AUTONOMOUS WORLDS

W/

Gubsheep, Ludens, Dmstfctn, Eva Jäger, Alasdair Milne, Rafel Morado, David Huang, Bytes, Agnes Cameron, Guilty Gyoza, Gvn, Arb, and Ker Lee Yap

Published by OxPARC Edited by Guy Mackinnon-Little

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AW

THE STRONGEST CRYPTO GAMING THESIS

Gaming as a Threshold for Crypto Apps

BY GUBSHEEP

7 ◊ 24

THE CASE FOR AUTONOMOUS WORLDS

Blockchains as World Technology

BY LUDENS

15 ◊ 24

LARGE LORE MODELS

Speculative Tools for Decentralized Narrative-Bub BY DMSTFCTN, EVA JÄGER, ALASDAIR MUE

29 ◊ 35

INFINITE MODDING

A Prehistory of Composable Game Development

BY RAFEL MORADO

39 ◊ 45

LIVELY WORLDS

How Worlds Absorb Novelty

BY DAVID HUANG

49 ◊ 56

TIMEKEEPING FOR DIGITAL GODS

Practical Considerations

for the Physics of Virtual Worlds

BY BYTES

61 64

A CHATROOM WITH LEGS

Indirect Communication and Conversational Worlds

BY AGNES CAMERON

69 ◊ 74

COMPOSABLE ENGINEERING

Rich Digital Physics and the Evolution of Computational Worlds BY GULTYGYOZA

79 ◊ 84

THREE ERAS OF WORLD GENERATION) Worldbuilding, Worlding, World-Weaving BY GVN & ARB

89 ◊ 96

HOW TO FALL IN LOVE WITH A SYSTEM

Coziness as a Catalyst for Participatory Agency BY KER LEE YAP

101 ◊ 105

GLOSSARY

109 ◊ 117

THE STRONGEST CRYPTO GAMING THESIS: Gaming as a Threshold for Crypto Apps

GUBSHEEP

Based on an essay originally written in July 2021; revised for Autonomous Worlds N1 in February 2023.

Crypto is not an incremental innovation. Rather, it unlocks fundamentally new ways of doing things that were not possible before. This is true across a wide set of domains: corporations ) traditional financial vehicles reimagined as permissionless Defi reimagined as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOS), protocols, legal agreements reimagined as smart contracts, and other constructs that we don't yet have the language to  describe.

The most interesting and important applications of crypto will lean heavily into the new affordances provided by blockchain technology, instead of just offering incremental improvements to existing applications. This is the same pattern that we've seen with previous computing platforms: smartphones, the World Wide Web, and the personal computer itself. In each of these examples, the longest-lasting and most impactful applications of the tech use the tech to do new things, not to do old things better. Think social media apps versus newspaper websites, online stores versus digital catalogs, or interactive TV versus... well, the internet.

What does this mean for crypto gaming?

CRYPTO-NATIVE GAMES

Gaming is a leading indicator on up-and-coming technologies. Games are a technically demanding yet relatively low-stakes > environment to explore scalability and usability problems early in a technology platform's lifecycle: security and compliance concerns in games are less critical compared to more 'serious' commercial or financial applications, often allowing for faster iteration loops. So while the untrained eye might dismiss a plat- form with 'just' a bunch of games as frivolous, the discerning will recognize that this state is a valuable testing grounds. How many mobile interaction patterns and habits have their roots in early mobile games like Doodle Jump, Cut the Rope, and Angry Birds?

If we accept that games are a leading indicator of new technologies, and that the most interesting applications of new technologies will lean into truly new affordances rather than incremental improvements, then it follows that the bleeding edge. of crypto application design in the next few years will be found in crypto-native games.

