I dislike the framing here in a number of ways.

1. You're talking about the world as a whole but using the terminology of games. That's fair enough, I suppose, but I worry that it leads to treating the world as game-like in ways that it really isn't. And I think this has actually happened -- e.g., when you describe how live-ness is helpful under the two categories of "offensive" and "defensive"; I claim that outside artificially-purely-competitive games much -- perhaps most -- of what we do is neither of those things.

2. "Live" and "dead" seem like language too extreme for the distinction you're making. Someone who is merely "working off a script" can still have considerable impact on the world, after all.

3. It seems to me that what-you-call-live-ness is actually a spectrum; some people (and other agents) are more original than others. Live/dead suggests something binary, or at least bimodal, and I'm unconvinced that that matches reality.

Much of the rest seems doubtful at best. Some examples:

4. What you say about "traditions of knowledge" seems like an equivocation. First of all you say that a "live player" is producing new things and therefore by definition must have (or, I suggest, be) a "living tradition of knowledge". But then you say that a l.t.o.k. must have "at least one theorist", which unless you're defining "theorist" super-broadly seems like it's only a reasonable conclusion if you define l.t.o.k. in a more specific way that doesn't let you go straight from "produces new things" to "has a living tradition of knowledge".

5. You say that a group "must be tightly coordinated" in order to do new things, but don't offer any actual evidence for that. I'm not at all sure it's true, and guess that it probably isn't. (What might be true is that when a group that isn't tightly coordinated does new things, those are usually better thought of as originality by the group's members rather than the group as a whole. But that isn't a reason to prefer tight coordination; what matters is how much originality the group produces, not whether it's credited to the group or its individual members.)

6. All the stuff about Steve Jobs and the intelligence community seems like overconfident guesswork. Perhaps Apple just hadn't been faced with onerous compliance demands before. Perhaps Apple had previously been willing to comply and what changed was that they became less willing. Perhaps they did indeed have good ways to deal with "the intelligence world" but it was other people within Apple rather than Steve Jobs himself that had that expertise.

A note: too many live players becomes chaotic and unpredictable and dangerous and is not a equilibrium state. In various ways it will become "unsafe" and systems will be put in place (like regulations) to protect people.

Like others, I'm not too fond of this.

It feels like signalling the superiority of people who are striving / trying to improve over people who are comfortably striving.

That's maybe something a lot of people may agree with, but for me there are a lot of things to be said for comfortable **mindful** striving as opposed to running in circle / running nowhere.

My main issue is that using people I know, I wouldn't really put the "living" people as better off than the "dead" people, at least in terms of their own life satisfaction and how much I would seek their companionship -- admiration is more of a tie, but I'm afraid I tend to over-admire people with masochistic tendencies and not much to show for it.

They also completed a military operation in Syria, notable in part because Syria is outside of Russia’s sphere of influence (i.e. the post-Soviet sphere), where they achieved their foreign policy objective of stabilizing Assad.

Given that Russia has naval base in Syria since 1971 I don't think it makes much sense to see it as outside of their traditional sphere of influence.