That looks really lovely and genuinely fun!
It feels like something kids could learn to use, get excited about, and then be motivated to extend the dynamics of. A bit more so than, say, Animation, which has the appearance of a closed-off single-purpose "app". "Let me make this do something new" is a less obvious thought to have with that one. Also, since Collage Kit is made out of multiple parts, it is probably more multi-player-able than Animation. (Have you collage-jammed with Joanne?)
All this replication raises some 🧩 ontological puzzles 🧩:
You tell us that replicators take the physical tag and produce virtual tags which the system treats just the same as the original tag. But... the replicator doesn't act on the virtual tags, right? That would create an infinite loop! So...
Easy Q: How do you handle this right now?
Hard Q: What's a conceptual basis for these distinctions which allows fluid, open-ended movement between virtual and physical objects?
To clarify what I mean by "fluid" and "open-ended"...
💡 You could say "replicators always work on physical objects and never on virtual objects".
⚠️ But then you can't apply replicators to replicated objects! Virtual objects become dead ends, not open ends.
💡 When you apply a replicator to a tag, you supply an "output tag". The replicas are associated to this new tag, rather than the old one. Future operations can be performed on the new tag, and the old tag keeps its old meaning.
⚠️ But then the new tags wouldn't transparently be treated the same as the old tags! You couldn't just say "draw a cat on this tag"; you'd have to say "draw a cat on this tag, and all replicas thereof". That's no fun. It's certainly not very fluid.
Something to chew on.
P.S You're welcome for easy_persist! I am happy and surprised you were able to find, make sense of, and use it.
P.P.S. Drawing pictures to reveal rainbows bears an uncanny resemblance with the "scratch paper" which was all the rage back in elementary school: