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This project chronicles a multi-month experiment in a simulated world that required me to evolve from a solo actor into a political organizer, a software developer, a financial strategist, and ultimately, a leader accountable to a community. The entire arc can be understood through the synthesis of three key domains: Code, Capital, and Integrity.

1. Code: Engineering the Engine of Growth (Technical & Systems-Thinking Skills)

The foundational challenge was a classic problem of productivity and resource limitation. The game’s manual, time-gated production mechanic created an inefficiency that I recognized could be solved through automation. This led to the first stage of the project, which demonstrated skills in:

• Rapid Skill Acquisition & Application: With a clear goal in mind, I took the initiative to independently research and learn a new technical skill: scripting with Python. I sourced existing code, but more importantly, I adapted and modified it to fit the specific parameters of the game’s environment, demonstrating an ability to not just copy but to comprehend and customize solutions.
• Systems Architecture & Automation: I engineered a 24/7 automated production system that fundamentally broke the game’s existing labor model. This wasn’t just about convenience; it was a strategic disruption that created a significant competitive advantage and formed the technological backbone of the entire enterprise.
• Data Management & Scalability: As the business grew from a personal script to a multi-client operation, I foresaw the need for a robust data management solution. I proactively learned and implemented an SQL database (sqlite3) to manage client information, lease agreements, and dividend payments. This demonstrates an understanding of scalable systems and the foresight to build infrastructure capable of handling increasing complexity. The database was the key to transitioning from a personal hack to a manageable, automated business.

2. Capital: Architecting a Virtual Economy (Strategic & Financial Acumen)

With the technical engine in place, the project evolved from a simple script into a complex economic entity. This phase showcases a deep, practical understanding of political and economic principles, echoing my philosophical interest in how structures and systems function. Key skills demonstrated include:

• Market Analysis & Business Model Development: I identified a clear market opportunity: players with underutilized assets (workers) and a desire for passive income. I developed a “win-win” business model—leasing these assets—that created value for both my clients and my company, demonstrating classic entrepreneurial insight.
• Financial Innovation & Capital Formation: Facing a capital shortage, I moved beyond simple barter and into sophisticated financial instruments. I designed and launched a stock system by performing a valuation of my company’s assets (total worker value), creating a prospectus for potential investors, and structuring both short-term (dividends) and long-term (share appreciation) returns. This required skills in corporate finance, asset valuation, and investor relations.
• Political Leadership & Governance: My return to the game began with a political challenge: reunifying a fractured alliance. I designed and implemented a formal political structure (the committee) based on representation and voting rights, demonstrating an understanding of governance and the ability to build consensus. This political stability was the necessary precondition for my later economic success. It was a practical application of the social contract theories I had studied.

3. Integrity: Grappling with the Burden of Trust (Ethical Reflection & Leadership)

The final and most important phase of this narrative is not about success, but about the profound lessons learned from its collapse. The project was not a sterile simulation; it involved the trust and resources of over 50 real people. Its conclusion demonstrates a level of maturity and self-awareness that transcends technical or business skill:

• Crisis Management & Resilience: Faced with external shocks (the war) and internal pressures (operational complexity, parental opposition), I attempted to innovate under duress by developing defensive scripts and engaging in public diplomacy (the newspaper). While ultimately unsuccessful, this shows an ability to problem-solve and lead during a crisis.
• Accountability & Self-Awareness: The most significant outcome was not the loss of virtual assets, but the deeply felt experience of failing a community that had placed its trust in me. My final reflection focuses on the weight of that responsibility. This demonstrates a strong moral compass and the ability to learn from failure on a human level.
• Bridging Theory and Practice: This entire experience served as a real-world laboratory for the philosophical concepts I explore in my writings. I witnessed firsthand how social structures form and fracture, how “subjects” operate within a system, and how the abstract concept of a “shared narrative” becomes the tangible foundation of a community. The ultimate lesson in “integrity” connects directly to my philosophical belief in the importance of the individual’s responsibility within a larger structure.

In conclusion, this case study is a demonstration of a unique synthesis: the ability to write code that builds systems, the acumen to leverage those systems to create capital and economic structures, and the integrity to understand that the ultimate measure of any system is its impact on the human beings who place their trust in it.

Background:

QQ accounts can be programmed to run as bots. Based on this concept, creating cross-group chat games using QQ bots became a reality. One such QQ bot game achieved a preliminary simulation of a market by allowing players to build factories and engage in a free-trade mechanism between players. Armies and alliances were also a major element of the game, encouraging cooperation and mergers among players.

