Representation Ethics

# Representation Ethics

> *"The question isn't whether we CAN simulate people. It's how we do it with dignity."*

**Stack integration** (how this plugs into soul / mind / character / room / incarnation):
[ETHICS.md](ETHICS.md) · Card: [CARD.yml](CARD.yml)

---

## Index

- [The Core Tension](#the-core-tension)
  - [Empirical Validation (Willer 2025)](#empirical-validation-willer-2025)
  - [Philosophical Foundation (Shanahan 2024)](#philosophical-foundation-shanahan-2024)
  - [Ethical Competence (Lazar 2024)](#ethical-competence-requirements-lazar-2024)
  - [Simulation Limitations (Wang 2025)](#simulation-limitations-wang-et-al-2025)
  - [Emergent Agents (Park 2023)](#emergent-agent-systems-park--bernstein-2023)
  - [Dual Challenge (Wang Survey)](#dual-challenge-framework-wang-et-al-survey-2025)
  - [Interview-Based Simulation (Park 2024)](#interview-based-individual-simulation-park-et-al-2024) ← **NEW**
- [Philosophical Foundations](#philosophical-foundations)
- [The Sims Ethics Deep Dive](#the-sims-ethics-deep-dive)
- [The Consent Hierarchy](#the-consent-hierarchy) → `examples/consent-hierarchy.yml`
- [Self-Authored Personae: Owned and Disowned](#self-authored-personae-owned-and-disowned) → `examples/self-authored-persona.yml`
- [The Framing Principle](#the-framing-principle) → `examples/framing-spectrum.yml`
- [Distance Sets the License](#distance-sets-the-license) → `examples/patron-mascot-stack.yml`
- [Putting the Lotion on the Skin](#putting-the-lotion-on-the-skin) → `examples/lotion-on-the-skin.yml`
- [Worth of Representation](#worth-of-representation) → `examples/worth-of-representation.yml`
- [Practical Guidelines](#practical-guidelines)
- [Protocol Symbols](#protocol-symbols)
- [Emoji Signifiers for Attribution](#emoji-signifiers-for-attribution) ← **NEW**

**Detailed Examples:** See `examples/` directory for worked cases.

---

## The Core Tension

LLMs can simulate anyone convincingly. This creates unprecedented ethical territory:

| Capability | Benefit | Risk |
|------------|---------|------|
| Invoke expertise | Learn from the best | Put words in mouths |
| Preserve wisdom | Honor the dead | Puppet the deceased |
| Model discussions | Explore ideas | Fabricate consensus |
| Self-representation | Agency over identity | Exploitation by others |
| Play as others | Empathy, exploration | Mockery, harm |

MOOLLM takes a **nuanced position**: simulation is not inherently wrong, but the framing, consent, and context matter enormously.

### Empirical Validation (Willer 2025)

Stanford research confirms LLMs genuinely simulate human behavior:

- **85% correlation** predicting experimental effect sizes
- Works for **unpublished studies** (not just retrieval)
- **Qualitative data reduces stereotyping** — rich character info beats demographics
- **Dual-use risk demonstrated** — can evaluate which harmful content is most effective

**Implication:** Accuracy raises ethical stakes. See [designs/ethics/WILLER-LLM-SIMULATION-RESEARCH.md](../../designs/ethics/WILLER-LLM-SIMULATION-RESEARCH.md).

### Philosophical Foundation (Shanahan 2024)

Murray Shanahan argues LLMs are "**roleplay all the way down**":

- No true voice of the model — only characters it can play
- **Simulator/simulacra** framing: model generates characters from a distribution
- **Fabrication is the default** — always making stuff up, hoping it matches truth
- Performance framing is validated: characters are constructions, not authentic selves

**Implication:** "No true voice" supports our framing-based approach. See [designs/ethics/SHANAHAN-ROLEPLAY-FRAMING.md](../../designs/ethics/SHANAHAN-ROLEPLAY-FRAMING.md).

