Very indepth write up! I love the idea of transhumanism as an upgrade interface. Letting certain skilled components of gameplay be optionally automated would be really interesting to see implemented as well.
"I needed someone to clear the monsters around the well, but I already asked Tim to do it. When you get a moment, could you help me settle a dispute with my neighbors?"
I love this! Certain 'quests' really only need to be done by certain characters, and there is no reason my mage should be out hunting for pelts when any hunter should have already taken care of that while the mage was out picking potion ingredients!
This is an incredibly in depth and complex game, approximating real life basically with all the emergent system layers, but I would sign up for the beta ;p
I'm a huge proponent of transhumanism (in a responsible sense, though I'd honestly probably settle for a dystopian cyberpunk future), and I think that it can be a neat gameplay component. I was a little bit disappointed by The Surge when it came out and was transhuman in name only, but I thought that things like Deus Ex managed to tell a richer story because of how the themes and subjects of transhumanism lead us to ask deeper questions about what it means to be human.
One of my favorite video game quests as a child was in a game where a bartender would occasionally send an NPC from the town out to refuel a still. If he failed to return, then you'd get the quest to go and check up on him (given you had a sufficiently positive reputation). In hindsight, one wonders what my parents were thinking by letting me play a game in which I was checking up on people fueling stills for bartenders. Gosh, GearHead really did prepare me for like 90% of game designing, though I don't think I processed that at the time.
However, it didn't do me much harm, and I think it was actually kind of influential in how I approached systems. Having that sort of depth doesn't necessarily tax systems so much.
GearHead has something like a dozen binary ratings that determine your character's perceived personality, and therefore how they become happy or unhappy and what jobs they will be offered. Combine that with NPC connections (which, as far as I can tell, are actually just a single tag: "ally", "enemy", and so forth) and you can get really interesting branching narratives. Given that it's a game made by an English teacher more than a decade ago (if my math is correct, which it is), I am always perpetually disappointed that most modern games with "dynamic storytelling" pale in comparison to this.
The first game is highly linear, but the second game actually has a few distinct branches that are pretty broad. I'm always a sucker for the first, however, because nostalgia is a heck of a drug.