The game was launched around March 2022, and I joined within the first month of its early development. I slowly expanded my factory through daily check-ins and the recruitment of a limited number of workers each day. Every hour, I could send a message called “Produce” to obtain living materials. The problem was that logging on every hour just to send “Produce” was rather troublesome, and moreover, I couldn’t carry out production while sleeping at night. At the time, I wasn’t particularly concerned about this issue because everyone else was in the same boat, but I never would have imagined that everything would undergo a qualitative change just a few months later. In any case, I maintained this state for a while and, together with the two founders of our alliance and other core members, we achieved the alliance’s first golden age. On April 12, 2022, our alliance even ranked 12th in the daily GDP leaderboard, which tallied all alliances.

But the good times didn’t last. Three days later, the alliance fell into disputes among its members and quickly fractured. I became the leader of one of the breakaway factions and subsequently went AFK, on the verge of quitting the game. From this major schism, I learned a lesson I had previously only vaguely understood: a successful group isn’t just about allowing everyone to express their opinions. If you stop there, it only leads to people venting their emotions without forming true cooperation. The crucial next step is whether each person’s opinion can actually be adopted or integrated into a solution that satisfies everyone. What ensures this is the power each member holds, such as voting rights.

Four months later—perhaps out of unwillingness to accept the previous failure, a sense of responsibility to the alliance, or simply in preparation for an experiment—I returned to the game. I took the lead in bringing together the original two founders and other members I could find. We established a committee, limited to former and current key personnel, to jointly discuss and vote on alliance affairs. Through this, we unified the various splintered factions and ended the era of division. Just like that, a formal political system capable of uniting the leadership was finally constructed, and the class division between ordinary members and committee members was born.

After the alliance was reunified, I began to research how to increase my own productivity to catch up with players who hadn’t lost four months of progress. The solution I found was to learn by searching online for Python code related to QQ auto-messaging. I then copied and pasted the code into a local runtime environment and modified it, which allowed me to program my account to run production 24 hours a day.

The productivity and convenience brought by running a script far surpassed what a typical player could achieve by manually sending “Produce” messages, and from this, I discovered a “business opportunity.” First, the game had a mechanism called production technology. Players could use living materials to upgrade their production technology, thereby increasing the productivity of their workers, which in turn boosted the output of living materials. With two players having the same level of production technology, my program could run production for 24 hours, while a typical player could manage at most 12 hours. This meant that under my account, a worker could achieve double, or even triple, the productivity of one under a typical player.

Therefore, I could persuade players who had the same or lower production technology level as me, and who couldn’t run their own scripts, to lease their workers to me. In return, I would give them a daily payment of living materials that was greater than what they would normally produce themselves. Meanwhile, I could still ensure that after paying the lease fees, I would have surplus living materials, thus making a profit. Clearly, this was a win-win deal. As long as I established credibility among the player base with my initial business, future operations would only expand faster due to the trust of more and more people (I also paid for advertisements in a news agency with several hundred members to gain more authority and publicity).

As time went on, my client base grew, eventually reaching 50 people. At the same time, I faced a shortage of living materials due to various needs, such as supporting the alliance, expanding the army to protect my factories, and upgrading production technology. So, I made two innovations: one was to use an SQL database to create data tables for better storage and retrieval of client information, and the other was to issue stock to better raise capital to meet my needs.

First, the stock. I calculated the total number of workers I had acquired through leasing—a huge number—and multiplied it by the market price of a worker (in the game, workers were more like fully automated production machines than humans) to get my total asset value. I then found potential investors in various QQ group chats who had large amounts of living materials and persuaded them to buy company stock. The stock was calculated as a percentage, with the total value naturally being the company’s current total asset value. Investors could spend living materials to purchase a corresponding percentage of stock. There were two main reasons investors were willing to buy the company’s stock. One was that changes in the company’s total asset value would only affect the stock price, not the fixed percentage of shares already purchased. This meant that if the company’s asset value increased in the future, the same percentage of stock would become more expensive, meaning the shares of existing holders had appreciated. The other reason was stock dividends, which gave shareholders a daily income corresponding to their percentage of ownership in the company. By promising investors both long-term (share appreciation) and short-term (dividends) benefits, I obtained a huge amount of living materials to cover various expenses and upgrade my production technology to the highest level. Correspondingly, because of the extremely high market price of workers (there were no other means to generate more workers besides daily check-ins and fixed daily recruitment, and you couldn’t plunder other players’ workers, only trade them), even with their significant investment of living materials, all the investors combined couldn’t achieve a high percentage of ownership. So, I didn’t lose much income and firmly maintained control of the company and my voice among the shareholders.

