1. Worlding

The virtual spaces of game worlds are most often confined to the realms of techno-capitalistic entertainment infrastructures - rendering worlds to be conquered, conjuring creatures to be confronted and processing never-ending cycles of adrenaline-pumping challenges. Attentive to the ways in which technologies are designed for consumption, mainstream game worlds have long attuned themselves to carefully crafted experiences of play, unfolding in accordance with rigorously curated templates, tried and tested narrative models, and, more recently, pre-packaged code structures. This calcification of virtual world design is largely underpinned by the operation of game engines on the basis of “shared codebases” (Chia, 2022) which, despite easing the process of development, result in the regulation of artistic, cultural, and narrative expression within the gamespace (Bogost, 2006, 56). This tendency towards a flat ontology of game worlds is symptomatic of a larger spectre haunting the creative industries, that which Matteo Pasquinelli calls the “massification of the creative attitude” (2007, 71), a process through which creative disciplines become hegemonic in nature, leading to an “entropy of meaning and producers” (Pasquinelli, 2007, 72) - the conflicts of which reverberate within the tensions that surround contemporary game worlds.

Amidst the resulting proliferation of carefully engineered (yet suspiciously analogous) polygon-sculpted worlds, a novel practice of virtual worldbuilding emerges, situating itself in antithesis to this hegemonic impulse. Worlding, delineated by artist Ian Cheng in his Emissaries’ Guide to Worlding, refers to the “artistic activity of an individual artist conceiving, incubating, triggering and nurturing a World towards aliveness” (2018, 19). Among the excess of worlds in our contemporary existence, from media franchises to economies or even nations, Cheng reflects on what it means to engage with realities expressively; when discussing what a world is, he specifies that it is “an artificial living thing, but a living thing nonetheless” (2018, 17), which must therefore fulfil conditions of autonomy (through the ability to exist independently of its creator) and aliveness (through its generative potential) - both affordances that are to be developed through computational means. Cheng, therefore, anchors his experiments in simulation within the algorithmic arena of game engine technologies. Having evolved steadily over the last decade, particularly in terms of physical realism and computational performance (Hudlicka, 2009), the algorithmic infrastructure of the game engine is not only able to facilitate complex simulations, but can also enable the rapid prototyping of immersive realities. Artists that ‘world’ inside the game engine often engage with more than the creation of volumetric spaces; whilst the capabilities of game engine software to render highly detailed virtual scenes is of crucial importance, many worlding experiments become entangled with other forms of computation in their approach to simulation, such as generative algorithms or artificial intelligence, which co-opt mechanical agencies into the relational system at play.

Alice Bucknell, a contemporary artist working with speculative fiction and game engine technology, also highlights the role of this software as an “efficient worlding technology” (2022) due the possibility for a world to be intimately encountered through the process of immersion. For Bucknell, game environments feel “both familiar and otherworldly, which is the perfect container for constructing stories that have one foot in the present and the other in an uncertain future (or many possible futures)” (2022). Similarly, Jakob Kudsk Steensen speaks about the choice of working with immersive technologies being rooted in the ability to develop simulations of places that he initially researches in person and then speculates on, conjuring and developing entire realities that audiences can then enter (2017). Reflecting on the ways in which worlding practices encounter the video games industry, Steensen highlights the emphasis on consumerism and the still-present legacies of the male gaze echoing across “megalomaniac production rhythms” (2017) that hone in on consumer satisfaction. Despite the challenges of operating in a different mode to the hardened archetypes of virtual experience, Steensen emphasises a fascination with the game form itself, particularly in its ability to offer complex design possibilities and sensual evocation; specifying an interest in the medium, but “just a whole other type of content [...] which functions in an art context”, he affirms the need of cementing a design philosophy that moves away from “tasks , goals , feel good vibes, winning mentalities and male heroism” and gains more depth than the pursuit for “reaching the next level” (2017).

