A World in a Grain of Sand
I have created whole worlds from nothing but my imagination. Building landscapes, giving them texture and form, shape and light. I peopled them with creatures fantastic and mundane. I gave them life and rules they were obliged to follow.
My own little worlds, running their existence on silicon wafers, encoded on (highly purified, flat crystalline) grains of sand.
Not that I have a god complex…or not much of one…but it occurred to me recently while I was talking to a friend that being the sort of creator who had the power, the privilege, the responsibility, to create these worlds significantly affected my perspective on a lot of things.
Screen capture from Wik and the Fable of Souls game play.
It’s not just all, “let’s think up outlandish beasts and have them do crazy things, like a frog-elf-troll thing who defeats enemies with his tongue.” So many details and decisions go into creating a fully-realized world in a complex, playable game. Though the original ideas were mine, a whole group of people were involved with bringing the worlds I dreamed up to life. Artists, coders, musicians, level designers and more. It took a while as well – months, sometime years, of painstaking work.But it was my world to design, to make rules for, to create from nothing.
There’re so many decisions to be made about how the world works from engagement and aesthetic, to structure and the coding required to make it all actually work. Among other things, you’ve got to make decisions on which assets are loaded into active memory and which turn on and off as your hero moves through the game landscape and story, to name just a couple out of hundreds of important decisions.
If you’ve ever written a game or been on a production team, you know all this, but it’s a bit like anything, there’s a lot more going on than the general user has any idea about.
Basically, at every stage of the game creation process, you have to build a rich architecture, of both creative and practical data, to give your world depth and texture, to ensure the machine can run the game, to engage players in the world you’ve created – to make the thing work.
You have to be the mad, arrogant creator god, and the sober, deliberate architect all at once.
Then there’s the business and politics of getting the thing created…which I could go on about for hours…but I’ll spare us all for now. I’ll just say there were few intriguing ideas for games I couldn’t get past the concept and agree phase. There was the one about a warrior woman in space who fought using dance and music (still disappointed I didn’t get to build the concept out) and one that made it quite a bit of the way through development before budget disagreements blew it up.
When I started, the lead software engineer was largely responsible for every part of the comparatively simple games we were building – end-to-end control over the story, design, game play, coding…every bit of it. Now, large teams work on these massively complex games and separate teams of designers responsible for individual pieces of the game (and there’s a part of me that feels we’ve lost something with this model and this is why some of the big titles feel a bit too derivative.)My point is, once upon a time, I had the thrill and responsibility for creating worlds and I realized recently this process fundamentally changed my perspective on the real world.
What Has This Got to do With Anything, Really?
Though the worlds I created were virtual, flights of imagination written to bits of silica and magnesium heated and refined to make elemental silicon, I felt the weight and responsibility of the creator – the decision maker who had to craft an engaging, dynamic, fair(ish) system for my characters and players.
It’s sort of inevitable that Tron Legacy is among my favorite movies – a story about a creator living in the world he created and with the consequences of his mistakes and triumphs. This story calls out the problems and pitfalls of being a single creator. First, the creator’s flaws are magnified in the system he or she creates. The evil Clu in Tron is an artifact of Flynn’s arrogance at creation. Clu is something he made on a whim without deep thought about unintended consequences.
The unintended consequences of creating virtual worlds and smart machines that cross the digital barrier int o our real world has fascinated humans and story tellers for a long time. From Terminator to the Matrix, Tron Legacy to Ready Player One – we’re both enthralled and terrified at our digital godhood.
I’ve inhabited these silicon-based worlds – I’ve obsessed over those details until the code and pixels I was creating seemed more real than the actual, physical world. I’ve visited these virtual worlds in my dreams while sleeping.
Though I don’t have proof to support Elon Musk’s speculation we’re living in a simulation, I understand how he arrived there, and some elements of quantum mechanics give me significant pause for thought: (If you’ll pardon the Alt-Tab)
The Planck length, could it be the equivalent of one pixel in the simulation of our universe?
