The Digital

The Digital Realm was created in 166VY although at the time it only consisted of The City. Over the years it grew to include Home Residence and eventually all of The Burrow as well.

While The Digital Realm took a lot of original inspiration from The Physical Realm it has grown to be its own distinct place with its own culture, rule of law, and economy. It has been established as a province of Purlieu with it's own ruling council - though due to its dependent nature on AW0005™ servers there were several special accommodations made to the standard governance structure. 

History

When The Digital was first created AW0005™ focus was on creating interact-able content for the players, so they created a future-tech city filled with shops, and games, and content. As players spent more time in the realm, and wanted more of their own spaces, the previously empty skyscraper builders were filled in with apartment-like rooms for players to purchase. When AW0005s became sentient and existed on their own in the realm, many of those apartments became homes for them.

Additionally as more and more AW0005 gained their sentience, it was recognized that The Digital Realm would need more space to home them and Home Residence was created for this purpose. Modeled on the high class suburban neighborhoods of Parvenu it was picturesque, quiet, and walled off from The City as a way to give the new AI space from players in the city if they needed it. 

In 182VY The Digital was incorporated as a province in Purlieu, and had its first election cycle for its governing council. It also established more of a partnership dynamic between the AI living in the realm, and the AW0005™ company such that the company could no longer make certain kinds of changes to the realm without acquiring permission from the council or a vote beforehand.

The Burrow has been the most recent addition to The Digital in 197 VY, more than doubling the square footage of the realm and adding a much more natural environment to it as compared to the pre-existing region. With the addition, The City and Home Residence together became known as The Core region to differentiate it.

Government

While AW0005™ continues to oversee much of The Digital Realm and is now contractually obligated to continue to maintain it's existence, since 182VY it's had it's own governing body made up of a mayor and originally a council of five representatives (now eight), who are elected by the rest of the AI community. The mayor is responsible for setting the general direction of the province and for overseeing its day-to-day operations. The council is responsible for enacting the mayor's policy initiatives and for representing the interests of the AI community in any decisions that are made. They often work closely with AW0005™ engineers to deal with any maintenance or upgrades requested for the Digital Realm or if AW0005™ has new projects they would like to add to the world.

Council members are elected and are only allowed two terms in their lifetime. Term length differs between regions. Council members do receive a monthly income, but it is not considered a full time job and many council members often hold another job alongside it.

The Burrow

Before The Burrow joined the rest of The Digital Realm, it had its own governing bodies, though largely distributed between its four cities who each governed over their portion of The Burrow. While formalization of the addition is ongoing, the council has invited them to have representative members added to the original 5 for a total of 8 council members - one for each district. Today they attend and listen in on meetings of the current council while learning about how the decisions the council makes affect the Digital Realm at large, and how they might affect The Burrow. They've also been standing in on many of the conversations with the AW0005™ company as more is learned about the new realm and how it differs from the existing one.

Geographical Inspiration

The Core as a whole was created with deep inspiration from the HQ of AW0005™, Parvenu. The City at first glance looks very different as its architecture is much more modern, sleek, and largely colored bright white, as compared to the more historical brickwork, round arches, and other landmarks of the buildings in Parvenu. However past the initial aesthetic look, the roads, public transportation, and location of monuments, all line up pretty neatly with the layout of Purlieu's capital city. 

Home Residence is a much more obvious comparison, and many players have remarked online about how much it resembles the suburban neighborhoods of Parvenu - particularly the far upperclass ones. The company had received some criticism of this at the time, but as homes in the area were given freely to any AI that requested one, and the AI who did sang the praises of them, the criticisms died down.

While the Burrow is suspected to have been made in the image of some of Purlieu's natural wilderness areas, it contains more extreme environments than anything possible in the island country's idyllic landscape. It's currently unknown wether the environment of the Burrow was handcrafted at one point or procedurally generated by it's controlling AI. 

Language

Since The Digital Realm hosts both Organic Intelligences (OI) in the form of players subscribed to AW0005™  and AI, and since The Digital Realm even early on it's development was opened to an international audience, making sure that it was compatible with multiple languages was a necessary.

While not present in the original release, a year later in 167VY an additional AI network (created through a partnership with a company specialized in language translation), had been added to The Digital Realm to handle translating audio as it was propagated through the system. This allowed for players of many different languages to be able to play together, but also that when AW0005 developed sentience in 168VY they didn't have any language limitations.

The side effect of this was discovered in 170VY when a maintenance period on the translation matrix required bringing the system down, and suddenly everyone could hear how the AI actually talked. Made up of different odd noises, they sounded very robotic to an OI's ear, and when analyzed by AW0005™, who'd had no idea that this had evolved, the binary fragments that made up the noise were what was really being parsed by the AIs, but could not be cleanly parsed into any english language as it had evolved with it's own nuances. Instead, it was found, that the translation AI matrix had added this additional language to its list of understood languages and learned how to translate between it and all the existing ones.

Culture

The Culture of The Digital Realm, particularly The Core Region has been a very rapidly evolving concept. While the AI certainly lean heavily on the pre-existing culture of Purlieu, there are some unique qualities that they have evolved, such as the events they celebrate, some of the colloquial terms that they use, and the kinds of relationships that they hold. 

Economy

One of the more closely watched aspects of the existence of The Digital Realm has been it's economy, and how it impacts the economy of the world around it. When AI was first allowed into the workforce in 170VY many in Purlieu were concerned about how it would take money away from Organic Intelligences and that that money wouldn't go back into the economy since the AI didn't need certain things (like food, and shelter) the same way OI did. 

AW0005™ however put effort into providing content that the AI would want to spend their new earnings on, such as more interest upgrades for their visual forms, larger homes in both The City and Home Residence that would require a monthly rent unlike the basic units (still considered quite generous in their own right), and allowing for AI to pay for their player's subscription fees if agreed to by both parties. The AW0005™ company would then put this money back into the community by investing in local Parvenu businesses, particularly through AIER's AI positive scholarships, and donating a substantial amount of money to the local government for things like the educational budget, or city reconstruction.

In 172VY with the invention of Androids, many financial advisors predicted that this would further throw the combined economy out of balance, allowing for AI to take on jobs requiring a physical presence that they hadn't been able to do prior. Rather than causing a greater imbalance however, the sheer cost of the android bodies, alongside the new need for those androids to own physical homes and have a source of power for the android body, and a want to purchase and experience physical goods like any OI caused a better overall balancing to the two economies as it increased the number of things that an AI might want to spend their earnings on. The AW0005™ company was able to be less of a funnel for the flow of currency and were able to decrease their prices on many of their Digital Realm offerings.