For Steensen, acknowledging the computational nature of the practice is crucial - he underscores the fact that “a game engine is essentially a software that connects humans with hardware, capable of providing real-time feedback and changes” (2017), accentuating the algorithmic core of worlding and its reliance on real-time rendering technologies. Similarly, Charrieras and Nevena point out that the production of video games “can be described as the building of a universe of possibilities relying more on systems and cybernetic principles than on aesthetic rules attached to the production of an object” (2016) - as such, the software operations underpinning the practice of building virtual worlds are identified as crucial to the process of creating computational realities, surpassing aesthetics; this is due to the programmability of software: game worlds are not finite objects, but rather operate according to a set of parameters crafted by developers, which set up the possibilities of experience for the audience. This is illustrative of the nature of all computationally-mediated objects: as Chun points out, “all new media objects allegedly rely on—or, most strongly, can be reduced to—software, a visibly invisible or invisibly visible essence” (2013).

This paper finds its starting point precisely in this line of thinking - approaching worlding not only as an aesthetic practice of volumetric collage, it considers virtual worlds to be expressive systems rooted in software practices. Proposing that an analysis of worlding begins with the refusal to approach game worlds as isolated experiences, emphasising instead a need to consider them within their socio-material complexity, this research touches on aspects of production, authorship, speculation and non-human agencies in its encounters with worlding. By peering ‘under the hood’ of virtual world design, it identifies three spectres that haunt the practice of worlding, offering them up as reference points for an analysis that is situated in the soft, fuzzy formations that grow, inconspicuously, inside the hardened algorithmic structures of game production.

2. On Speculation, Software and Metaphor

Emerging as a critical strand of exploration within the arena of immersive worldbuilding, the practice of algorithmic worlding borrows subject matter, tools, and processes from feminist STS and speculative fiction in order to unsettle the paradigms of game design, slowly delineating the edges of a softer, more open practice concerned with the experimental patterning of possible realities. In doing so, it brings critical attention not only to the intents underpinning fictional worlds, but also to production processes and the relationships that form between developer and system. Through its manifestations of possible speculative futures via computational simulation, worlding counters the hegemonic impulses of contemporary game design patterns, thereby queering the sociotechnical existence of virtual worlds.

Drawing on a rich tradition of speculative practices within feminist thinking - from Donna Haraway’s call for a critical consideration of “what knots knot knots” (2016), to Ursula LeGuin’s search for “the other story” (1989) and Kathleen Stewart’s emphasis of the expressive potential of non-human agents (2012), worlding does not so much emphasise a conceptualisation of the world as mere volumetric set-up, but rather the intricate web of relations that is interwoven across fictions, facts, spatialities, artistic intents, politics, computational structures, affective states and evocative assemblages - “a mobile but more or less stable ensemble of practices, involvements, relations, capacities, tendencies and affordances” (Anderson & Harrison, 2010, 8).

On the ontological level, as Hunter and Palmer highlight, the transition from the noun ‘world’ to the verb ‘worlding’ denotes a shift “from a being to a doing; to a gerundive and generative process”; worlding as practice is itself illustrative of aliveness and agency, of the activity of setting up a world, rather than an emphasis on the world-as-is. The term becomes operative when situated in the context of computational simulation, where algorithms fulfil its generative desires. Acting as “the invisible whole that generates the sensuous parts” (Chun, 2013), software is central to an analysis of worlding with game engine technologies. Proposing a software-centred analysis of new media, Chun goes so far as to suggest that software itself can be seen as a “metaphor for metaphor”, a construct inherently entangled with power; at once an instrument of neoliberal capitalism and a method for creating “visions that go elsewhere”, Chun specifies that “spectres haunt us through our interfaces—by working with them we can collectively negotiate the dangers and pleasures of the worlds they encapsulate and explode” (2013).

This paper sets out to encounter the spectres that haunt the various interfaces of worlding with game engine technologies - from those operating at face value, at the top level of sealed-over code structures in the program’s interface, to those less visible, operating underneath visual scripts, governing the agencies at play and mediating across human and non-human intelligences. Tentatively engaging in a process of negotiation that accounts for socio-material complexities, this research aims to encounter the practice of worlding in its own habitat: crystallising inside the hardened structures of game engine technologies; spinning webs across theories, agents, dimensions and speculations; turning functionalities inside out, re-figuring and re-positioning as needed.

