties, says to you, a robust immaculately-dressed superior man in your thirties: "I'm standing for the Council. Please vote for me!".

And please note that I'm not introducing "social" norms into the game. I'm introducing basic patterns that go back to chimps and earlier and that have been genetically encoded into our physiology for millions of years. A lowly-placed chimp experiences chemical changes which reduce its energy levels. Being less energetic, it becomes less aggressive, therefore less threatening to the alpha chimp, and therefore gets beaten up less. It's actually an evolved survival strategy, though we humans call it depression and "cure" it with Prozac--a source of false dominance, you could say. Look up "serotonin".

Meanwhile those in the executive classes holiday at the best resorts, eat in the best restaurants, visit the best health clubs, buy at the best clothing stores, and so on and so on. They even sleep in beds!! It is not economically irrational for them to do this. Such behavior is necessary for them as they claw their way up the dominance hierarchy. Hence the fantastic power of marketing.

However, because Cantr lacks coding to reinforce the basic drives that human beings possess, and therefore has no developed consumption, and therefore has in effect no real economy, it is not rational to eat a cooked meal when you have raw potatoes available. Anyone here think it is rational to construct a bed in Cantr? You see, the players of Cantr are acting rationally at the moment. They are acting as rational agents--the basis of economic theory--just as they do in every sim that's ever been constructed, and what they are doing is making and hoarding stuff because they have nothing better to do with it.

But one thing I can tell you. If the programmers of Cantr ever decide to code behavioral reinforcment as suggested above, it will be perpetual Christmas-time for bakers, jewellers, clothiers and so on. And then you will see an economy and a society. All this comes from the simple trick of providing feedback to players on the consequences of their lives.

Part of this topic has been dealt with before, up to a point, see:
<cantr description> for clothes?
http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1990
Clothing marker
http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2038

However, I wanted to pull the discussion of that into here, and reinforce the "readily seen" aspect, since a mere clothing indicator would be insufficient. This is a literary roleplay game and requires litarary reinforcement.

There was another thread which I failed really to understand...
More Choices When Making A New Character
http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2539

...but I was particularly horrified by this:

Anthony Roberts wrote:
"The more strenous work you do (Digging, chopping, farming, building, etc) your muscles build. The more simple work you do (Fishing, cooking, clothing making, travelling (Debateable), etc) the more your muscles loosen."

With all due respect, have people not seen genre paintings of Medieval peasants? They were, according to forensic archaeology, stringy rather than muscular, of poor health, toothless, with warped bandy legs and about 5 feet tall. A physical build like Arnie's is the product of an immensely wealthy leasure society. So your highest status is the "idle" rich with the resources to work out in health clubs. It would be quite interesting to aim for the super rich in this game and see if one could get away with it, versus the jealousy of the peons and such.

So in my character descriptions above, people who have done no physical work in the past x period get "superior" (provided of course that they are also fully dressed and eat the best foods), those who work on machines or make secondary items like clothing get "average", and those who regularly labor with mere tools or their bare hands in the fields or mines get "inferior". Hunting would be an exception and Rangers would likely hit close to superior (perhaps "authoritative"). Currently, however, there is no reinforcement between career and status, so obviously the game world has come to resemble Maoist China.

Once again, the question is whether people want a society simulator where jewellers actually sell stuff, or else just a text version of Ultima Online (like when it first came out). If the latter, then I'm obviously in the wrong place. But if you do want a true society to emerge, then possibly you'd like to begin suggesting possible adjectives for these description ranges. Perhaps mine were too cruel at the lower ranges, but I wanted to use them for shock effect.

And if welcomed--ie if I'm not cussed too much for the above--I'd like to discuss in my next thread the psychology of death and how to draw consumption into that also, while solving the chaos in the building industry at the same time. I'll provive a quick hint. To drive the point home I shall use a name from our history, if I may (absolutely no disespect intended, it just happened to be a name that came to mind). So, in the context of a world where lesser buildings change their names, you get permanent options like...

