Thanks for such detailed and thoughtful comments! I certainly think there is lots of room for further development of the questions.

You make a very good point about genre knowledge and I agree that For the Queen does presuppose a shared genre context even if it's not a specific fantasy-world context. (i.e. it might not have to come from a particular lore, such as from a series of novels, a shared understanding of actual history, or an evolved understanding based on playing a fantasy RPG).

How we get to new forms of living is so broad, of course, that I enjoyed thinking about it specifically from a solarpunk perspective, combined with a posthuman position from my own art practice and research program. Each of these has had some exploration, as you note, but it feels like there is still so much more room to explore.

I quite like how games like Dialect are able to explore new forms of living, although with some fairly strong contraints. In that case, the settlement is doomed to disappear and characters are generally positioned as fighting back against a hostile environment whether physical or social environment, so very much at odds with a solarpunk perspective.

Decision-making is absolutely key to a posthuman position, I think. Your suggestion of exploring that further is an excellent one. My first thoughts though aren't to code democracy into as an essential. After all, does non-human nature even want democracy? Does that actually help in the long term? What does democracy mean when members of the society can't vote in the way that humans do? We also have to be careful not to humanise the non-human participants too much, as that defeats the purpose of a posthuman position. How to do that is tricky!

But an exploration of the within-human-group decision making is a good place to begin the discussion. Perhaps that would be a great thing to include in earlier phases of the game, and then subvert it later as the game explores a more explicit integration with the natural world and breaks down the human perspective. Fundamentally, what does a social structure look like when the members are not only the humans, and can/how does it incorporate e.g. plants? There are some really interesting hints from researchers like Monica Gagliano about directions with plants specifically, but I definitely want to think more about it.

The prompts probably do seem to project that we should be reverent of the natural world more than is really ideal. I think that I probably arrived at that point because that is a step that is often taken along the way. But a more critical perspective on that relationship is necessary to make real progress. That's a topic an artist/scientist collective that I am a core member of (The Algae Society) is exploring as we make various kinds of transdisciplinary work.

Thanks again for such insightful and valuable comments. They are helping me think more deeply about what is contained in the game and how it could evolve.