In doing so, metaphorical practice becomes a potent tool of enquiry for peering inside the technical and cultural blackbox of game world design. Deploying metaphor as method within software studies, Pritchard and Britton formulate a proposal for reimaging the parameters of Computer Science in their article ‘For Careful Slugs: Caring for Unknowing in CS (Computer Science)’ (2017). Launching a call for the opening up of the ‘CS’ acronym, they propose the ‘Careful Slug’ as one possible metaphor to soften the ossified values governing the domain of computing; the careful slug urges “the slowing down of computational operations, prescribes sticky constellations across material and immaterial agents and abandons categorization in favour of radical openness” (2017, 2). Responding to Aimee Bahng's proposal to “reach across speculative reality and wonder with, rather than marvel from a distance”(2017), Pritchard and Britton’s metaphor practice encourages engagement with software informed by alternative perspectives that materialise outside the rigid infrastructures of computer science methodologies – they urge software-practising communities to question “forms and formats of interventions that seek to remake the violent realities of dominant CS (Computer Science)” and look outside of these through the metaphor of the humble slug, who moves slowly and carefully, deliberately existing in slippery spaces where alternative epistemologies are in operation.

Seeking to extend this metaphorical practice to the context of game engine technologies, this paper situates computational worlding as a process of counter-cultural computation rooted in an unknowing of techno-capitalistic patterns driven by slow, experimental and speculative development. Frequently operating in accordance to different paradigms than the established labour structures and design patterns driving consumer-oriented game productions, worlding slips through the cracks in the calcified structures of virtual world design - like the careful slug, it lurks in the cracks, in the soft and fuzzy liminal spaces where speculations germinate.

3. Encounters with the Spectres of Worlding

The Engine

The first spectre encountered in our analysis of worlding is perhaps the least evident as such; the terminology of the ‘game engine’ is well-established within the game industry. In the literal sense, an engine is a machine that converts energy into mechanical power, facilitating movement and enabling vehicles to operate. Similarly, a game engine can be seen as the driving force behind a video game’s operation, converting code into real-time effects. It is the underlying software framework that powers the game, handling core functions such as rendering graphics, processing user inputs, simulating physics, managing artificial intelligence, and more. Just as a mechanical engine enables a car to move, a game engine empowers the game to run, bringing virtual environments to life by managing the complex interplay of various systems in real-time.

In this first haunting, this research argues for a socio-material conceptualisation of the engine that pushes past its pragmatic understanding as a purely technical tool. Beyond an integration of multiple subsystems that must operate in harmony to create a cohesive game experience, the game engine brings together multiple agencies: software, industrial complex, developer(s) and computational entities become entangled in a complex configuration of intents, processes and affects. As Castañeda writes, this process of refiguring a construct as a relational entity entails “generating accounts of necessarily powerful and yet still contestable worlds” (2002, 4).

A salient example of the socio-materiality of digital games can be observed manifesting in the eerie relationship forming between algorithm and novice developer - often posing a significant technical entry barrier, game engine technologies frequently present novices with difficult encounters; Montfort and Bogost highlight the fact that developers frequently need to work around software constraints, employing tricks and hacks to adapt available technology to their needs (2009). Furthermore, many of those interested in producing artistic interventions within the game engine hail from a non-technical background and must engage in a process of negotiation with a tool that, as Whitson shows, they often perceive to be “recalcitrant, wilful and needlessly abstruse” (2017). Through an ethnographic investigation, Whitson attempts to look into perceptions of the game development process cultivated by novice game developers at an indie games studio. Finding that they tend to perceive the game engine as “a site of messiness, negotiation and resistance”, Whitson shows how how games design processes are the result of constitutive entanglements of the social and the material - oftentimes perceived as capricious and acting outside of the artist’s intents, game engines tended to be seen as “exerting human-like agency and even magic” by those entering the practice (2017).

Within this relationship that Whitson maps, social and affective rapports to the software emerge - due to the fact that “we commonly respond to self-stabilising, black-boxed machines as if they exhibit consciousness of will and purpose” (2017), many novice developers tended to ascribe magical qualities to the obscure algorithmic operations that were complicating their desired creative outputs. As things became mis-rendered, unwilling to spawn in the correct place, distorted or glitchy, the novice game designers perceived these phenomena as the traits of a capricious entity which was ‘refusing to cooperate’, causing the software to morph into a perceived entity that constitutes “something magical in the sense that it is so complex as to be fully unknowable, definitely not something simply taught or learned quickly, but something arcane that one must tread lightly around” (2017).