To Our Mother the Lady Jessamin DuVar MacGregor, a vast stone pyramid surmounted by a bronze sculpture and adorned with 40 iron shields

Surplus items? What friggin' surplus items?
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(to be continued)

[The Industriallist]

You are right about the exercise thing. Anthony took it far too much from a modern perspective.

Now that that's out of the way, the rest of this is absurd. First of all...Cantrians presumably didn't evolve from apes, since there aren't any apes that I know of, and cantrians don't reprduce. They also have, and (in my opinion) should keep, extremely simple physiologies.

Dominance in Cantr is left for the player to work out. Which makes sense, if you consider that human dominance is mostly psychological, not chemical.

If you claim people act as rational agents, you haven't seen enough cantr yet. Hardly anyone does. There was someone asking recently about producing this obscenely costly armband...diamonds and steel and other things, I think. It doesn't do anything, but people will occasionally notice it and be imensely awed, intimidated, or whatever...
If more people acted as rational agents, the treasure troves would be in more use. There ought to be a lot more hirelings of various sorts, but the pool of people who seem at all reliable is small, and the subset you can trust is smaller.

Also, all you're doing is creating a short-run boom in demand. Pretty soon, everyone who can get clothes and such will have them, and everyone else will just have to live with insulting labels. A few new food goods might go into production, but I rather doubt it. Already, the 'have-nots' are identified when you check and see that they aren't packing a shield.

In principle, I don't think it's a good idea to ram luxuries down people's throats. This is just a variation on the 'raising the bar on basic living' idea, which no one seems to want, and doing it in an odd direction.

My counter-proposal is that item degredation (any time now, please!) would mean that anyone who wants wealth and power is a source of constant, productive demand for workers to repair their equipment.

[kroner]

Item Deterioration for President!

[Agar]

You seem to be trying to change the simulation to a pychological point of view, what with the aforementioned "insulting" labels and such. The labels also try to point the simulation into the medevil era, with peasants and royalty, with the highborn activities, lowborn activities, blah blah blah.

Yhea, I said Blah blah blah.

First, Cantr doesn't have a specific time setting. There are motorcycles and vans crusing around, and not a horse and buggy in sight. (WHY?) Cantr isn't medevil, modern, ancient, or anything in between. Some areas are more advanced than others. I know of one island where there are no engines to be found or used. Is it in a different time? No, it is just differently advanaced.

Secondly, the simulation isn't a psychological view of soceity, it's more like how a human resources department sees society. We don't care how people are muscled, or how they're dressed, we care that they are available to do work. Every person in cantr is the same strength, can do the same amount of work on the same kind of material, carry the same load, do the same amount of damage.

We aren't people. We are man-hours.

Clothing is irrelevant, just a fringe benifit or a badge of office. What we do is irrelevant, just that we do it.

We aren't here to evolve in a pychological or chemical manner. Those how have power are players how have gathered to them people who are responsible, loyal and dedicated. There aren't any game effects or coding neccesary to facilitate this. Players words and actions make the societies happen.

If you can't see the society around you, you aren't looking. You aren't naming people well. You can name someone "Crag" but that doesn't tell you anything. Even adding the <CANTR CHARDESC> doesn't do much. You could describe him further, like "Crag Stone Knights Leader" or describe him as much as you feel neccesary: "Crag SK leader 3rd person caveman" if you feel his manner of speach annoys your character. Of course, if he hears you call him that, you're gonna get sabered, but, that's what those alpha chimps do the those uppity chimps.

Try this before you decide you're in the wrong place. Have your characters shut up and listen. I don't mean skim to see who's whispering to who, LISTEN. Watch who defers to who and why. Take notes, put them on character descriptions,in your notes, write a book whatever, just look to see if you don't see societies in the simulation.

Programs don't make simulated societies, people make simulated societies.

