Ok, I'll respond. But if you really want to talk, I'd recommend breaking it up into separate threads. Not many people come here unfortunately and leaving a gigantic wall of text is not very inviting for discussion.
Good question. I'm assuming the servers are housed in the Cities. From the sounds of it, Cities are self sufficient. We don't know why Cities existed in the first place, though. I don't think there are any theories on why they exist. If you want to come up with theories, create a new thread.
- How do they power the servers and computers? Can't that energy be better utilized for more constructive purposes?
As the above answer, I'm guessing that Cities are self sufficient. This is in the future so maybe they are using nuclear (either fission or fussion) or maybe geothermal power (since there are a lot of volcanic activity).
As for being utilized for more constructive purposes, that depends on your definition of constructive purposes. Keeping people sane is a pretty important job. Plus, if all of the computers today shut down, a lot of major cities would die. We are very dependent on functioning computers and I would imagine a future society would be even more so.
- Why does everyone want to play this game instead of rebuild society?
Not every one wants to play this game. In fact, it appears that a very small group wants to play the game. We are seeing the world through Kleya's eyes and when she first logged into LiFe, she saw how Saisuke was well liked even though he was powerful. She wants to be liked/loved and so she is trying to follow Saisuke's example. But we know that Mina and her family don't want to play the game. We've also seen one of the trials and compared with the number of contestants vs the number of people in LiFe, it looks like very few people want to play the game. A lot want to watch the game, but not play it.
- How do they transmit power to people's homes, or maintain a solid network connection if there's a bunch of forbidden zones?
For people inside of Cities, I'm again assuming that they are fully connected. For those that are in non Cities, we know of four types Stable area, Not-so-stable area, Unstable area, and Miracle area. I'm assuming that Stable areas were lucky enough to have some sort of power generator. The others probably have a smaller power generator or are surviving with extremely little. In Annie's case, she just recently found a network connection. As to how it was still connected, we don't know. Maybe the Cities have been trying to repair the world. We know that they send out food to other areas so they could also be trying to repair networks and power.
- If there are forbidden zones, someone must have made them so. Who did it? The government? Tyrannical wasteland overlords?
- How do isolated people know where the forbidden zones are?
What are these "forbidden zones" that you are talking about? Are you talking about the University or the Miracle area? For the University, it is an under-construction zone that is not fully coded. So it has bugs and can be dangerous for a LiFe avator to enter. The Miracle areas (and others) are just categorization of areas. If you are in an area with friends/family around you, then you would be categorized in a Stable area. Kind of like how we categorize first-world and third-world today.
Did you even read that comic strip? Where does he say it is more important than those? And then you have Mary's response criticizing him.
Good question. Hopefully we'll find out more as the comic progresses. We do know that the Cities are shipping food to outsiders. That's one of the main reason to be in LiFe. You can make money and order food shipments. When Annie entered LiFe, it mentioned how it has been a long time since another outsider appeared. This most likely points to the fact that if you did not quickly find a way to connect to LiFe, you died. Only a very few survived longer than that on their own. And how they did that, hopefully we'll find out with Annie's side story.
- In fact, this raises all sorts of other questions, like how can their equipment survive the solar winds?
We already know how to design space craft that can carry humans through the solar winds. So we could easily design Cities that can withstand solar winds. In the comic, we know of Cities that went defunct (Germany City is an example). So not all Cities survived either.
- If people can survive in those conditions, and if they do use the game for books, chess, conversation, card games, art, and so on because those things don't exist inside the safe zones, couldn't they scavenge for the real life equivalents?
Not everyone is in LiFe or the game. We've never seen Mina's father enter LiFe and it appears that he never does. Dannie's parents also don't seem to enter LiFe. Considering that it costs money for citizens to enter LiFe, I would assume that the majority of citizens are not in LiFe. So most likely they do have real life equivalents of those and do use them.
- If they can't survive in those conditions, what's to stop people from creating new ones in real life?
Nothing. Not sure why this matters.
- If people just use the game for human interaction, what happened to VOIP, SMTP, videotelephony, and other communications protocols as dictated by the IEEE 802.1 standards?
Lol. This comic is set in the future. There are probably other standards by the one.
Also, the technology industry loves walled gardens. We went through it in the early email days and are currently going through it with smart phones. Maybe we get outside of the walled gardens and in the future enter another one once Kidos are invented. Which ever company invented the Kido and marketed it first (I'm guessing TenKa) would have had a defactor monopoly on that form of communication. Any subsequent company would have had to reverse engineer it. This is how it seems to happen in technology all the time.
- Did I forget to mention that their entire economy is based on this game?
Actually, I don't see any proof of that. We know that people work outside of LiFe (Danni's parents and the mentions of the fields by Brandon). We know that people use LiFe to sell other goods (Mina's singing). So the game or even LiFe is not their entire economy.
- Who the fuck decided that it was a good idea to place the entire stability of your market off of a service which could crash at any minute?
You should look around today and see how common that is now. Imaging Google servers, Apple servers, Microsoft servers, EA servers, etc shutting down. We have moved a lot of our lives onto the "cloud". Cloud disruptions are beginning to cause real problems in peoples lives and work (just the other day Adobe Creative Cloud was offline which prevented a lot of people from doing any work).
Probably. They just survived the Ending and are building a new life. They want it to be as close as possible to their current life so they are using what they have. If those go away, then they'll figure out something new.
- If the economy is based off of this MMO, how do the people who run this game make a living?
See my above answer on why the economy is not based on it.
- The people in the cities are the only ones forced to pay a subscription to play, and they all pay for things like food and medicine with the game's currency, so do the people who run it have to play the game too?
See my above answer on the economy.
- If the game costs money for citizens, why not charge for outsiders so that the economy can thrive? Why not put them to work?
See my above answer on the economy.
- If the economy isn't based off of the game, why can people use its credits to buy shit?
Because they aren't using the game's credits. They are using money.
- Since their currency is digital in nature, what's preventing people from fabricating new credits outsideof the game and then laundering them by creating a dummy account?
Most of our money now a days is digital. What prevents people from fabricating new credits now?
- Are the kids the only ones who make money in the game?
I think you need to start separating LiFe from the Game. They are two very different things.
But as for your question, no. Why would you think that? We've only seen one example of making money in Life and that is Mina. Do you honestly think that just because we've only seen one example that everybody has to be doing the same thing?
- Why can't adults make money off the game too?
They can make money in LiFe. Kleya's sponsor obviously makes money (she has fancier clothing).
- If people make money off of the game then they're allowed to keep playing the game, so why don't people just release some success guides in order to saturate the game with successful players? Wouldn't that show the corporations that their system is flawed?
People make money playing Star Craft today. Some make really good money. There are plenty of success guides available for Star Craft. That hasn't destroyed the market for good Star Craft gamers.
People make money playing World of Warcraft. Again, there are lots of success guides. People still make money playing World of Warcraft.
Plus, very few people play the Game. The majority use LiFe and there isn't a way to beat LiFe. It is basically a virtual environment where people can interact. And the interaction allows commerce between people.