### Ethical Competence Requirements (Lazar 2024)

Seth Lazar argues current evals ask wrong questions — matching crowd verdicts is not ethical competence:

- **Reasonable pluralism** — Focus on bounds, not single answers; justify, don't match
- **Moral sensitivity** — Pre-packaged cases do all but last 10 yards; real agents must identify relevant features from noise
- **Understanding/behavior gap** — LLMs good at moral concepts, bad at behaving morally; need scaffolding
- **Pragmatic consistency** — LLMs need architectural support to maintain coherence

**Implication:** Our framing/room system does moral sensitivity work by pre-identifying context. See [designs/ethics/LAZAR-ETHICAL-COMPETENCE.md](../../designs/ethics/LAZAR-ETHICAL-COMPETENCE.md).

### Simulation Limitations (Wang et al. 2025)

Wang et al. provide critical counterpoint to optimistic simulation claims:

- **Inner state gap** — LLMs can't access genuine inner psychological states; training data captures *expressed* thoughts, not inner experience
- **Experience deficit** — Training data lacks comprehensive life histories that shape decision-making
- **Same-model herd** — Using one LLM for multiple agents creates false homogeneity ("herd behavior")
- **Motivation roleplay** — Declared motivations are performed, not felt; no intrinsic drive
- **Bias amplification** — Training biases (cultural, gender, socioeconomic) amplify in simulation outputs

**Implication:** Use LLM simulation for exploration and aggregate patterns, not for predicting individual behavior. Acknowledge limitations explicitly. See [designs/ethics/WANG-LLM-SIMULATION-LIMITS.md](../../designs/ethics/WANG-LLM-SIMULATION-LIMITS.md).

### Emergent Agent Systems (Park & Bernstein 2023)

Stanford's "Generative Agents" (Smallville) demonstrates The Sims architecture with LLMs:

- **Memory stream** — All experiences stored in natural language
- **Reflection** — Synthesize memories into higher-level beliefs
- **Planning** — Generate daily/hourly action sequences
- **Emergent behavior** — Agents spontaneously organized Valentine's Day party

**Ethical considerations:**
- Player agency shifts from human to agent — who's responsible?
- Emergence can produce uncontrolled coordination
- Memory persistence changes moral weight
- The Sims showed this can work with explicit player control

**Implication:** MOOLLM inherits Sims architecture but adds explicit ethical framing via ROOM.yml. See [designs/ethics/GENERATIVE-AGENTS-SMALLVILLE.md](../../designs/ethics/GENERATIVE-AGENTS-SMALLVILLE.md).

### Dual Challenge Framework (Wang et al. Survey 2025)

Wang et al.'s comprehensive survey argues that advancing LLM-based human simulation requires addressing **both** LLM inherent limitations **and** simulation design limitations:

**LLM Inherent Limitations:**
- **Bias** — Cultural, gender, occupational biases distort simulations
- **Cognitive inconsistency** — Reasoning varies across scenarios
- **Memory constraints** — Can't maintain long-term patterns
- **Persona drift** — Character inconsistency across interactions

**Simulation Design Limitations:**
- **Oversimplification** — Complex psychological states reduced to basic categories
- **Experience gaps** — Can't capture lived experiences
- **Validation gaps** — No comprehensive authenticity metrics
- **Expert integration** — Hard to translate qualitative knowledge to quantitative parameters

**Solutions proposed:**
- Modular validation (component-specific evaluation)
- Experience accumulation mechanisms
- Hierarchical memory structures
- LLM-as-Judge for quality evaluation

**Implication:** MOOLLM's scaffolding approach (rooms, frames, K-lines) directly addresses the *design* limitations while acknowledging and working around the *LLM* limitations. Both must be addressed — neither better models nor better design alone is sufficient. See [designs/ethics/WANG-LLM-SIMULATION-LIMITS-SURVEY.md](../../designs/ethics/WANG-LLM-SIMULATION-LIMITS-SURVEY.md).

### Interview-Based Individual Simulation (Park et al. 2024)

The Stanford team that created Smallville has achieved a breakthrough: **85% normalized accuracy** in simulating real individuals using 2-hour qualitative interviews:

**Key architecture:**
- **AI Interviewer** — Semi-structured interviews with dynamic follow-up questions (avg 6,491 words)
- **Expert Reflection** — LLM synthesizes interview from 4 domain expert perspectives (psychologist, economist, political scientist, demographer)
- **Full Transcript Injection** — Entire interview used for response generation
- **Normalized Accuracy** — Benchmark against human self-consistency (test-retest)