[Gunther_01]

I think that Cantr is the best society simulator on the net. It's already relatively realistic, and is getting better all the time.
In the real world there is no real drive for consumption or trade, or nice lookign cloths, or fancy jewlery, or even money!
People by designer cloths, and diamonds because they "show other people how cool you are", it's a psycological thing.
Money was simply invented to make trading easier, it has no real value in itslelf, except the value that the government assigns to it.
And besides in game, people do RP there consumer tendencies. Everyoen likes cloths and nice jewls.
So don't go saying that there is no consumption or trade, because there is!

[Pirog]

I think The Sociologist has a very good point, although I don't think his way of solving the problem is for the best.

People appearance in Cantr doesn't matter at all (at least for very few people. Many of the respected leaders walk around undressed), but in real life you always measure people by their look. You might not like that fact, but EVERYONE is shallow in that matter.

I would very much like to see balanced diets give people better physique, sleeping indoors and in beds could make them cleaner than people sleeping on the ground outside (if such a function would be implemented) etc.

Calling people inferior or superior is a wrong way of coming to terms with peoples appearence though. IRL a raggedy clothed beggar can sometime have more charisma than a rich, well dressed person.

But if things would point out what kind of physique someone has, if they are clean or dirty and how they are dressed would make a first impression. The difference from The Sociologist's solution is that the way the person express himself or act may change that first impression, just as IRL.
I would also like different quality settings on clothing. (I have brought this up before) Instead of letting a standard description describe the quality of the clothing (it's impossible to make a nice looking hemp dress) there should be values that describes the clothes. By implementing the option to make every piece of clothing "simple", "normal" or "fine" you get a bigger difference in clothing. The better quality you like, the more time the piece of clothing takes to make...and when item deterioration comes in effect the only reason for making fine clothing would be that they look nice. For the common worker a simple coat would be more economic to make. (In the current system without item deterioration everyone would probably go for the "fine" clothing, since it is a one time effort and then lasts forever...)

I believe many of the hierarchy problems will be fixed when children are implemented. Important and respected people will get children suited for good careers, while the children of workers will not have the same status. Much of the problem will be about peoples RP ability though.
Children will also bring the possibility of political systems where the ruler passes the "throne" on to their offspring. This would not only make an interesting hierarchy, but would also open the game up to a lot of interesting conspiracies and plots when people try to come closer to the seat of power.

[Pirog]

Agar>

Secondly, the simulation isn't a psychological view of soceity, it's more like how a human resources department sees society. We don't care how people are muscled, or how they're dressed, we care that they are available to do work. Every person in cantr is the same strength, can do the same amount of work on the same kind of material, carry the same load, do the same amount of damage.

We aren't people. We are man-hours.

I have to say speak for yourself here. I find that way of viewing Cantr is incredibly boring and unrealistic. Since I try to RP my characters as thinking and independant beings instead of assembly line robots I have a very different perspective on the game. The way people act, what clothes they wear and the way they express themselves have a huge impact on my characters.

It is this purely economic view of Cantr that I don't like. People are only out to become as rich and powerful as possible. A society simulator should focus as much on social questions as productivity, if not more.

And regarding to the time setting that may change.
I would suspect (at least hope) that the game will be reset in Cantr 2.0 and that the more hi-tech stuff won't be implemented from the beginning of the game.

[Anthony Roberts]

You know, it's funny how everything always comes back on 'me'. It's like you people have no one better to pester, really.

However, you know that much more than that paragraph was said - If you're going to publish the facts, publish them all. Such things as eating different vegetation groups, eating too much or too little, etc. I didn't say that if you work every day on the harder tasks, your person becomes a super-human muscular figure, did I? No. However, sure, it could happen, but they'd still need to compliment their stranious work with added foods, nutritious, from all vegetation groups, and more than your daily requirement in order to keep that figure.

So I may not have said it "that" way before, but the point being: it is supposed to be "as realisic as possible under the constraints of the Cantr code" - If it can't be done, a substitution could be made. If it can be done, then nag for them to do it. Don't take an all out assault on me for something that was said, especially because all I was doing were "passing on" the plans for the future. Plans change, and that post was made a damn long time ago, so don't blame me for it. End of discussion.