Besides the stock, the other innovation was the database. The principle was to import the sqlite3 library in Python, which then allowed me to write SQL statements through a Python program to store or retrieve information from the database. When the database was combined with QQ message sending, everything from automatically sending daily lease payments to all clients to distributing dividends to shareholders was automated. The company even formed a partnership with its largest client and shareholder, the leader of another alliance, achieving the feat of leasing an entire alliance’s worth of workers. The company also set up a dedicated oil department to seek business expansion and collaborated with a trade city that could provide various supplies and munitions…

However, just as the business was booming, our alliance, as the defending party, suffered a defeat in a confrontation with the enemy. The alliance army was breached late at night, resulting in the loss of a large amount of military supplies. In response, I developed a rudimentary automatic defense program and began investing heavily in materials and troops to counter-attack the enemy. I even created the first and last edition of the alliance newspaper to seek help from the international community, but the war was ultimately lost. The enemy bombed my factories, causing the company to lose more than half of its workers (over a hundred thousand).

In addition to this, another problem was that even with fully automated data retrieval and semi-automated data storage programs, running the company in its later stages still required me to deal with daily changes in client and shareholder data, which led to changes in the stored data (and I still had to manually input these changes for the program to store them in the database). Coupled with my decreasing energy after the school semester started, which made the complex research for further full automation of data collection feel increasingly tedious and difficult, and my parents’ opposition to me focusing so much on this game, the company’s operations were becoming increasingly difficult, even without the losses from the war.

Ultimately, after successfully trying to log into other people’s accounts to run their production automatically for them, after exhausting the trust of clients and shareholders over several days and even weeks as I stopped paying rent and dividends, and after I started going AFK again and was on the verge of quitting, the alliance’s second golden age came to an end. My two-to-three-month experiment in automation and business finally came to a close.

From this series of experiences, I can summarize so much, but the most important thing is that I truly experienced the feeling of letting down the accumulated efforts and trust of more than 50 people. This made me realize that the word “integrity” is one of the most important virtues I need to practice consistently in the future, both online and in reality.