A crypto-native game is a game that maximally embraces the architectural patterns and ethos of blockchain application development:

• The source of truth for game data is the blockchain. The blockchain is not just used as an auxiliary store of data, or a 'mirror' of data stored in a proprietary server. All of the meaningful data is accessible on the blockchain-not just, for example, asset ownership. This allows the game to fully utilize the benefits of a programmable blockchain: a transparent data store that is permissionlessly interop- erable.
• The game logic and rules are implemented via smart contract. For example, combat in a game, and not just ownership, is all on-chain.
• The game is developed in accordance with open ecosys- tem principles. The game contracts, and an accessible game client, are open-source. Third-party developers are empowered to customize or even fork their own gameplay experiences through plugins, third-party clients, interoper- able smart contracts, and even total redeployment. This in turn allows game developers to harness the creative output of an entire (incentive-aligned) community.
• The game is client-agnostic. This is closely related to the three above points, in that a litmus test for whether or not a game is crypto-native is: 'If the core-developer-provided client disappeared tomorrow, would the game still be playable?' The answer tends to be yes if (and only if) the game data store is permissionless, if the game logic can be executed permissionlessly, and if the community can interact with the core smart contracts without relying on interfaces provided by a core team.
• The game is interoperable with things we consider valu- able. Blockchains provide a native API into the notion of value itself, and digital assets are by default interoperable with other assets that we care about. This both reflects and contributes to a sense of depth and meaning in game- play, and contextualizes the World of the game in the 'real' World.

Notably, we do not consider the following 'crypto-native games':

• A traditional mobile shooter with a crypto wallet integration.
• A TCG where card assets are stored as ERC721 tokens on Ethereum, but battles happen off-chain.
• A DeFi app that is 'gamified' or has a playful skin. These apps are valuable and innovative in their own right, but we are specifically interested in applications that are games first and foremost, rather than primarily financial vehicles or protocols. We consider games that are essentially pure speculation on NFTS (an asset class) to be of this category.

This is not to say that only crypto-native games can be successful (commercially or artistically), while games that use blockchain in weaker ways cannot. However, crypto-native games are the most important games to look at if we want to understand the long-term implications of blockchain technology.

NEW MECHANICS, NEW WORLDS

Crypto-native games are powerful because they seek to unlock mechanics that are fundamentally new, rather than just making incremental improvements on existing games.

Some of these mechanics are likely to be financial: crypto-native games certainly seem well-positioned to leverage the powerful new incentive mechanisms and ownership models unlocked by blockchains. For example, creative and diegetic uses for tokens and in-game items could align game designers, content creators, and players in ways that weren't possible. before.

But other mechanics may be social, political, or even philosophical. With an active community of only a few hundred players, Dark Forest saw levels of player self-organization that would have been unheard of in communities for online games of similar size and simplicity: cryptographic information markets, automated player corporations, embedded digital realities, and more.

Games will be instrumental in helping us to understand what blockchain technology will do for the world. As microcosms of the integrated digital Worlds of the future, they act as sand- boxes for experimentation and innovation. If crypto is really going to be a civilization-scale technology, then games are a crystal ball into the future: what strange beasts will bloom in the Autonomous Worlds of tomorrow?

A polychromatic fungal colony flourishing in a terrarium project forgotten in the back closet of a high school computer lab over summer break.

THE CASE FOR AUTONOMOUS WORLDS: Blockchains as World Technology by LUDENS

Based off an essay originally written in August 2022, revise and extended for Autonomous Worlds N1 in February 2023 A World is a container for entities and coherent-enough intera rules. When a system of entities and rules becomes alive, they become a World.

We inhabit Worlds-whether physical or conceptual. We learn how to work and behave within them. We engage in tribalism, spatial reasoning, and territorialism over Worlds that live entre in our minds. We have a sense for the boundaries of Worlds and

their rulesets. Worlds exist within books, games, social groups, and religions Amongst those, we can find the Worlds of Namia, Christianity,

and the Commonwealth Law. Worlds run on everything from letters to wikis, bedtime stories, constitutions, databases, and, most importantly, our collective human intelligence. A World running on X means that X

is the reason for the persistence of the World, the reason why we continue experiencing the container as a World, as being alive.

Worlds sometimes live entirely within the minds of people, with some light physical footprint: books, computer memory, and so on. However, the physical artefacts of those Worlds are not the reason for which the World is alive. Printing a million copies of a book doesn't create a World, unless people read it; care about it; and inhabit it.

DIEGESIS

To be precise when talking about Worlds, we need to define diegesis. Something is diegetic if it is in the World. And for something to be in the World, it needs to have respected the introduction rule of the World.

The notion of diegesis is important when defining the boundaries of Worlds. Remember, a World is a container.

Let's go through some examples to build up some intuition. we will use the word entity to describe any constituent of a World:

event, character, rule, facts, etc.

