From Beginning to Entropy

An introduction to The Autonomous Worlds' Survival Kit

Bringing autonomous worlds to life is a delicate and intricate sorcery. 

That is because not only the witch needs to be skilled in crafting characters, settings, dynamics, mechanics, progression curves… it also, and perhaps most importantly, needs to learn how to lure inhabitants in, and make them stay. Inhabitants need to become curious enough to explore those worlds, feel like they belong there, be passionate enough to keep them alive, and get angry enough shall they be taken away from them.

Bringing a world to life can therefore only be the work of a collective genius, or we could call it, stealing a term from Mark Fisher, a scenius¹. The ultimate dream of a witch weaving an autonomous world: That her world shall be taken away from her. That the inhabitants may rebel, and subvert and weave and fork and smuggle things into her world that she didn’t think of, and break it, and fix it, and, eventually, graduate to witches themselves. 

The AW cauldron - from the Moving Castles Figma, deep fried witches with AW logos from PWR

Autonomous worlds is a relatively new concept (if you are not familiar with the term I can recommend this, this, and, why not, this too) and as such it is still blanketed by a thick fog of war. Its topographies, pitfalls, birthmarks and imageries are yet to be discovered.

This survival kit is a candid attempt at recording my (our?) path through this new territory, with any thoughts, open questions, and hopefully learnings I’ll find along the way. In my journey of becoming a better game designer and world weaver I read several “industry recommended” books, and yet it seems the ones that stayed with me the most are rather than those “guides” the ones written in diary format (Masters of Doom, or The WoW Diaries are two great examples). Why? Because they portray the deeply complicated landscape of those times, of how things never worked at first, of how discouraging that can be, of how there is never a plan and definitely never a singular solution. I therefore chose to write frequent and short posts, in the making, mostly unedited, of quick production and consumption, both to track and share the evolution of my personal experience and understanding of AWs, but also to keep track of the larger evolution of this new scenius.

It will be up to the reader to connect these fragments and elaborate them in a way that can be fruitful to their practice as autonomous worlds’ witches.

o7²

1. ‘The jungle was a fictional space as much as a genre, a brutal ‘90s update of William Gibson’s cyberspace. Jungle’s innovations were collectively driven, not attributable to individual auteurs, but to ‘scenius’, the interaction between DJs, producers and the ‘massive’ on the dancefloor. Breakbeats and bass sounds would evolve from track to track, as if they were audio lifeforms subjected to an intense process of unnatural selection…’ k-punk, Mark Fisher, 2011

2. If you were wondering the title of this first post is inspired by this Kurt Vonnegut pun.