Regarding how our senses impact society, I can speak from personal experience alone, and what I have observed. Animal impulses are an enormous influence.
Since no game has been able to tap into them, I dunno what to do about that, but since the purpose of the Nth is to simulate volutarist society, I reckon some consideration to the impact of such matters and how the affect society is going to be necessary.
As I said, my recollections are that such matters largely governed my youth. I suspect that to be the case for most folks. YMMV, but I doubt it.
Look at the risky behaviour it drives everywhere you can. Smoking, drinking, gluttony, promiscuity, laziness, skydiving, streetracing, copbaiting, on and on. None of these things are chosen for rational reasons, they are behaviours driven by the animalistic sensations we are prone to.
Absent those impulses, the modeling ability of the game is limited.
I remember you could drink to drunkenness in Everquest. They tried to simulate the disorientating effect of drunkenness, and it was kind of fun to try to navigate drunk, but it's also nothing like as compelling as the sensation of a buzz.
Not trying to bugger things up, but such impacts on human behaviour may benefit from some Everquest style simulation.
Maybe some things can be driven by tapping into the impulses of the meatbags playing the avatars, since they can't be made to affect the avatars themselves.
Like when an avatar is at an age when young men are suffering testosterone poisoning, some compelling benefit to the animal urges of the player might be triggered by ingame foolish behaviour.
Awesome, yes I get you. So while I'm not convinced that it's important - you are - and how this works, how it should work, is that you are basically volunteering to describe that, which you have started to do, and I thank you.
I'm sure it would be very useful to the project if you were to lay this all out with a bit of research in a post.
I am incapable of translating the concepts into code, but I can try to provide some examples of how to incentivize foolishness that our glands provide in real life.
I'll roll that around a bit in the back of my head, until an idea falls out. That's generally how my writing process works =p