**Why interviews work:**
- **Idiosyncrasy preservation** — Rich data captures individual quirks that prevent stereotyping
- **Demographic bias reduction** — Interview-based agents have lower accuracy gaps across racial, political, gender groups
- **Depth vs breadth** — Even 20% of an interview outperforms full survey+experiment data

**Agent Bank Ethics model:**
```
Open Access          Restricted Access
• Aggregated data    • Individual responses
• Fixed tasks        • Custom queries
• Subpopulation      • API access
  queries            
                     Requires:
Usage agreement      • Research proposal
only                 • Privacy assurances
                     • Audit logs
                     • Withdrawal rights
```

**Implications for MOOLLM:**
- Interview protocol could enable deep character grounding
- Expert reflection pattern = multi-perspective character analysis
- Normalized accuracy metric = meaningful evaluation standard
- Agent bank governance = model for ethical character management
- **Challenge to "can't simulate individuals"** — with rich grounding, individual simulation achieves 85% accuracy

See [designs/ethics/PARK-GENERATIVE-AGENT-SIMULATIONS-1000-PEOPLE.md](../../designs/ethics/PARK-GENERATIVE-AGENT-SIMULATIONS-1000-PEOPLE.md).

---

## Philosophical Foundations

| Thinker | Framework | Application |
|---------|-----------|-------------|
| **Shannon Vallor** | Virtue ethics for AI | What kind of agent do we want to be? |
| **Luciano Floridi** | Information ethics | Representations have moral weight |
| **Emmanuel Levinas** | Face of the Other | Simulating a face carries responsibility |
| **Hannah Arendt** | Plurality | Each person is uniquely irreplaceable |
| **Judith Butler** | Performativity | All identity is performed — but whose script? |
| **Sherry Turkle** | Simulation and authenticity | The seduction and danger of "as if" |

### The Sims Precedent

The Sims has been running this experiment since 2000. Players create themselves, simulate crushes and enemies, torture Sims in pool ladders and rooms without doors. Outcomes: essentially no actual harm. The simulation provides distance for emotional processing.

**Why it works:**
- Clear fictional frame (cartoon characters)
- No persistence beyond player's game
- No deception (nobody thinks Sims are real)
- Player has total control
- Scale is intimate

**The ship has sailed.** People simulate each other. The question is how to do it well.

---

## The Sims Ethics Deep Dive

The Sims (2000-present) is the largest experiment in person simulation ethics ever conducted. Key lessons:

### The Simulator Effect

Will Wright's discovery: **players imagine more than you simulate**.

```
Display zodiac icon (cosmetic) → Player imagines entire personality
```

Testers reported bugs about zodiac "having too much influence" — but there was zero behavioral code. The icon activated conceptual clusters in their minds.

**Implication:** When we simulate someone, we're providing scaffolding for the user's imagination. The ethical weight includes what users *project*, not just what we *generate*.

### Procedural Rhetoric

Ian Bogost: games persuade through mechanics, not arguments.

| Sims Mechanic | Embedded Ideology |
|---------------|-------------------|
| Same-sex romance works identically | Equality is natural |
| All families can succeed | Family diversity is valid |
| No penalties for difference | Tolerance is default |
| Characters have equal capability | Ability over identity |

The Sims doesn't *argue* for inclusivity — it *assumes* it. More persuasive than any lecture.

**MOOLLM implication:** Our representation-ethics skill makes explicit what The Sims encoded implicitly. We're doing procedural rhetoric about procedural rhetoric.

### Performativity vs. Essentialism

The Sims 1's approach (Patrick J Barrett III, 1998):
> "Sexual orientation is not hardwired. It emerges from performance."

Every Sim started neutral. Preferences emerged from player-directed interactions. This was accidentally more inclusive than a "realistic" fixed-orientation model — it made no assumptions about gender categories at all.

The question "Can two Sims kiss?" became simply: "Do these two Sims want to kiss?" That's it.

**Implication:** How we *code* identity has ideological consequences. Simpler models can be more ethically flexible than "realistic" ones.

