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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6482445" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'd prefer it to be plausible. Spectacle is par for the course with everyone hurling around visual images anyway, I want it to be somewhat sensible (which is why I need to think about things like trade and class systems).. It's easy to go 'round the recursive matroishka doll that is a city of lies-upon-lies, but I'd like it to be vaguely functional, which means they've gotta stop at some point. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> My current conception has the city importing most of its base resources (such as food). If they're advertisers and entertainers, maybe it's a little like Vegas or Orlando: it makes money by attracting people to it to spend all their money and go home. They use that coin to buy the basic food and water and supplies that a functioning city needs. So farmers sell their food to merchants who go to the city to sell their food for coin which, in an ideal scenario for the City of Illusions, they spend on a night of hedonic pleasures and then have to go get some more food to sell back to the city. This kind of overlaps with the "advertisement" idea...though how would an illusion know what the user wanted? Perhaps "phantasms" do that work? ("Thank you for signing up for GnomeGnet! To find your way to the nearest elven restaurant, please follow the childhood friend that you had an unrequieted crush on. *ding*")...or maybe something that filters them out? I'm getting a Neo's Choice vibe -- take the red pill or the blue bill, one will let you embrace the illusion, the other will let you see through it. Yeah, from my knowledge, the novel's about lying aliens and a person who needs to see through those lies. I don't know that choosing the Truth would be seen as a virtue in the City of Illusions. I mean, if you wanted the Truth...why would you come there? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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