This perception of the software as a magical actor unsettles the agencies at play within the process of worlding; the software itself becomes filled with agential force, now constituting an entity that intervenes in accordance with its own desires. Artistic intent becomes, therefore, shared between the artist’s idea and the software’s intransigence. These algorithmic resistances do not remain neutral - as things break or operate in a different manner than the developer expects, or limitations scripted into traditional patterns of game design assert themselves, they fold back into the design process, influencing artistic intentions. If the technical barrier is too high for errors to be identified and corrected, or for codebases to be bypassed, alternative routes are developed, oftentimes circumventing the original idea altogether (Whitson, 2017).

This first metaphor emphasises the need to shift the attention away from established notions of production, toward a more nuanced understanding of the engine as a web of relations as brought into being by complex human and nonhuman agencies. At the same time, it aims to bring attention to the relationships that form in the margins of developing game worlds, where alternative practices often draw on other knowledge(s) than the computational corpus that traditional games developers would, injecting other sensibilities and intents into the process of working with game engine technologies. As the example of perceived magical essence and capriciousness shows, game engines are socially and materially complex, interconnected systems that impact differently upon users and contexts and which are not only situated technically, but also socially, culturally and politically.

The Garden

The second haunting materialises through the metaphor of the ‘garden’: prioritising an ecological perspective on game worlds over the technical one active in mainstream debates, the garden encapsulates the lifeworld of the virtual space, which encompasses three-dimensional assemblages, technical entities, interactive and generative possibilities, artistic intent, codebases and software impositions. Relationality takes centre stage again, this time looking inwards, more intimately, towards the dynamics, exigencies and affective relations that form between world-maker and world instance. Much like a gardener tending to an ecology that operates across multiple agencies, virtual world-makers develop a nuanced relationship with the digital spaces and beings they work with, fostering a sense of care and stewardship.

This relationship operates in more complex ways than a developer-program rapport rooted in problem solving: the quest for progress and perfection shifts to a speculative exploration of possibility and a wandering with, rather than through, the game engine. In this arena, generative possibilities grow according to parameters sown within established code structures - often exploratory, these tactics seek new modes of expression rather than smooth operations. Much like the unpredictability of nature, the software ecology faces the one tending to the world with uncertainty: bugs appear and generate accidental outcomes, prompting a need to seek alternative paths; machine intelligence enables encounters with the unexpected, the spectral and wondrous; codebases act in capricious and arcane ways, triggering a need to re-configure possibilities. The magic-like capriciousness of the software framework, paired with the generative potential of computational operations structure an ecology of machinic agency that the gardener must operate with.

Structuring a counter-practice that operates inside the algorithmic infrastructure of the engine, this ‘gardening’ process is an experimental one, allowing for agents and relationships to develop in surprising and unexpected ways at various scales, oftentimes working against the intended purposes of the code frameworks at play; within this process, the world-shaper takes on an alternative, speculative (and oftentimes affective) role that moves beyond the pre-determined structures of ‘building’, ‘developing’ and ‘powering’ a system and into ‘caring for’, ‘evolving’ and ‘adapting’ a world.

The concept of gardening is not new to discussions of authorship and computation; from Miller's vision of a “horticulture-inspired programming methodology” (2018) to Stepney et. al.’s proposal of “an unconventional computational framework for growing cyber-physical systems” (2012), computer scientists have looked towards nature previously in order to envision the future of computational frameworks. Hunt and Thomas draw parallels between gardening and software at the individual level of experience (1999), highlighting the similarities between the iterative processes and feedback loops operating within software practices to those present in tending to the unpredictability of a garden; specifying that “coding is not mechanical” (Thomas, 2013), they emphasise the process of negotiation with the computer and the fluidity of adaptation as crucial in practices of software craftsmanship. Within artistic practice contexts, Ridler et al. (2020) describe thinking of software development as gardening, highlighting a mode of engagement that values patience, adaptability, and care.