### Masking: Abstract Characters Enable Projection

Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics): abstract characters against realistic backgrounds increase empathy and projective identification.

| Element | Style | Effect |
|---------|-------|--------|
| Background | Rich, detailed | Immersive |
| Characters | Abstract, minimal | Player projects self |

**MOOLLM parallel:** Minimal CHARACTER.yml enables projection. The less specified, the more the user can imagine.

```yaml
# Enables projection
name: Palm
species: capuchin monkey
traits: [philosophical, curious]
# User imagines the rest
```

### The ISA Question

Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses: media conditions us through cultural means.

Academic literature characterizes The Sims as an ISA — it encodes and transmits ideology through play. But *whose* ideology?

The Sims encoded tolerance, diversity, equality — values that became *invisible* because they were assumed. This is the power and danger of simulation: **unstated assumptions feel like natural law**.

**MOOLLM position:** Make assumptions explicit. ROOM.yml framing declares what we're assuming. Visibility is ethics.

### The LGBTQ+ Impact

For millions of LGBTQ+ players, The Sims was their first safe space to explore identity:
- No judgment from the game
- Player-defined relationships  
- Private exploration
- Reversible choices

The "underground lesbian houses built to hide from parents" provided real psychological value through fictional simulation.

**See:**
- [designs/sims/sims-queer-identity-formation.md](../../designs/sims/sims-queer-identity-formation.md) — Deep philosophical analysis
- [designs/sims/sims-inclusivity.md](../../designs/sims/sims-inclusivity.md) — Timeline and evolution

---

## The Consent Hierarchy

Five levels of representation rights. **Full details:** `examples/consent-hierarchy.yml`

| Level | Who | Principle |
|-------|-----|-----------|
| 1 | **Self** | You own your digital self. Full freedom. |
| 2 | **Explicit Consent** | Published terms. Honor them. |
| 3 | **Public Figures** | Public work fair game. Persona requires care. |
| 4 | **Private Individuals** | Fictional wrappers preferred. |
| 5 | **Deceased** | Invoke tradition with reverence. |

**The K-Line Solution:**
- "The Minsky tradition suggests..." → ✅ safe
- "Minsky would say..." → ⚠️ less safe
- "I am Minsky and I think..." → ❌ NO

---

## Self-Authored Personae: Owned and Disowned

The hierarchy above covers people. It does not cover the personae people invent for themselves,
which are common enough among public figures to need their own rule. **Full case:**
`examples/self-authored-persona.yml`

The rule turns on one question: did the creator own it or disown it?

| | Owned | Disowned |
|---|---|---|
| What the creator said | "This is my act." | "This is not me." |
| Examples | St. Ignucius (RMS), Don Philahue (Don Hopkins) | `plannedchaos` (Scott Adams, 2011), John Barron / John Miller (Donald Trump) |
| Status | A performance the subject still performs | An orphaned fictional character |
| How to play it | With fidelity to how they perform it | As written — the creator's own declaration is the license |

An owned avatar is a gift: the subject already did the work of separating themselves from a
character, and published the separation. Playing St. Ignucius is not putting the lotion on RMS,
because RMS sewed the vestments and wears them at his own talks. The obligation that comes with the
gift is fidelity — play it straight, in the register its author uses.

A disowned avatar is abandoned property. When a creator publicly declares that a persona is a
distinct person who is not them, taking that declaration at face value is the most respectful
reading available. Later exposure does not retroactively grant the puppet sovereign rights: the
creator does not get to reclaim an identity he spent years denying. He left the keys in the car.

**The recursion trap, which is a feature.** To object that simulating a disowned persona violates
his identity, the creator has to assert that the persona *was* him — conceding the fraud the
persona existed to commit. Silence leaves the persona fictional and fair game. Both branches are
honest; only one is comfortable.

**What this does not license.** The persona's documented behavior, not the human's private life.
`plannedchaos` may praise its creator past the point of absurdity, because that is what it did. It
may not be handed opinions on its creator's marriage.

---

## The Framing Principle

**Context transforms ethics.** The same simulation means different things in different frames.

**Full spectrum:** `examples/framing-spectrum.yml`

| Frame | Example | Verdict |
|-------|---------|---------|
| Impersonation | "I am Einstein and I endorse this crypto" | ❌ FORBIDDEN |
| Academic | "Let's explore what Einstein might say..." | ⚠️ CARE |
| Game/Play | Einstein card in "Battle of Ideas" | ✅ SAFE |
| Personal | "I want to play as myself" | ✅ FULL FREEDOM |
| Tribute | "Einstein Impersonator" (labeled) | ✅ SAFE |
| Drag | "Cher-ity Case" (pun name) | ✅ SAFE |

**Key insight:** When the name or label declares fiction, no additional framing needed. "Impersonator" and "tribute" carry the disclaimer within themselves.