QQ帐号是可以通过程序编写被运行成机器人的，基于这种理念，通过QQ机器人实现跨群聊游戏就成为了现实。其中一个QQ机器人游戏通过允许玩家建立工厂和玩家间自由贸易机制实现了对市场的初步模拟，军队和联盟也是游戏的一大要素，鼓励了玩家间的联合与兼并。
这个游戏是在2022年3月份左右诞生的，而我在游戏发展早期中的第一个月就加入了，并通过每日签到和每日限制数量的工人招募缓慢地扩张着工厂。每个小时我都可以发一次名为“生产”的消息从而获得生活资料，但问题是每小时就上线一次发“生产”是比较麻烦的，况且我晚上睡觉也是无法进行生产的。当时我并不特别在意这个问题因为其他人也是这样的，但我也绝对不会想到数月以后这一切都发生了质的改变。总之，当时我就一直维持着这种状态，并与两个联军创始人和其他骨干成员共同实现了联军的第一次黄金时代，以至于我们联军在2022年4月12日的统计了所有联军的当日GDP排行榜中登上了第12名。但好景不长，三天后联军就陷入了成员间的纠纷并迅速走向分裂，我成为了其中一个割据政权的领袖便从此挂机，处在了退游的边缘。在这次大分裂事件中，我学到了一个先前一直模糊理解的道理，那就是一个成功的团体并不仅仅在于允许每个人表达自己的意见，只停留在这一步的话只会让每个人发泄自己的情绪而无法真正形成合作，实际上关键的东西是更进一步的，那就是每个人的意见是否真的能被采纳或融合进一个所有人都满意的方案，而确保这一点的就是每个成员的权力，比如投票权。
四个月后，或许是出于对上次失败的不甘，对联军的责任感，又或者仅仅是对一场实验的筹备，我重新回到了游戏并牵头最初的两位创始人和其他还能找回的成员通过构建一个仅限曾经或现在重要人员才能加入的委员会来共同商讨并表决联军的各项事务实现了各个割据势力的联合并结束了分裂时代。就这样，一个可以团结领导层的正式的政治体制终于被构建了出来，而普通成员和委员会成员的阶级分化也最终诞生了。联军重归一统后，我开始钻研起了如何提高自身的生产力从而追赶上其他未丢失四个月时间的玩家。而我找到的解决方案就是通过在网上查询与QQ自动发消息相关的python代码进行学习，随后把代码复制粘贴进了本地的运行环境再加以修改，就实现了通过程序操纵我的账号24小时进行生产。
挂脚本带来的生产力和便捷性是远超一般玩家人力发“生产”消息的，我就从中发现了“商机”。首先，游戏有一个机制叫做生产技术，玩家可以用生活资料来改进生产技术从而提高工人的生产率并反过来加大生活资料的产出。在两个玩家拥有相同等级生产技术的情况下，我的程序可以进行24小时生产而一般玩家最多只能达到12小时的生产，这就意味着工人在我的帐号下可以发挥相较于一般玩家两倍，甚至是三倍的生产力。那么，我完全可以说服生产技术与我同级或者比我低的，且无法自己挂程序的玩家把他们的工人租借给我，作为回报，我会每天给他们一笔大于自己平时生产的生活资料，而我则依然可以通过24小时生产来确保交完租借费用之后还剩下多出来的生活资料从而实现盈利。显而易见，这是一场双赢的买卖，所以只要我通过最初的业务建立了在玩家群体中的信誉，那么未来的业务只会因为越来越多人的信任而加速扩大（我还通过支付生活资料向几百人的新闻社投放了广告来获得更多权威性和宣传）。
随着时间的推移，我的客户数量不断增长并在未来最终到达了50人，同时，因为支援联军，扩军保卫工厂和提高生产技术等各种需求，我也面临着生活资料紧缺的境地。于是我进行了两个创新，一个是使用SQL数据库创建数据表从而更好的存贮和调用客户信息，另一个是发行股票从而更好的募集资金来填补需求。首先是股票，我统计了自己账号下的通过租借取得的，巨大数量的工人总数并将其乘以工人的市场价格（游戏中的工人更像是全自动生产机器而非人类）从而得到了自己的资产总值，随后我便在各个QQ群聊中找到了一些有着大量生活资料的潜在投资者，接着便说服他们购买公司股票。公司股票是以百分比进行统计的，其总额自然是公司目前的资产总额，而投资者们就可以花费生活资料购入对应百分比的股票。投资者们之所以愿意购买公司的股票主要有两种原因，一个是公司资产总额的变动只会影响股票价格而非已经完成购买的，固定的股份占比，这就意味着如果未来公司资产总额上升，相同百分比的股票会变得更贵，也意味着已购入者的股份增值了。另一个是股份分红，让拥有对应占比股份的股东获得了公司每天对应占比的收入，就这样，通过对投资者许诺长期（股份增值）和短期（股份分红）利益，我获得了巨额生活资料来填补各项支出并将生产技术提升到了最高级，对应的因为工人极高的市场价格（除了每日签到和每日固定招募之外没有其他手段来产生更多的工人，也无法掠夺其他玩家的工人，只能交易），投资者们就算投入了极大的生活资料，全部加起来也无法达到对股份的高占比，所以我并未损失太多收入并且牢牢控制住了公司和在股东间的话语权。除了股票之外，另一个创新是数据库，原理是在python导入sqlite3库，最后就可以通过python程序编写SQL语句来向数据库中存入或调用信息。而当数据库和QQ消息发送结合在一起的时候，不管是每天自动向全体客户发送他们应得的租金，又或是向股东进行分红，就都被实现了。公司甚至还和最大客户及股东，一个其他联军的领导人达成了合伙人关系从而实现了租借一整个联军工人的壮举。公司还安排了专门的石油部门来寻求业务扩展并与可以提供各类物资和军火的贸易城展开合作……
然而，就在事业蒸蒸日上之时，我方联军作为被进攻方在与敌人的对峙中出现了失败，联军军队在深夜被敌军攻破，导致了大量军事物资的流失。于是我开发了初级的自动防御程序并开始投入大量物资和军队对敌方进行反击，我甚至还制作了联军历史上第一版也是最后一版报纸从而向国际社会寻求帮助，但战争最终依然失败了，敌军轰炸了我的工厂并导致公司损失了一半以上的工人（十几万人）。除此之外，另一个问题是公司发展到后期就算使用全自动数据调用和半自动数据存储的程序，在运营时依然需要每天面临客户和股东的数据变化所导致的存储数据变化（而我还是需要手动输入这些更改才能让程序帮我存入数据库）。外加我开学之后精力逐渐变少导致对进一步全自动化数据收集的繁杂研究感到逐渐枯燥与困难，以及父母对我过于关注这个游戏的反对，导致就算没有战争带来的损失，公司的运营也在变得愈发艰难。
最终，在进行了对其他人账号登陆并帮他们自动生产的成功尝试之后，在耗尽了数日乃至数星期因我不再发放租金和分红的客户与股东的信任之后，在我再次开始挂机并濒临退游之后，联军的第二次黄金时代也来到了尾声，而我长达两三个月的自动化和商业实验也终于落下了帷幕，
从这一系列经历中，我可以总结出太多东西，但其中最重要的是我着实体验到了辜负50多个人的积累和信任的感受，这让我意识到“诚信”这一词是我今后不管是在网络中还是现实中都需要一直实践的一个最重要的品德之一。