Observer Game Mechanics
Environments that encourage interesting play may suggest top-down causality
What differentiates “game mechanics” from the emergent rules of an environment? They create oddly constrained play, as if chosen to guide you down a path. It’s more a suspicious feeling than a testable claim.
Dreams are the cleanest example of the heuristic’s power. Many explanations treat them as some natural side effect of the brain’s housecleaning. They are mere waste removal or memory consolidation. This ignores the incredible constraints of the dream environment. Once inside, what you know and can do are tightly bound. If dreams were a video game, they wouldn’t even be worthy of the open-world tag on Steam.
In a dream, you have full access to your memory and skills, but a few key checks are hidden from you by your own mind. You can’t question the nature of reality, notice and call out absurdity, or wonder if you’re dreaming. Some people claim this ability with practice, but it’s rare. The dream world leans fearful, filled with anachronistic survival threats—predators, falls, pursuit, drowning—things we almost never face when awake. Time distorts to skip straight to choices. Hours of felt time compress into seconds of REM, with meaning and salience packed into a few key actions. You’re mostly on rails to finish a predefined story. Ignore it? Expect it to recur the next night. Locations get recycled and relabeled to save on level design. The dream needs you in a museum? Only upon waking do you realize it reused the layout from a childhood friend’s home or a Walgreens as stand-in.
All taken together, this looks less like side effects of memory consolidation than a deliberate playground. The best theory of dreams I’ve encountered is that they force rehearsal of situations you avoid considering. Experiments have replicated this by asking people not to think about topics before bed and seeing them appear more often in dreams. Explanations like this can only surface when you examine the constraints of an environment and determine when enough coincide to preclude coincidence.
If this “constraints as clues” heuristic works for dreams, maybe we can try applying it to the rules of the universe itself.
Our universe has some odd attributes that can be read the same way. Since this is all dubious, take the following as given to see where it leads. The objective of the universe is to maximize the quantity and lifetime of observers within. The standard model, spacetime, particle masses are all downstream of this.
There are two operational classes here, matter and forces. Only matter can host observer moments and actuators. Forces can carry messages and momentum, but cannot host observers or directly rearrange distant matter. Matter is confined by a universal speed limit, but as you accelerate it becomes more energy-hungry and can never reach it. This locks it into nearby regions of a truly massive game arena. Messages (via forces) always propagate at the full limit and arrive first, but they diffract and attenuate.
Forces carry information. They can announce intentions, establish reputation, coordinate many players, and create common knowledge long before any matter arrives. Because beams diffract at distance, receive beats transmit at scale. You can see faint things far away more easily than you can yell back at equal SNR. Gravitational lensing turns stars into free telescopes with focal points safely beyond your orbit, but broadcast from there is not symmetric.
Forces are also irrevocable. Once a message is sent, it cannot be clawed back. That permanence gives signaling a one-way reputation. Your early missteps always arrive first, broadcasting your evolution and intentions. Your host star itself has been broadcasting your potential location in the void long before your existence. As a treat, each star and planet also constantly broadcasts its age and the compounds it’s forging.
Matter can host minds, replicators, sensors, and interceptors. It can convert force into observers and store knowledge. It can also destruct other matter it contacts. Every maneuver burns resources, and travel exponentially so. Because later-launched matter can be engineered with more 9s of the c, any earlier probe can be clawed back. Surprise colonization becomes a bad bet at interstellar baselines.
Matter also computes, under two strong constraints. First, latency means maximum diameter sets a hard floor on round-trip signal time. Large monolithic minds waste cycles waiting on themselves, further encouraging observer quantity. Second, pack too much matter into a region and it collapses into a black hole, perhaps zeroing out its moments. The matter a space can hold before collapsing depends on the area of its bounding sphere, not its volume, so large regions can crunch to a void at surprisingly low densities. Forget metal and circuits, a sphere of water out to the asteroid belt would squash to a black hole. In this universe, many networked minds each hosting separate observer moments beats out planetary brains.
Messaging translates the asymmetry into strategy. Because messages reveal locations, trajectories, and industrial timeline long before hardware can arrive, defense outruns offense at cosmic distances. A world that hears “incoming” can recruit allies, pre-position interceptors, or publish a denial. Messaging can also pre-seed competence. Fax down curricula for fabrication, safety norms, and multi-party protocols so locals can bootstrap without foreign hardware.
That we’re in a universe with a separate entity type of “information” at all is incredible. It’s a special substance that can relay any configuration of matter, always travels faster, and has the strange property of being quarantinable. You can separate it into its malicious and helpful components, for any definition of those terms, and then toss the malicious into the trash like it never existed.
This alone is so bizarre it warrants an update against the existence of supernatural persuasion. If someone with a million-year head start could fax you into self destruction, information becomes as powerful as matter and that elaborately separate mechanic’s distinction is pointless. This begs an already shaky premise, but is worth considering, since evil faxes must come in constantly.
The final stage could then be the transcension hypothesis. The only winning move is to fly toward the nearest black hole and live on or near its event horizon. Get the benefits of time dilation, lots of energy, and a cold sky for dumping it. If that’s the playbook, black-hole fecundity theories look like the endgame mechanic. The previous ruleset gets you through your first few billion years of hard steps to reach black-hole interceptor technology alive.
If we want to further beg the premise by assuming observed physics does maximize observers, we unlock a plethora of information about how civilizations interact in the universe and their equilibrium states. It may even tell us something about the hair on black holes and the patterns it can support.