[Jos Elkink]

Anthony, you shouldn't feel so personally attacked when someone just points out that you could see the relation between working and muscles the other way around. It's just another opinion / view on the matter.

I would suspect (at least hope) that the game will be reset in Cantr 2.0 and that the more hi-tech stuff won't be implemented from the beginning of the game.

Although I have no idea Cantr 2.0 will be there any time soon - might take years - I thought I had made quite clear by now that (1) the game will definitely not be reset; (2) Cantr is not a Medieval game and was never intended to be.

Money was simply invented to make trading easier, it has no real value in itslelf, except the value that the government assigns to it.

Money used to have the value of the material it was made of. I think it is only in the previous century that this link was dropped (at least, banknotes still referred to gold).

But to the main issue. I find the analysis of The Sociologist really very interesting and it opens my eyes a bit, and I mostly agree with Pirog's response (except for his point about clothes' quality). What I'm wondering is, to what extent would this be handled by the skills systems we have long designed just not yet implemented? The idea is that instead of 'strength' a character will have a series of characteristics ('drunkeness', 'tiredness', 'cleanliness', 'muscular strength', etc.), which are affected by a lot of different factors and which in turn affect the effectiveness of participation in different projects. So a tired person cannot work as hard, or a drunken person not aim as well. This while the actual level of the skills will be hidden from the user (not like the strength percentage now), except for clearly visible elements (someone who is exhausted will look exhausted). To what extent would this help in the context of The Sociologist's analysis?

Moving some of the clothes/looks description to the events page would be nice, perhaps, but would also really slow down the server and increase the bandwidth usage. Since we're working at limits of those, we'll have to postpone such a change, I fear. But it would help roleplay, I must admit. Currently, most of my chars have no clothes, but it's hardly visible. If I would see it every time I act, it would really disturb me much more ...

[SekoETC]

For some reason I have been unable to read all the posts in this topic, in the first try I read half of the initial post, second time the other half and I guess most of the first reply. There's just too much information.
But you do not need clothes or equipment to look successful. How about this: "You see a muscular man in his thirties, naked body decorated with geometrical patterns painted with ash. His short hair hardened to spikes with mud and his long beard braided to two plaits." compared to this "You see a skinny boy in his twenties, with a running nose and zits all over his face, hair tangled to a terrible messy bush and an aura of sweaty odour surrounding him". Now if there was a project of taking care of your body...
Only that saying those things with built in messages would be too complicated. That's why most people do it with rp. There should be more rp, honestly. Maybe give character a description box when others have voted to like his rp enough, that would encourage people. Oh yes, Cantr is a society simulator... damn. But that doesn't have to limit rp, does it? Game mechanics are just a sceleton, rp is the flesh.

[Agar]

If you want clothes to be the deciding factor in how your character intereacts with other characters, make it that way.

About a month before the "you can see weapons" code was implemented, I read some post about evil not having a chance because you can't assassinate anyone. So, I made a character with assassination in mind. I was quiet and paid attention. When people used war bows and other weapons, I changed their name to reflect that. <CANTR CHARDESC> Warbow 01. This was bothersome when people started passing things around, but I kept up. I was waiting and watching to see if I could spot someone weak and well armed or watch someone fall dead and drop weapons, so I could become well armed and then eventually pop into someone's house, off them, and run.

The day never came sadly, but I wanted my character to behave differently based on how people were armed, and I made it that way.

If you want clothing to change how you interact, change people's description to include how you percieve them. Clothing has been readily visible for quite some time now, and it's right there on thier decsription page, so set up your perceptions as you see fit.

Why code something you can already do? It would shove the feature down peoples throats, make them use it even if they don't want to. The programming department has better things to do than add something you can already do, but I'd rather train horses then housebreak kids.

[Pirate Lass]

Yeah, training horses is far less tedious and messy....

