Natanael

You can do much better than a ledger with a commitment scheme and transparency log.

You're forgetting about the traffic analysis and key distribution problems

The people designated to reach out to locals to make sure they understood how serious it was got fired

3 grams off from collapsing into a black hole

No, copyright isn't relinquished from any of that (not even any effect on damages if you still require players to have bought the game to use the private servers), and trademarks wouldn't be affected at all if you simply require that 3rd party servers are marked as unofficial

Only applicable if they run the servers themselves, not if they let others run their own servers.

And "would leave rights holders liable" is completely false, no game would have offline modes if it did

The outer chains are purely for stability of the top. The center one holds all weight.

The Pixel line is comparable to the Samsung S line, you got a budget phone before

If you're talking about that mountain range, sure we can be Eurasia instead then

I can see a few ways to nudge people, like a puzzle that's more linear than it looks like, or selecting the tasks in the next version of the encounter based on the events in the previous version of it to match (you wouldn't see clearly what the "enemy" is doing so you wouldn't notice that those actions the second round weren't fixed, the game is just trying to replicate the interactions between past/future self and the rest of the stage is completely arbitrary). Basically treating it as a choreography problem.

Maybe even make it feel more "wild" by recording how the player controls the character during the game before that point, use something like generative ML to make the "enemy" AI act as the game think you would respond to your past self, then when you're the future you returning to the stage the game nudges you into using your abilities in the same way (altering how you have to use your powers to solve puzzles to match how the previous "predicted AI you", making you face other enemies and use your abilities in similar ways to win fights)

I have some similar ideas about a story driven time travel game where it's set up so that at one point you face an anonymous enemy, which forces you to trigger certain conditions in the stage and then they escape.

Later in the game you return to this stage at the same point in time, expecting to face that enemy again, but you are this "enemy", and the game nudges you into replicating the exact same sequence of events so that you take the actions which the "enemy" did so your (NPC) past self can replay the exact steps you previously took.

But the game doesn't show this clearly to you the player until you completed the stage - while your character is shown to have noticed something strange, the game doesn't show you the player (or you character's party) that you faced yourself until the end of the stage, using different positions and camera angles to hide it from you and the party. And if you manage to replicate the event chain perfectly, you'll get to see your party members being visibly stunned when you see them realize it was a time loop (your actions in the stage breaks the loop), and hopefully the player can be made to feel like they experienced a time loop, as if they really faced off with themselves twice ("how did the game know I would do it that way?")