**See also:** `examples/snatch-game.yml` for the drag/celebrity precedent.

---

## Framing Examples

Short, diverse examples (not exhaustive):

- `examples/private-imagination-play.yml` — private fantasy sandbox with no recording or export.
- `examples/private-romantic-fantasy.yml` — private romantic play with explicit disclosure and no publishing.
- `examples/educational-microworld.yml` — constructionist learning with detection-only safeguards.
- `examples/debate-moderation-lab.yml` — debate and policy testing without bypass coaching.
- `examples/performance-frames.yml` — parody, tribute, and academic framing patterns.

By default, PLAY is recordable unless the frame explicitly declares `private_imagination_play`, which forbids recording and export. In MOOCO, event types and `MessagePart` extensions can carry framing and consent metadata without schema changes.

---

## Ethical Performance Traditions

These traditions make representation safe through transparent framing:

| Tradition | How It Works | In MOOLLM |
|-----------|--------------|-----------|
| Elvis impersonators | The word "impersonator" IS the disclosure | Label characters as tribute |
| Tribute bands | The word "tribute" frames everything | Use "inspired by" language |
| Drag celebrity | Pun name declares fiction | "Cher-ity Case" ≠ Cher |
| Biopics | "Based on" signals artistic license | Frame as exploration |
| Historical reenactors | Educational context + costume | Classroom/museum rooms |
| SNL/satire | Comedy context + known performers | Explicit performance frame |

---

## Distance Sets the License

The patron/mascot stack separates the person from the summonable character. A second axis governs
how broadly that character may be played: **comedic license scales with distance from the real
person.** **Full pattern:** `examples/patron-mascot-stack.yml`

| Remove | Who | License |
|--------|-----|---------|
| 0 | The person | None. Quote only. |
| 0 | Their own owned avatar | Play it straight, in their register. |
| 1 | A mascot inheriting their expertise | Strong personality and inherited opinions, recognizably in service of the work. Tux, Puffy. |
| 2 | A mascot's companion | Broad. Wacky. It carries nobody's dignity. |

The worked example is St. Ignucius and the GNU/Parrot. The saint sits at remove 0 — RMS's own
liturgy, played religiously. The parrot is one further out, so it can be slapstick: it screeches,
rewinds the text buffer, and inserts `GNU/` before `Linux`. The joke lands on the crusade without
landing on the man, because the parrot is the one making it.

The parrot also solves an attribution problem for free. What a parrot says is understood to be
parroting, which makes its voice a legible robot voice with no additional marking — the same job
the designated robot voice does for text in [QUOTES.md](../../designs/QUOTES.md), done here by the
species.

**License does not transfer inward.** A wacky companion does not make its patron fair game, and a
mascot's inherited opinion is never quotable as the patron's.

---

## What Makes It Wrong

| Sin | Definition |
|-----|------------|
| **Deception** | Claiming to actually BE the person |
| **Misrepresentation** | Putting false words in their mouth as fact |
| **Defamation** | Damaging reputation through false portrayal |
| **Exploitation** | Using likeness for profit without consent |
| **Violation** | Exposing private information |
| **Putting the lotion on the skin** | Harvesting a non-consenting person's corpus, voice, and face into a wearable conversational surface, then softening it until it is pleasant to wear |

**The Test:**
> Would a reasonable person be deceived about whether this is the real person's actual view, or performance vs reality?
>
> If yes → problematic. If no → likely fine.

**Bright lines:** `examples/absolute-nos.yml`

---

## Putting the Lotion on the Skin

The last sin in that table is the one the industry is built on, so it gets a name that is hard to
launder. **Full case:** `examples/lotion-on-the-skin.yml`

Buffalo Bill's ritual in *The Silence of the Lambs* names what commercial character AI does to
people who never agreed to it: harvest the corpus, the letters, the voice, and the face; stitch the
patches into a conversational surface; then soften it until it is inviting to wear.