1. The World of Harry Potter. In the World of Harry Potter, the

introduction rule is very simple: if an entity is included in a story written by JK Rowling and published under the Harry Potter series, it is diegetic. Otherwise, it isn't.

2. The World of the US dollar. This World is alien to an average person, and so is its introduction rule. Its entities are authorities, balances, debts, and values.

The introduction rule goes as such: If an authority attests the existence of a balance or debt, it is diegetic. Additionally, if enough of us accept the 'dollar value' of an entity-physical or not-its corresponding value becomes diegetic.

3. The World of Warcraft: In World of Warcraft, the introduc- tion rule is formalized using computer code. If the game server relays the existence of an entity to players, it is diegetic. Introduction of new entities-like 'my character is level 60' or 'our guild is the best on the server'- is dictated by the C++ code written by Blizzard engineers.

DIEGETIC BOUNDARY

Some Worlds do not have clearly defined boundaries, and certain entities can appear to be diegetic only to a subset of people.

Most Worlds have not suffered much from ambiguities and nebulous diegetic boundaries. Others, like the USD World, are so important to our lives that we decided to spend an immense amount of time and effort on their introduction rules and borders. You can think of bureaucracy and law as a form of gravity: they attract blobs of coherent entities together and define a strict boundary for what is and what isn't diegetic. Formalising introduction rules using 'law' and 'code' has proven to be of utmost importance to the mission-critical Worlds permeating our lives. They give Worlds harder diegetic boundaries.

Soft diegetic boundaries often involve authorities or social consensus as a form of introduction rule, whereas hard diegetic boundaries are enforced with clear transparent rules law, code, or mathematics. Our top level physical World-the universe-has a very hard diegetic boundary enforced through 

its introduction rule: physics. 'Hard' or 'Soft' boundaries can both be desirable features for a World. 'Fan fiction' is the practice of playing with soft diegetic boundaries; while commerce requires a World with hard boundaries: doubts and arguments over the validity of some one's tender hinders trade.

BLOCKCHAIN

Worlds have a tech tree: language, writing, law, and psychology are key discoveries that enabled the creation of some of the most important Worlds around.

In 2008, an email exchange introduced one of the biggest breakthroughs in World technology: Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a blockchain: a network technology used to create canon. In the case of Bitcoin, network participants reach an agreement over the 'canonicalness' of a set of balances. Something being canonical is equivalent to an entity being diegetic from the lens of Worlds.

Bitcoin is a World. Just like the World of the US Dollar, it's a weird one. The entities in the World of Bitcoin are balances and addresses, and the introduction rule is defined in computer code. It goes like this: addresses have balances. Part of a balance can be 'spent' to transfer it to another address. And- most importantly-balances can be increased through 'mining,' an expensive computational process.

Blockchains are a type of substrate for Worlds. They unambiguously hold the set of all diegetic entities within their state. Additionally, they formally define an introduction rule with computer code. A World with a blockchain substrate enables its inhabitants to participate in consensus. They run a network of computers reaching agreement on each introduction of a new diegetic entity.

There are two blockchain concepts that are important to define from the perspective of Worlds:

1. A blockchain state root A state root is a compression of all entities in the World. With a state root, one can determine whether any entity is diegetic. Believing in the state root of a World is equivalent to believing in the World itself. Ox411842e02a67ab1ab6d3722949263f06bca-

20c62e03a99812bcd15dce6daf26e was the state root of Ethereum-a World with a blockchain substrate- on July 21, 2022 at 07:30:10PM UTC. All entities of the World of Ethereum were taken into account in the calculation of this state root. It represents the entirety of what was and what wasn't diegetic in that World at that specific time.

2. A blockchain state transition function: Each blockchain defines a state transition function. It can be thought of as an unambiguous introduction rule. It defines how the previous state of the World-the set of diegetic entities- can introduce new diegetic entities with inputs from people and machines. In the case of Bitcoin, the state transition function defines how balances can be spent and transferred between addresses

In a World with a blockchain substrate, the belief of partici- pants in the introduction rule entails total acceptance of the entities introduced by it. 'Belief' here needs to be defined. An nhabitant of a World with a blockchain substrate believes in the introduction rule when two statements hold:

1 They or someone they trust participate in the digital ‘'consensus' of that corresponding blockchain. Through participation, they can independently retrieve the state root of the blockchain, which-as described above-is a compression of all diegetic entities in the World. 2 They believe the specific consensus algorithm of the

blockchain is operating properly. Blockchains are not magic: they create diegetic hardness, but they aren't free lunches Various attacks and failure modes exist for each specific blockchain implementation.