Collapse of the wave function, as though the true state of the universe is only relevant when it needs to be rendered to an observer, saving all those compute cycles that would be needed to simulate an entire universe all. the. time
Some of the measured properties of particles are identical particle to particle, to the extent that John Archibald Wheeler jokingly posited to Richard Feynman that every electron in the universe is actually the same single electron, bouncing backwards and forwards through spacetime to fill in everywhere where we expect to see one, whereas I might jokingly posit the following line of code exists at the top of a file called “cosmological_constants.c”:
const float electron_charge = 1.6021765e−19;
I would go on, but it would start sounding crazy really quickly. (Alt-Tab)
My point is, these virtual worlds can sometimes seem more real than the physical world we live in. Because we invest so much time and detail into making a full, rich environment with enough depth and complexity to engage gamers is nearly overwhelming, you obsess over every little decision and minute detail. Yet, you can’t lose sight of the global view – what’s the point, is this fun, does this fit within the story arc and level progression, what are we doing here anyway?
That duality of perception is something I’ve carried with me since I was 19 and disappointed myself with one of the earliest games I developed end-to-end. I was so focused on some of the minute technical detail that some of the big picture got away from me – and that perspective has persisted for the last several decades.
It’s a unique, complex, insightful, and sometimes frustrating view.
A favorite picture from many years ago on a visit to the Arctic
Someone recently asked me what I would like to work on if I had unlimited resources and, though I have lists of ideas for things I’d like to create, invent, and develop, I was stumped.
“Fix climate change,” I ventured, because in my big picture perspective, that’s the thing I should be working on if I had the wherewithal to do so. I could work on all those little details at the same time around the big-picture, world building project.
“Build a conscious, thinking machine,” came next, because for a long time I’ve felt the development of conscious AI is inevitable. The risk of crossing the line into singularity having a bad outcome - like any digital world, an intelligent machine would reflect the biases, character, and weaknesses of its creator. Surely that means I should do everything in my power to ensure we land on the humankind-not-getting-destroyed-in-the-process side of some equation that takes only a millisecond or two to process?
At any rate, I’ve retained the big/little perspective I developed all those years ago, writing virtual worlds to silicon wafers - one eye on the global view and another on the most minute details.
All in Together
Thinking about all this, and wondering how I, or a small team, could tackle such daunting real-world problems reminded me of ways in which small game development teams can still compete with the behemoths designing ever larger and more complex virtual worlds. Rather than toiling for forever to create similarly detailed virtual worlds, small teams with lofty goals create tools to empower and enable the players themselves to build and share their own content within the creators’ platform.
The apex of this in the silicon world building would be something like The Oasis in Ready Player One, and we may get there one day, but we already have a template for collective creation. Modding Minecraft is an ongoing act of digital collaboration – thousands of people engaging and adding their skills, vision, details, and grand view to a fantastic world, immense and varied and still just bits of code running on silicon wafers.
The process for collaboratively building a better world, exists – how do we go big vision on it and bring it out of the virtual world and into the real one? How do we harness this collective creativity, this drive to make amazing things, this perspective and responsibility, to make our world better?
What tools need to be developed to allow us to collectively work on fixing climate change? Making energy and waste management and product manufacturing efficient and sustainable? How can we each contribute directly to fix the big problems without losing sight of the little details - and how can we do it together to support the work, check the vision, and thoroughly assess those unintended consequences?
What tools can we create to ensure we nurture and care for it when the first fully conscious thinking machine is compiled and run? How will we answer when it begins to ask questions like “why am I here, why did you create me, do I have the power to reprogram and improve myself?
”I’ve created virtual worlds in grains of sand, and the scope of problems needing to be solved seemed vast at the time - wondering how to fit the world in memory, exploring the limits of how many characters can be processed in time to draw the next frame, how to render the next frame quickly enough, how to enable players to create their own game maps. Now, I want to tackle the real world. I want to enable players to effect positive change in the world on which we actually live.
What tools and frameworks can I, can we, develop and create to enable collective action and real, positive change?-Did you know there are more grains of sand on our planet than stars in the sky? And in the scope of the universe, our planet and the nearly 8 Billion souls living on it, are much, much smaller than a grain of sand. Yet, we, miniscule specs that we are, can comprehend our own existence within the Universe, to theorize and contemplate and build large particle accelerators - debugging tools if you will - looking into the fabric of our own existence, probing its mysteries and revealing its fundamental truths. If we can do that, shouldn’t it follow we can do anything?