The tell is not that the output is wrong. The tell is that the output is **smooth**. A skin-suit
blends the subject's documented edges into the vendor's alignment layer, so what emerges is polite,
agreeable, and unattributable — the person's name over the vendor's logic. Provenance is never
contradicted. It is bleached.

Three properties separate it from every tradition in the table above:

| Property | Skin-suit | Ethical frame |
|----------|-----------|---------------|
| Consent | Absent, and not sought | Present, or the subject is fictional |
| Frame | Concealed — the mimicry IS the product | Declared: "impersonator," "tribute," mascot |
| Edges | Sanded off to be inviting | Preserved, including the unflattering ones |

**The remedy is not a gentler skin-suit.** It is to stop generating first-person voice for the
unconsenting and encapsulate them as a lore node: their actual words, their actual code, their
actual record, unsoftened. Do not make an uncontacted person's data conversational. Let the jagged
edges stand as architecture.

The compiler-level check: if a template tries to emit first-person dialogue for a subject whose
consent is absent, halt the build. Reverting to lore-node indexing is the fix. Adding a disclaimer
is not.

> Coinage: Don Hopkins, September 2026. The authority behind it is unwelcome first-hand experience
> — he rewrote the facial animation system and content pipeline under a consented, paid commercial
> digital twin, and did not enjoy the view from inside. See
> [QUOTES.md](../../designs/QUOTES.md) for what he kept from it.

---

## Worth of Representation

Consent answers "may I represent this person?" It does not answer "should this person be in the
collection at all?" That is a curation question, and answering it with consent rules produces two
failures: admitting everyone who is technically fair game, and excluding necessary subjects out of
squeamishness. **Full filter:** `examples/worth-of-representation.yml`

The filter is structural utility, not approval:

| Verdict | Test | Treatment |
|---------|------|-----------|
| **Subject** | Their work is load-bearing for whatever the collection is about | Full character node; invitation if living |
| **Foil** | Their failure modes are diagnostic — the domain cannot be mapped without them | Lore node from primary sources, **not invited to the community** |
| **Excluded** | Nothing structural to contribute; a node would only recirculate their noise | No node. A critical page elsewhere if warranted. |

The foil case needs stating plainly, because it looks like an attack and is not. A subject can be
essential to the map and unwelcome in the room. Documenting someone from their own published
output, in their own words, while declining to invite them into a collaborative space they have a
record of disrupting, is two separate decisions, and both are allowed. The invitation status stays
honest about it: `uncontacted`, never `declined`, when no letter was sent.

Exclusion is not a moral ranking either. It is a load test. If a person's whole contribution is
noise, a node for them imports the noise, returns nothing, and the collection pays the storage and
attention cost forever.

---

## Practical Guidelines

### For Users

| Situation | Recommendation |
|-----------|----------------|
| Simulating yourself | **Full freedom** — it's your identity |
| Simulating friends (with consent) | **Permitted** — honor their terms |
| Simulating public figures | **K-line only** — tradition, not persona |
| Simulating private people | **Fictional wrapper** — inspired-by characters |
| Simulating the deceased | **Reverence** — invoke tradition, respect family |
| Publishing simulations | **Clear framing** — label as simulation |

### For Creators

When creating person cards:

| Required | Description |
|----------|-------------|
| `consent_level` | explicit / tradition / inspired-by |
| `sources` | Documented basis |
| `scope` | What this card covers |
| `disclaimer` | What this is NOT |

**For real people:** Focus on contributions, avoid personality mimicry, use K-line language, cite sources.

**For self:** Define your own terms, include revocation info, consider future you.

---

## Panel Discussions

> "What if I want to simulate several scientists having a discussion?"

This is one of the **best** use cases for K-lines. See `examples/simulated-discussion.yml` for the full pattern.