I'd like to insist that this is not a default property of Worlds with formalized introduction rules. For example, a flash crash at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange led to outcomes that were rejected by almost all traders as 'invalid'; even though the introduction rule of the World-an order book matching engine-had been formalized with computer code.

Belief in the proper operation of a Blockchain's consensus algorithm preempts various 'what if' scenarios found in other Worlds with formalized introduction rules.

What if someone changed the introduction rule without telling us, the inhabitants of the World?

What if the introduction rule has been misinterpreted? What if some entities were introduced while bypassing the introduction rule?

Through digital consensus, blockchains create some of the hardest diegetic boundaries around.

AUTONOMY

Blockchains are of course not the only type of substrate for Worlds. Remember, Worlds run on everything from tribal songs to databases.

Yet, blockchains as a World-substrate bring a qualitative increase in the autonomy of their World.

Each World ranks differently when it comes to autonomy: some Worlds have an introduction rule relying on the existence  and participation of a permissioned individual to introduce new diegetic entities (eg: Harry Potter); others rely on the consensus of a group of people to interpret and enforce their introduction rule (eg: the legal system, the World of the US Dollar); and some are in need of untampered computers running their formalized introduction rule (eg: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, World of Warcraft).

In the limit case of a World's autonomy, no special individual or hardware is needed to introduce new entities and maintain the diegetic boundary.

Worlds with a blockchain substrate are maximally autonomous: anybody can enforce the introduction rule, without damaging its objectivity. The disappearance or betrayal of any particular individual does not hurt the World: its diegetic bound- ary remains as hard as ever. Such Worlds can be nearly on par with systems like the English language, or physics itself.

Of course, autonomy is something you can only measure in retrospect. Before an actual existential threat faces the World, autonomy is often performative. Sometimes, a credible path towards autonomy is what allows Worlds to be seen as autonomous.

AUTONOMOUS WORLDS

Given 'World with a blockchain substrate' is quite a mouthful, we started referring to them as Autonomous Worlds.

I like to think of Autonomous Worlds as planets in our solar system. Digital instead of physical.

Think about Mars. Mars-with its mountains and ancient riverbeds, its complex geology, its thin atmosphere-is a World. Most of the time, you cannot observe Mars by simply looking at the sky. Yet Mars is still out there, part of our solar system. If you were to use special instruments, you would be able to gather information about Mars, and this information would be the same for another person using the same instruments.

The telescopes used to observe Mars can be built by anyone. It makes it easier for us to agree on the fact that 'yes, there is a big red sphere out there, and you didn't make it up.'

Additionally, the rocks and deserts on Mars keep existing if someone stops believing in their World. Nobody can 'unplug'

Mars. Autonomous Worlds have telescopes that anyone can build and use to reach consensus. The entities of these Autonomous Worlds remain diegetic as long as at least one person participates in the digital consen- sus. The introduction rule remains objective as well as trans- parent, and observing the state of the World is open to anyone

with the right telescope. Nobody can unplug Autonomous Worlds.

Autonomous Worlds have hard diegetic boundaries, formalized introduction rules, and no need for privileged individuals to keep

the World alive.

FROM AUTONOMOUS WORLDS TO INTEROBJECTIVE REALITES

Thanks to Hilmar Petursson, Sina Habiban, and

Guy Mackinnon-Little for inspiring this section.

In addition to our shared objective reality (the Universe and its physics) and our private subjective reality (our own feeling and thoughts), we experience intersubjective realities: intangible concepts shared by multiple human beings. Prime examples of intersubjective realities are religions and money. Those realities-being subjective-have subtle different interpretations across people: love, an intersubjective reality, is experienced in very different ways. Even if shared, it remains intangible and subjective.

An alternative framing of Autonomous Worlds is that of 'interobjective realities.' Through autonomy and an objective formalized introduction rule, we can reduce-or even remove- the (inter)subjectivity of those realities.

We have taken part in intersubjective realities for ten of thousands of years. Now, using the affordances of autonomy and transparency from Blockchain World-substrates, we can grant some of the rigidity and objectivity of our shared physical reality to our shared intangible realities. We can take the leap from intersubjective realities to interobjective realities.