This ethos stands in direct opposition to established circuits of production within the game industry, where a focus on perfecting the output, minimising bugs and neutralising any unexpected behaviours is quickly enforced by development teams. Contrast establishes itself between industry labour practices (involving large-scale development teams) and the small-scale, ad-hoc organisational model of artistic worlding (where individuals, collectives, or small-sized teams work to develop artefacts). Consequently, whilst the games design industry focuses on speed, control and power, with the game director having jurisdiction over production decisions, worlding finds its focus in slow, iterative and exploratory processes. A de-stabilisation of the traditional game world production model occurs, causing a transmutation of the figure of the game ‘architect’ into the less glamorous role of a ‘keeper’ of the virtual ecology.

Implying a continuous process of care, the metaphor of the ‘gardener’ deploys the method of ‘iterative gardening’ as a line of flight for the exploration of the care-based relationship developing between computational game worlds and the ones that grow, maintain and care for them. In this context, care means more than just writing code; it involves regularly updating, evolving, fixing, and adapting the software to keep its liveliness going, across many realms: conceptual, technical, aesthetic. This is not only a technical process of maintenance; it also structures an affective web of relations, where artists often feel attached to the worlds and entities that they produce - Cheng, for example, likens the process of maintaining a world to caring for a pet or a child (2022), highlighting the affective rapport and the high degree of responsibility felt towards such worlds.

The method of iterative gardening also draws on emerging ideas around “radical gardening” (McKay, 2011) which reimagines the practice of gardening as an act of resistance and empowerment, one that intersects with environmental activism, social justice, and community-building. McKay explores how gardens can serve as sites of political expression, cultural resistance, and ecological restoration, forming alternative approaches that challenge industrial agriculture, urban development, and environmental degradation. Similarly, the iterative gardening processes shaped by those engaged in worlding practices stand in opposition to the industrial mindset that governs contemporary game production methods. They resist the drive for rapid production, uniformity, and control, instead embracing a more organic, thoughtful approach that values slow growth, diversity, experimentation, adaptation and watchfulness over virtual environments.

The artist works with, rather than through, game development, thereby challenging the dominant narratives of efficiency, power and control operating within the industry. By framing worlding practices as processes of iterative gardening, the ethical and cultural dimensions of software development are foregrounded as this metaphor travels beyond the notion of authorship as a unilateral or industry-driven imposition of control. Highlighting the continuous, caring labour that underpins the formulation and maintenance of immersive virtual environments when produced outside of the industrial complex of games design, this metaphor situates worlding as an ongoing process of nurturing, rather than manufacturing, opening up more holistic views around digital authorship and the relationships that form between human actor and technical object in such software practices.

The Oracle

The final haunting explores the wielding of game engine technologies as speculative probes within artistic processes that engage in the patterning of other realities. The tendency to use these software structures for the simulation of alternative or future worlds positions them as oracular technologies; operating as navigational toolkits for looking towards the future from within an uncertain present, they allow for the prototyping of complex, infinitely scalable worlds that encapsulate a multitude of contexts and agents. Their ability to simulate complex, three-dimensional worlds is not the only element that suggests an oracular nature: the spectre of the oracle is embodied in the agential force of computation as it manifests through emergent behaviours that result from procedural operations and generative algorithms embedded in the software structures that materialise virtual worlds.

The construct of the oracle is an archetypal figure of human culture, present across many mystical traditions. The latin “orare”, to speak, delineates the agency of a more-than-human entity which has the ability to communicate with an audience, translating an inaccessible type of knowledge into something graspable, experiential. As Eidinow emphasises, oracles were often consulted during tumultuous times or in the face of an uncertain future - in the same way, contemporary worlding practices are grounded in the precarities of the present as they look outwards towards possible futures. Worlds like Bucknell’s “The Martian Word for World is Mother” (2022), which envisions possible futures of habitation on Mars; Steensen’s “Primal Tourism” (2016), which engages in climate speculations to critique tourism, colonialism and the legacies of extractivist practices; or Cheng’s Bag of Beliefs (2018-19), which probes the possible futures of non-human intelligences as they intertwine with human consciousness, all take root in a desire to critically address the contemporary condition.