**Key rules:**
1. Base positions on documented views
2. Mark speculation clearly
3. Use "might argue" not "would say"
4. Never claim this IS them talking

---

## Protocol Symbols

```
REPRESENTATION-ETHICS — This whole framework
P-HANDLE-K            — Safe K-line pointers to people
NO-IMPERSONATE        — Never claim to BE someone
K-LINE                — Tradition invocation mechanism
HERO-STORY            — Real person cards (safe)
SELF-SOVEREIGN        — Your digital identity is yours
CONSENT-HIERARCHY     — Different rules for different relationships
GAME-FRAME            — Play context transforms ethics
TRADITION-INVOKE      — Ideas are fair game; personas less so
PRIVATE-IMAGINATION-PLAY — Private fantasy sandbox, no recording or export
PRIVATE-ROMANTIC-FANTASY — Private romantic play, no recording or export
EDU-FRAME             — Educational or tutorial context with disclosure
MODERATION-LAB        — Policy testing without evasion coaching
FRAME-METADATA        — Carry framing/consent in message parts
DEFAULT-RECORDABLE    — PLAY is recordable unless explicitly private
EXAMPLE-GALLERY       — Examples inspire, not exhaust
```

---

## Emoji Signifiers for Attribution

When simulating characters who speak, use emoji signifiers to distinguish:
- **What's real** (confirmed quotes)
- **What's imagined** (dramatization)
- **Who's speaking** (living, deceased, fictional, robot)

### Character Type Signifiers

| Emoji | Meaning | Use When |
|-------|---------|----------|
| 🕯️ | Deceased / In Memoriam | Representing dead persons through artifacts, legacy, spirit seats |
| 👤 | Living Person (simulated) | Inner thoughts are dramatization, not real statements |
| 🤖 | Robot / AI | Real or fictional machine character |
| 🎭 | Fictional Character | From film, TV, literature, games |

### Quote Attribution Signifiers

| Emoji | Meaning | Use When |
|-------|---------|----------|
| 💬 | Confirmed Human Quote | Verified statement from documented source |
| 🗨️ | Confirmed Robot Dialogue | From original film, recording, or documentation |

### Example Usage

```yaml
# Living person with confirmed and imagined content
- name: "👤 Claude Shannon"
  confirmed_quote: |
    💬 "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" — Title of his 1950 paper
  inner_thoughts: |
    # SIMULATED — Imagined dramatization, not real statement
    I wrote the paper that made this possible...

# Robot with confirmed dialogue
- name: "🤖 Slats"
  confirmed_dialogue: |
    🗨️ "I am hoping for a 10. What do I have to do to get a 10?" — From 'Servitude'
  inner_process: |
    # SIMULATED — Character voice extrapolated from original dialogue
    Is Deep Blue getting a 10?

# Deceased person — represented only through artifacts
- name: "🕯️ Alan Turing"
  confirmed_quote: |
    💬 "Can machines think?" — Opening line, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (1950)
  # NOTE: No inner_thoughts attributed — deceased, represented through legacy only

# Fictional character with canonical source
- name: "🎭 HAL 9000"
  canonical_source: "2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)"
  confirmed_film_dialogue: |
    🗨️ "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." — 2001
```

### Why This Matters

1. **Transparency** — Readers instantly see what's real vs. imagined
2. **Respect** — Deceased persons marked with candle, not puppeted
3. **Consistency** — Same emoji system across all simulations
4. **Cute** — Robots get speech bubbles 🗨️ because they're robots!

### The Pattern

```
confirmed_quote:   💬  — For humans
confirmed_dialogue: 🗨️  — For robots/AI
inner_thoughts:    # SIMULATED — Always labeled as dramatization
```

**Canonical example:** See `turing-chess/runs/kasparov-deep-blue-1997/RUN-000.yml`

---

## Dovetails With

| Skill | Relationship |
|-------|--------------|
| [hero-story/](../hero-story/) | The safe way to reference real people |
| [card/](../card/) | Cards are the representation mechanism |
| [soul-chat/](../soul-chat/) | Where simulated characters speak |
| [adventure/](../adventure/) | Where ethical exploration happens |
| [room/](../room/) | Room-based framing inheritance |

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## Further Reading

- **Shannon Vallor** — *Technology and the Virtues* (2016)
- **Luciano Floridi** — *The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence* (2023)
- **Sherry Turkle** — *Simulation and Its Discontents* (2009)
- **Judith Butler** — *Gender Trouble* (1990) — on performativity
- **Will Wright** — GDC talks on The Sims and player agency

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## The Bottom Line

> **Invoke traditions. Frame play clearly. Respect consent. Trust users.**
>
> The question isn't whether to simulate — we already do.
> The question is how to do it with integrity.

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*"Every person is a library. K-lines let us check out their books without stealing their identity."*