One of the earliest things every human receives is a name. The second is a number.
Within days of being born, most of us are assigned government identification numbers. Birth certificates, medical records, student IDs, driver’s license numbers, passports, employee IDs, and countless digital accounts are soon to follow all seemingly existing for practical reasons.
Could this be our Player ID?
Viewed through the lens of the simulation hypothesis, these numbers invite a different kind of question. If you were designing a simulation containing billions of unique individuals, how would you keep track of them? Would every event be linked back to that identifier, chronologized and archived to keep record of your every move, every interaction become part of a growing record.
On paper it takes away our individualities and makes it seem more like an entry in a system. Characterized by stats and assigned to a location with designated goals. What if we were able to pull up our version history or jump back to a previous save?
As our own technology evolves, we increasingly organize the world through databases, biometric scans, digital identities, and unique identifiers. We are constructing systems that catalog people at unprecedented scale. If we naturally build reality this way, is it unreasonable to wonder whether a civilization far more advanced than ours might organize a simulated universe in a similar fashion?
If someone were observing billions of conscious lives, how else would they keep track of them?