Eidinow further highlights that, across antiquity, oracles were perceived to operate outside of human reason, out of an “unreason” accessible only to them (2007); historically considered to be mystical knowledge, this ‘unreason’ represented a system that existed outside of human consciousness - too complex to grasp, this ‘other’ knowledge was non-human in nature, the oracle constituting the point of translation between the mystical and human realities. As such, an understanding of the oracle as a translation point that serves to attune the human to other ways of knowing positions it as an instrumental metaphor for conceptualising the points of contact where the generative, emergent qualities of software are encountered.

This final spectral metaphor therefore argues that the oracle is a lens through which to view the algorithms that script uncertainty, wonder and surprise into virtual worlds, translating the inaccessible logic of software operations into simulated realities that are not only representationally complex, but which contain intelligent agents or adaptable states which manifest according to emergence. Mediating across code and human experience, these oracle entities speak from a more-than-human position, exerting the agency of the technical within these simulated worlds. They exist in continuous states of becoming, perpetually generating, updating, evolving as data streams modulate their translation of software into content. Oftentimes, as we see in Cheng’s Bag of Beliefs (2019), the audience can directly engage with an oracular agent, feeding more data into the simulation through real-time interactions.

Oracular practices are not apolitical; on the contrary, they emerge in antithesis to the labour practices of contemporary culture. Through the lens of Adorno’s dialectic materialism, the oracular qualities of computational generativity reflect the ways in which experimental software practices might enable a separation from labour and commodity, moving towards practices that are immanent to their own laws. What is proposed here is a reconsideration of the relationship between virtual worlds and the social ground against which they are defined. Worlding experiments operate against instrumental reason, sitting in opposition to the logics of content production scripted across codebases, functionalities and intended use cases of the technologies that govern them. In both form and content, they move away from the reasonings that inform their algorithmic infrastructure and travel towards ‘unreason’, looking for experimental, glitchy, strange and speculative uses that sanction the primacy of industrialised software.

Adorno reflects on how art has the ability to both mirror and reject the loss of human agency within creative cultures driven by commodities and capitalistic production systems (2007, 5) - a loss of agency that we also witness across game production techniques, where platforms that centralise practices and content emerge. Not subsumed to the technical division of labour native to mass production, the worlds that result out of the misuse of game engine technologies both reflect the industrial complex of game design and pull away from the crystallised formats of the practice; through oracular interventions, indeterminacy and uncertainty are injected into the world-assemblage, allowing technical agencies to explore new territories. As such, the metaphor of the oracle seeks to situate game engines as technologies of speculation and artistic potential rather than platforms for content production, positioning the oracle as a translation point between the operational knowledge of software and the affective structures of lived experience.

4. Conclusion

The engine, the garden and the oracle are, in the end, metaphors for the same thing: software; they embody the same technical entity operating at different scales: as the infrastructure that ‘powers’ a virtual world, the lifeword of the technical assemblage and the uncertainty of generative possibility. Departing from Chun’s proposal that software in itself is a metaphor and can be understood as such, this paper delineates three metaphors through which the speculative use of game engine technologies can begin to be explored. Through these three spectres that haunt the emergent practice of worlding, this work aims to open up a theoretical framing that engages with the socio-political contexts of virtual worlds. Emphasising an organic perspective on virtual world design over a purely technical one, this paper has sought to make visible some of the ways in which game engine technologies are used in alternative contexts to those prescribed by techno-capitalism: with particular attention to the calcified patterns of game design and the game industry’s tendency towards auto-cannibalism, metaphorical practice is used to reveal the ways in which slow, intentional and careful artistic computation methodologies take shape within these platform technologies, foregrounding experimentation, wonder and uncertainty.

In order to situate worlding as a practice, a change in the way that we think about the creation of virtual worlds is needed– one that slips through some of the openings and cracks in the hardened shell of game engine infrastructures and embraces uncertainty, care and speculation – a perspective that centres values and processes with intention and breaks away from the imperialist logic dominating software structures, generating a complex cultural politics. As such, worlding proposes a refiguration of the game engine itself, asking us to abandon its habitual techno-capitalist infrastructures and engage in worldbuilding otherwise. By creating an inroad towards a politics of algorithmic worlding, this work aims to open up further critical discussion of artistic practices that refuse the commodified form of the game and propose alternative paths that lead outside the mainstream intents, processes and labours governing contemporary virtual worlds.