The Struggle of the Dao (大道之爭)

Overview

The Struggle of the Dao (大道之爭) was a research-oriented multiplayer game prototype developed between 2020 and 2021.

It was conceived as an experimental environment to explore digital cultivation (cyber cultivation) — a model in which growth, power, and agency arise through continuous practice, constraint, and transformation, rather than linear accumulation.

The project employed a game system as a controlled substrate to examine how institutions, economies, and delegated agents behave under conditions of governance failure and ideological competition.

Core Research Questions

The prototype was structured around several foundational questions:

• How can progression be modeled as cultivation rather than linear accumulation?
• What does it mean for a digital entity to “consume” itself in order to advance?
• How does composability change when assets are ephemeral rather than permanent?
• Can delegation and agency be expressed as ontological relations rather than ownership relations?
• How do human and non-human agents coexist within a shared institutional frame?

Cyber Cultivation as a Systemic Paradigm

At the core of the project was cyber cultivation — a reinterpretation of traditional cultivation systems in a digital and computational context.

Key characteristics included:

• Progression emerging through constraint, transformation, and sacrifice
• Power not being permanently stored, but continually re-earned
• Advancement requiring consumption rather than hoarding

Cultivation was treated as a process, not a terminal state.

This paradigm later informed a broader structural worldview concerning being, agency, and execution in digital systems.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG)

Procedural Content Generation was used to sustain cultivation dynamics and economic diversity.

PCG was applied exclusively to gameplay and economic layers, including:

• Loot generation and rarity distributions
• Affix and modifier composition
• Terrain topology and resource gradients

The objective was to prevent deterministic optimization paths and ensure that cultivation remained situational, contextual, and non-formulaic.

Consumable NFTs and Asset Composability

A central experimental axis of the project was the design of consumable NFTs.

Unlike permanent or purely collectible digital assets, these NFTs were:

• Consumed, transformed, or decayed through use
• Designed as inputs to progression rather than endpoints
• Composable as functional components within larger systems

This approach reframed digital assets as process-bound instruments rather than static property.

Why Consumability Matters

Consumable NFTs produced several structural effects:

• Prevented infinite accumulation and wealth concentration
• Enabled sustainable economic cycles through destruction
• Allowed composability without long-term systemic lock-in
• Shifted value from ownership toward participation and timing

This model directly challenged dominant assumptions about digital property and scarcity.

DID Wallets, Agents, and Asset-Holding Capability

During the development of this prototype, a critical conceptual shift occurred:
assets were no longer assumed to be held exclusively by human players.

The emergence of DID-based wallet models introduced the possibility that agents themselves could hold, consume, and transfer assets.

This reframed NFTs and digital assets in several important ways:

• Assets became attached to identities, not interfaces
• Ownership shifted from player-centric to agent-centric
• Delegation implied not only authority, but asset custody and responsibility

In this model, an agent was no longer a passive executor of player intent, but a situated economic actor capable of holding composable, consumable assets.

This marked an early transition from:

“players using assets”
to
“agents participating in economic systems.”

NFTs in this project therefore emerged not as collectibles, but as identity-bound, process-aware instruments — a precursor to later work on agent wallets, semantic operating systems, and asset-bearing autonomous entities.

Governance, Delegation, and Ontology

Delegated Entities as Ontological Extensions

Players could deploy delegated entities that functioned as externalized commitments rather than disposable units.

These entities represented:

• Persistent institutional presence
• Delegated agency rather than direct control
• Long-term strategic posture

This distinction later became foundational in treating agents as ontological actors, not merely tools.

Positional Logic and Non-Zero-Sum Competition

Territorial mechanics were inspired by Go-like positional logic:

• Influence (“qi”) accumulated relationally
• Control was gradual and reversible
• Dominance emerged through balance rather than annihilation

Competition was framed as structural tension, not elimination.

Ontological Lineage: Heaven, Earth, Human, Law, Dao

The cyber cultivation framework implicitly mapped onto a layered ontological model:

• Heaven (天) — system constraints, rules, and invariants
• Earth (地) — environment, topology, and material conditions
• Human (人) — players and intentional agents
• Law (法) — governance mechanisms, protocols, and enforcement
• Dao (道) — emergent order arising from interaction and execution

This structure later became explicit in the design of semantic operating systems, where:

• Agents are not merely executors, but situated beings
• Management is a relation between ontological layers rather than command hierarchies
• Execution is constrained by meaning, responsibility, and context

Outcome and Retrospective

The project was intentionally left unfinished.

Its primary value lies in the insights it generated:

• Consumable assets enable sustainable composability
• Cultivation-based progression resists extractive optimization
• Delegation reframes control as responsibility
• Game systems provide a viable medium for ontological experimentation

These ideas directly influenced later work on semantic systems, agent management, and executable institutional design.

Retrospective Note: Choice, Value, and Regulatory Markets

In retrospect, this prototype surfaced a question that later became central to work on regulatory markets and governance design:

What is the value of choice under constrained systems?

Within The Struggle of the Dao, players were repeatedly required to make irreversible or consumptive decisions:

• consuming assets to advance,
• committing delegated entities to contested territories,
• sacrificing optionality for positional stability.

These mechanics reframed value away from accumulation and toward commitment under constraint.

From a regulatory perspective, this suggested that value does not arise from unrestricted freedom, but from meaningful choice within enforceable boundaries.

This intuition later informed thinking on regulatory markets, where:

• rules function as value-shaping instruments,
• governance defines the space in which choices become comparable and accountable,
• and market signals emerge only when actions carry real consequences.

In this sense, the prototype anticipated a core principle of regulatory market design:
without constraint, choice loses meaning; without consequence, value collapses.

Retrospective Note: Choice, Regulation, and Capture

This project also informed later thinking on regulatory markets, the value of human choice, and mechanisms for resisting regulatory capture.

Although these concepts were not explicitly formalized during development, the system design implicitly assumed that:

• Choice must carry real cost and consequence to remain meaningful
• Institutions tend toward capture once stabilization occurs
• Markets function as constraint mechanisms only when participation, exit, and failure are real

The cyber cultivation framework treated decision-making as a form of irreversible commitment rather than preference expression.
This perspective later became foundational in work on regulatory markets, agent responsibility, and governance design under adversarial conditions.

Historical Significance

The Struggle of the Dao stands as an early exploration of digital being, agency, and cultivation within computational systems.

It is preserved as a historical research artifact — a precursor to later work on semantic operating systems, agent ontology, and governance-aware execution.

Archived research prototype. Not an active product.