While Autonomous Worlds offer a new way to create objective and transparent realities, it's important to recognize that they are not meant to replace intersubjective realities. In fact, the intangibility and subjectivity of these shared concepts are precisely what make them so valuable and cherished by humans. However, it's crucial to understand that intersubjective realities are anchored in other realities, such as the physical World and shared cultural experiences.

In her book The Human Condition, philosopher Hannah Arendt talks about how common sense is like the table we sit around. She writes, 'To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.' Arendt suggests that the shared experience of a common human World enables us to bridge our understanding of intersubjective realities.

Understood in this way, 'common sense' might better be called 'communal sense' to distinguish it from what usually comes to mind when most of us hear the phrase. To know is to share a World, and only by sharing a common human World with others who look at it from different perspectives can we see reality in the round and develop a collaboratively authored communal sense: a canon, of sorts.

As we move away from a human World governed by physics as the underlying medium of society, our communal sense is threatened by the lack of objective shared realities. Modern digital realities are increasingly flimsy, ad-driven, Al-generated, backdoored, black-boxed, and optimized for isolation and passive consumption. It's becoming increasingly difficult to build the table, to create a communal sense with others, as the substrate of these realities keeps slipping under our feet.

Autonomous Worlds-by definition-don't slip under our feet: their Digital Physics are open and transparent, and no permissioned actor is allowed to change them without a collective agreement from their inhabitants. As our taken-for-granted intersubjective realities come under increasing threat, Autonomous Worlds can help them anchor into a more durable and stable interobjective digital reality. Autonomous Worlds can become the digital table we sit around, the container in which we can begin to fashion a new form of communal sense.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Sina Habibian, DC Posch, Josh Stark, Saffron Huang, Rafael Morado, Hilmar Petursson, Will Robinson, Lakshman Sankar, Arthur Röing Baer, gubsheep, and Nalin Bhardwaj for feedback on the previous drafts of this essay.

Some of the ideas introduced build upon work from lan Cheng's Emissary's Guide to Worlding (Metis Suns, 2018).

1.

We do not mean worldbuilding; which is focused on creating fantasy Worlds in order to make fictional stories better and more consistent.

2.

In blockchain jargon, they are called 'full nodes.'

A formation of Roombas patrolling a decrepit mall.

LARGE LORE MODELS:

Speculative Tools

for Decentralized Narrative-Building

DMSTFCTN, EVA JÄGER, ALASDAIR MILNE

In the IRL world-or 'groundworld'-consensus narratives are fracturing. The Trad Web (the entrenched social networks of Web2) in particular is ineffective at delivering protocols for both ground truthing on one hand, and healthy contestation on the other. Commentary on once verifiable events has become adversarial, with events themselves (transactions, exchanges, altercations) often difficult to verify. Here, the most fundamen- tal record keeping becomes centralized through 'captured" top-down infrastructure that resembles a surveillance architecture. The capacity to verify and contest becomes attached to hierarchy, access, and control.

While Autonomous Worlds are in their nascency, and susceptible to becoming siloed gameworlds for niche communities, they possess a wider potential as generative infrastructure for a new kind of commons-a public resource with a tangible benefit. Here, we propose that decentralized narratives are the essential public resource produced by Autonomous Worlds and explore the potential for Autonomous Worlds to act as a commons geared to bring this resource and its public value into the groundworld.

Autonomous Worlds can offer the ingredients and World weaving potential to become what we term an 'autonomous knowledge commons,' afforded by its involuntary relationship of collective infrastructure ownership. Here we take the core features of an autonomous knowledge commons to be non-centralized yet formalized access to both the means of narrative creation, linked to a permanent record of events, alongside the right to redeploy, or reseed, the results elsewhere. Building on gubsheep's proposal that crypto-native games operate as sandboxes or 'microcosms of the integrated digital worlds of the future,' we suggest that building an autonomous knowledge commons might offer a way to export procedures or knowledge back into the groundworld in the form of narrative. With this in mind, an autonomous knowledge commons could be a space to experiment with new ways of building both consen- sus reality that has been lost in the groundworld, and shared narratives drawn from the emergent, permanent canon afforded by on-chain games.