[The Sociologist]

Dominance in Cantr is left for the player to work out. Which makes sense, if you consider that human dominance is mostly psychological, not chemical.

I am not saying that achievement is mainly chemical. I am saying that greater or lesser degrees of dominance, once achieved, produce feedback via physiological (ie chemical) processes. If you lived under an overpass in a cardboard shack for 20 years, this would have a different outcome compared to if you were CEO of Intel for 20 years. At root I'm saying that lifestyle has consequences, so if you are in a socially dominant position, that position pretty much necessitates the maintenance of a lifestyle which expresses it. And such a lifestyle is in turn the trigger for conspicuous consumption and generates demand for products.

If you claim people act as rational agents, you haven't seen enough cantr yet. Hardly anyone does. There was someone asking recently about producing this obscenely costly armband...diamonds and steel and other things, I think. It doesn't do anything, but people will occasionally notice it and be imensely awed, intimidated, or whatever...
If more people acted as rational agents, the treasure troves would be in more use. There ought to be a lot more hirelings of various sorts, but the pool of people who seem at all reliable is small, and the subset you can trust is smaller.

I can assure you that most people act for the most part as rational agents within the context of how they perceive a situation and their place within it. They do so in all the simulations that have ever been designed. Such behavior is the basis of economics, game theory, research into prisoner's dilemma, various theories of ethics and countless other things. Players in Cantr are, in my experience to date, rational enough. Furthermore, players are currently doing the best they can to produce, except for some older characters who have become bored with it and don't need to do it.

The problem is that players have too few ways to consume. There is no model driving consumption, other than food and shields (and to a lesser degree weapons and transport), therefore no demand, therefore no or inadequate markets, and therefore the accumulation of hoarded goods. It is significant that apart from items required for steel production, the only other really significant market is for cheap food in some locations, and food is one product which is consumed.

BTW did you mean this: "A pair of well crafted bracers fit snugly to the wearers arms, shimmering in the sunlight with their many diamonds, clear glass beads, and other valuable metals." I would not consider the occasional production or consumption of such an item problematic. After all, players do occasionally look at descriptions. Find me someone who manufactures and hoards beds... now that person's behavior would be a little odd.

Also, all you're doing is creating a short-run boom in demand.

Thank you.

My counter-proposal is that item degredation (any time now, please!) would mean that anyone who wants wealth and power is a source of constant, productive demand for workers to repair their equipment.

I do not disagree with degradation as a concept. Preferable, however, would be to spread stuff around first, then degrade it. What will happen now is that Joe of Joe's Bakery will lose his sickle. It will break. Maybe it was the only one he ever had in his life. Meanwhile, even assuming Edwina Evilguts of Castle Steel hires more labor, demand for bread will not extend out to Joe's bakery if there are raw potatos closer by. And what of Angela the Tailor and her prize scissors? Not really any new demand there; even less if people are too busy repairing the communal town bicycle, which keeps breaking down, to spare any resources.

You are trying to replace consumption with depreciation. They are not the same thing. The one follows the other.
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[The Sociologist]

You seem to be trying to change the simulation to a pychological point of view, what with the aforementioned "insulting" labels and such. The labels also try to point the simulation into the medevil era, with peasants and royalty, with the highborn activities, lowborn activities, blah blah blah.

Medieval? No, I was thinking of Beverly Hills, Oscar Night, Trump Castle, glossy magazines... Whatever it may be, the buzzword "Consumer Society" sure ain't Medieval. And nowhere did I mention birth or highborn.

Secondly, the simulation isn't a psychological view of soceity, it's more like how a human resources department sees society. We don't care how people are muscled, or how they're dressed, we care that they are available to do work. Every person in cantr is the same strength, can do the same amount of work on the same kind of material, carry the same load, do the same amount of damage.

We aren't people. We are man-hours.

Clothing is irrelevant, just a fringe benifit or a badge of office. What we do is irrelevant, just that we do it.