So, what would be necessary to fortify the propensity of Autonomous Worlds to become autonomous knowledge com- mons? Here, we will propose a new 'modding' superstructure: a 'Large Lore Model' (LLoreM) plug-in that facilitates collective and decentralized narrative-building and explicitly links to the on-chain record. The LLoreM offers an interface which main- tains a link to interobjective realities whilst communicating with the intersubjective groundworld. In other words, LLoreM enable a commonly built consensus reality that is nonetheless collectively generated and governed. The LLoreM could be prototypical scaffolding for stewarding a shift from worlding wildemess to mission-driven commons.

LORE GENERATION

Having established the potential of Autonomous Worlds to become autonomous knowledge commons, given the right infrastructure, we look to define lore and 'lore generation' in concrete terms by using a procedural spoken language game, I Went To the Shop, as an example. From there, we will consider how to hardcode this process of lore generation into a viable tool (LLoreM) that combines the value of player lore generation with the unique affordances of on-chain games, considering the implications of such a tool in comparison to legacy Web2 lore-recording.

In the I Went To the Shop memory game, commonly played by kids to pass the time on road trips, we find a temporary World created through a shared narrative of a trip to the shop. The rules of the game require that players repeat the phrase: 'Today I went to the shop and I bought...' appending it each time with a new item purchased. The first item added must begin with the first letter of the alphabet and each subsequent item must begin with the next letter. So after three rounds the phrase might be: 'Today I went to the shop and I bought an apple, bubblegum, and a cold beer.' Gameplay emerges through the balance between adding items that one player can remember and items to throw off another players' memory. Players must keep a level of engagement and entertainment by listing uncommon, surreal, or offensive items. Even while the narrative produced is held in common, its texture is contingent on the particular circumstances of individual players: in-jokes, shared  language (US english offers the sensible zucchini for Z, whilst in UK english you might buy a zebra), and-in the case of bored kids in a car-a desire to get a reaction from the adult driving  might all play into these choices.

Here we take lore to be the decentralized, accrued narrative. Lore generation is the general concept to describe procedures (within the World of a game or otherwise) which produce this decentralized narrative. A reified tool built for this purpose could be called a lore generator. Lore generation is important  because it acts as a means of creating knowledge-claims in a suspended context, contestable later as necessary. It gamifies the production of narrative, holding it as something common and mutually constructed between players, like a jovial list of commodities bought at the shop.

But at the end of the I Went To the Shop game, the 'ledger' of ingredients has no record and is lost. Similarly, the shared experience of the players is lost, along with the emergent narrative. Further, even if some player recorded the ledger (even a trust-worthy elder figure) or an on-chain version collected the list of ingredients introduced via its Digital Physics into its canon (creating a hard diegetic boundary through digital consensus), there is no mutually agreed protocol for recording and verifying the emergent narrative. In order to transform this narrative into lore then, we need a system-and interface-that is collectively agreed upon. We will now turn to a prototypical LLoreM that could be used to produce a dual ledger capable of recording and verifying a lore-claim alongside an immutable record.

LARGE LORE MODELS-LLOREM

A LLoreM is a tool we conceive of as a collective writing plug-in that attaches to a 'host' on-chain game, allowing it to be used as what Moving Castles calls a 'narrative engine. "(8) It is by definition a lore generator, but with additional design specifications conceptualized to respond to some of the epistemic problems discussed with regard to the groundworld. Accompanying the game's ledger in which players' actions are recorded through transactions on-chain, is a 'para-ledger." The para-ledger becomes a contestable mythology of the core on-chain gameplay events.

Writing in the para-ledger must correspond to a block on the chain, but the resultant lore is written by players and is in itself nonprocedural. The function of this design is to maximize the affordances of the blockchain's immutability while preserving the inherent mutability of human narrative (the narrative's contestability). The human component combines the value of subjective testimony with the incontestable actions recorded on each block. As such, the para-ledger operates as an interface through which players and observers can access and make use of the blockchain ledger, offering players an opportunity to collate or reflect upon their actions while providing observ- ers with context beyond a list of actions. The para-ledger, of course, remains contestable: this is a core part of the design and reflects a need for intersubjective consensus in all attempts to produce collective knowledge. But any contestation at this stage, even against elder testimony, is made against the backdrop of ground truthed canon blocks.