Thanks for this. You have just summed up perfectly how the game currently operates. You have a model of characters as producers, yes? You said "We care that they are available to do work". However, an economist would be equally concerned that characters are available to consume products. It works like this: production->supply->MARKET<-demand<-consumption. Currently, there is decent production, almost no consumption except for steel related materials and some food, and therefore little or no market. Consequently, items accumulate at the supply end.

You have to stimulate demand, and demand is a question of some necessities (food), but beyond that also of drives and motivations. Which is why companies go for marketing. Marketing latches onto basic drives and thereby enhances consumption.

I think that Cantr is the best society simulator on the net. It's already relatively realistic, and is getting better all the time. In the real world there is no real drive for consumption or trade, or nice lookign cloths, or fancy jewlery, or even money!

Woooo... Are you sure you don't want to take another look at that last sentence? I would agree, BTW, that Cantr is attracting some exceptional roleplayers. I will happily say I've heard stuff IC that I couldn't hope to equal.

People by designer cloths, and diamonds because they "show other people how cool you are", it's a psycological thing.

And a "psychological thing" is or is not a "real drive"? If you feel that people around you perceive you as a rickety, bare- assed inferior man, to use my extreme example, then you will not feel cool, will you? Your own self-perception will be that you've fallen right out of the dominance hierarchy, not so? Your hormones will alter and you will feel depressed. So to save yourself you will be driven to shop for those designer jeans, and that is a classic example of what I'm talking about.

Sure, some of us are immune to designer labels on clothes, but then it'll be something else. The latest graphics card...

Money was simply invented to make trading easier, it has no real value in itslelf, except the value that the government assigns to it.

Wrong on both the last two counts, I'm afraid. The government says a given bank note represents 1 dollar, but it does not stipulate what that 1 dollar will buy. And money is in effect a commodity and can be traded for other kinds of money. The price of a dollar can rise or fall. Its value is determined by the market just as is the value of an apple. This is a modern concept, however, and Cantr's economy is not robust enough to support it.
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[The Sociologist]

Calling people inferior or superior is a wrong way of coming to terms with peoples appearence though. IRL a raggedy clothed beggar can sometime have more charisma than a rich, well dressed person.

But if things would point out what kind of physique someone has, if they are clean or dirty and how they are dressed would make a first impression. The difference from The Sociologist's solution is that the way the person express himself or act may change that first impression, just as IRL.

Mahatma Gandhi, for example. OK, point taken on the use of such terms. As I said, I was using them for shock effect. Indeed that last sentence of yours is very telling. You are saying those particular descriptions of mine were too normative. One could drop that particular category altogether (ie the category reflecting the sort of work you have mostly done recently), or else replace it with more neutral terms like worker, machinist and so on. One needs to prompt the motivation to climb to higher status levels, but not in so cruel a manner as to put people off completely.

So I stand corrected.

I would also like different quality settings on clothing. (I have brought this up before) Instead of letting a standard description describe the quality of the clothing (it's impossible to make a nice looking hemp dress) there should be values that describes the clothes. By implementing the option to make every piece of clothing "simple", "normal" or "fine" you get a bigger difference in clothing. The better quality you like, the more time the piece of clothing takes to make...and when item deterioration comes in effect the only reason for making fine clothing would be that they look nice. For the common worker a simple coat would be more economic to make. (In the current system without item deterioration everyone would probably go for the "fine" clothing, since it is a one time effort and then lasts forever...)

OK. Would you agree with my conclusion that the description page is too remote and insufficiently "readily seen"? What one might do at a minimum is place a summarized listing of clothing items on the "talk to" page (ie where one enters the text). This would initially be just "leather cap, cotton robe and leather shoes" (easy to program right now), then with your addition you would get "fine leather cap" and so on. Both one's own description and that of the person one is talking to should appear, the whole point being to stimulate competition in that area.

However, my own belief remains that ideally a summary of various categories of appearance compressed into 2 or 3 single terms should appear on the main events page also. These categories would summarize what you eat, what you wear and how you live. Again, please bear in mind that the terms need not be as harsh as those I used.