There are further speculative possibilities for interoperability here too: if multiple on-chain games operate on a shared block- chain ledger, and players use a singular identity to play these, the LLoreM could triangulate between the different games by locating players' activities across the ledger, producing an 'interdimensional' narrative of the player as they move between Autonomous Worlds. Inversely, a lore iteration could be replayed in another game, stacking para-ledge' lore to correspond with the blockchain and producing iterative parafictions. (9)

COMMUNITY LOREMAXXING

Given the stakes of narrative control we outlined at the outse it is worth reflecting on the potential for blockchain to p a fixed 'ordering' for a historical record. Narrative itself is an affordance which has been lost in the Trad Web epoch, as Lev Manovich suggests of 'rewriting' in Web2: 'It is as easy to add new elements to the end of a list as it is to insert them logic of the Web. If new elements are being added over time, the anywhere in it. All this further contributes to the antinarrative achieving consensus reality might be hard while such a system result is a collection, not a story. (10) This offers a sense of why remains dominant. By enabling packets of narrative to be anchored to the fixed-order events of an Autonomous World's concrete, decentralized ledger, a LLoreM makes the events sense-able and transparent and thus reenables narration as a slow burning premodern craft resistant to singular ownership by

designated heroes or monarchs.

Through the specific affordances of on-chain World weaving, the LLoreM offers an infrastructure for Autonomous Worlds to become autonomous knowledge commons. This collective lore generation system offers a procedural alternative to increasing reliance on GPT-pilled automated myth-generation. Whereas GPT models also draw upon a collective form of writing, the centralized and automated technical intervention used is much more heavily weighted, and as such fails to preserve community control over written outputs in most instances. Instead, the LLoreM seeks a way of engaging the blockchain that uses it efficiently while also aiming towards its most unique affordances; simultaneously, it is tuned to maximize the oppor tunities to tap into the creative potential of human collectivity: loremaxxing.

1 'Groundworld' here refers to our IRL world that we

take as ground and is collectively constituted. Alasdair Milne, Collaborative Systems in Machine Learning Artistic Research (PhD thesis), Serpentine Galleries R&D Platform and King's College London, forthcoming 2024.

2.

Elinor Ostrom's definition of commons is a scarce resource that provides users with tangible benefits, but aren't owned by anyone. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2015. See also: Martin Zeilinger, 'Can the blockchain finally create a commons?' Spike Art Magazine, 2022.

3.

We take narrative as a subjective, chronological rendering of either events in the groundworld, a fictional World, or some combination of the two.

4. Future Art Ecosystems 3: Art x Decentralised Tech, Serpentine Galleries, 2022. Available at: https://www.serpen- tinegalleries.org/whats-on/future-art-ecosystems/

5.

gubsheep, 'The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis," 2021. Available at: https://gubsheep.mirror.xyz/nsteOfjAT- PSKHOJBIRDOj2iynmvv_C8i8eb483UzcTM

6. ludens, 'Autonomous Worlds (Part 1),' OxPARC, 2021. Available at: https://Oxparc.org/blog/autonomous-worlds

7. Journalist and scholar Nathan Schneider has been researching cooperative models and DAOS in order to under- stand how crypto might offer something unique for coop tooling. Here he discusses self-governance for online communities. Nathan Schneider, 'Modpol is a Self-Governance Toolkit for Communities in Online Worlds,' Hackernoon, 2022. Available at: https://hackemoon.com/modpol-is-a-self-governance-toolkit-

for-communities-in-online-worlds

8. Autonomous Worlds Residency Demo, 5 Decem- ber 2022. See: https://twitter.com/heylukegibson/sta- tus/1599888301699186689

9. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, 'Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,' October, 2009, 51-84.

10. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, The MIT Press, 2001, 220.

A laboratory aquarium shimmering with programmable biomater confounding scientists by demonstrating an entirely new form of cellular reproduction.

INFINITE MODDING: A Prehistory of Composable Game Development

RAFAEL MORADO

In games of all kinds, there has always been the question of

authorship. Gaming is a collective media and not only that, it is a performative media. A game will not unfold without the active intervention of the player, making them not an audience but a co-creator. Not all games allow for this creative performative space, but all sports and many video games do. Competition is almost always the focus of these performances (as is the case with MOBAS, shooters, and speed runs). Still, the performances of gaming can also happen in free-creating Worlds like Mine- craft, whose livestreaming influencers often just explore the game for their audience. No matter the intention of the player, playing a game is (or can be) a creative act. While players have always been partial creators of the games they play, one way

to understand the history of gaming is as a drama in which the boundaries of authorship are continually redrawn. The poten tials of on-chain games herald another significant chapter in this drama, but first, let us consider how we got here.

Gaming's means of production have evolved greatly since it became a 'proper' industry over the course of the 1970s. At the outset of the industry, one game developer would manipulate hardware directly while single-handedly creating

all the content: code, graphics, music, and gameplay. As time passed, more abstractions started to emerge allowing special- ization within specific domains of a game. Musicians, graphic artists, and animators focused solely on executing their skillset, while engineers came to specialize in working specifically on animation tools, physics simulations, and rendering and lighting engines that allowed content creators to avoid the distraction of working with code.

Two aspects are fundamental when thinking about this evolution: ownership and complexity. As the market grew economically, big studios emerged to provide the necessary investment and retain legal ownership (both for financial liability and intellectual property) of the final product, allowing games to explode in terms of production complexity. Once these large stu- dios started to churn out titles, it became logical to reuse large segments of code and sometimes even gameplay. Complexity could be hidden or abstracted away, making way for standard- izations. The in-house game engine thus became the path to protect the studio's investment. Most companies protected their code as IP as it could be considered a solid asset to investors. Other companies, a few years later, took a different approach and allowed not only for their code to be cloned, but for users to build on top of their game. With these 'open engines,' the stage was set for players to express themselves on a level beyond (or above) the rules and aesthetics of the game. The modding scene that emerged from this more open approach created some of the most important titles we have today: Dota 2 and League of Legends (both iterations of the original MOBA, DOTA), Counter-Strike (built on top of Half- Life's engine), and Fortnite (an iteration of PUBG, itself a mod based on ARMA 2). Ironically, these games are now protected (owned by Epic, Riot, Valve, and Tencent), and modding them is not the simplest endeavor. Of course, not all mods are as suc- cessful as League of Legends or PUBG, but the point stands: modding enabled players to express themselves within the rules. of the engine rather than only within the rules of the game. The game became to create games.

Composability on the blockchain is, philosophically, a very open type of modding. Composability, as we are defining it, is a permissionless extension of software functionality. Simple functions exist on-chain and are accessible to any user. On top of those functions, more software can be created that relies on them but simplifies, amalgamates, or increases their capabil- ities. These new contracts are deployed freely and their use of the preexisting functions is unrestricted save for the con- straints built into the initial contracts. All the mods above were created on top of existing games by people who played the game, creatively asked 'what if,' and took the effort of creating a new product. Blockchain allows this activity to happen within the live game: instead of creating a semi-clone in a separate instance, code can be deployed on top of a running game. Once games are running fully on-chain, they become fertile ground for experimentation. Anyone can deploy new features on top of a game. These changes and additions can happen within differen layers of the game, from the most fundamental (concerning the location of entities, statistics, and abilities) to the highest level (concerning the user interface, buttons, and notifications) Freedom of manipulation depends entirely on the layer and the

architecture of the original game.

Let's call the bottom layer of a game the sandbox. At this level, the rules are there only to enforce constraints, not goals Constraints are fundamental to a game because they either simplify reality so it can be simulated or they create extra friction within reality which in turn creates challenges for performative play, as is the case with a game like football. With but building one from scratch. One way to think about it is that computer simulations, we are not simplifying an existing reality, we are not only defining how much oil can be found in the virtual lands of a given game, but also how much energy burning oil provides, how to refine oil into more efficient fuels, and how to create different engines powered by these fuels (assuming those are areas the devs would expect players to delve into). Some call this set of constraints Digital Physics.

On top of the sandbox we have the game rules, establishing goals, rewards, and unique variants. This is where the generic constraints of the sandbox are shaped into a game, with a defined quantity of players, a starting and end condition, clear goals, tasks to be achieved, and likely a score system. The

sandbox rules are indifferent to the entities they govem as they simply react in a (mostly) predictable fashion to the inputs from the user. The game rules, on the other hand, concem goals, objectives, and rewards for the users. They establish winning conditions and penalties. This organization is more present in certain games (poker, sports, RPGs) and less in others (Lego or other toys). The harder the contention of these rules, the more specific skills will come out the other end. In that sense, for a skill to be measured carefully, some very tight constraints have to be put in place. Think of how enhancers are rigorously monitored in many sports.