Some anthropologists believe that interactive stories were invented alongside the campfire, when the elders of the tribe would incorporate audience suggestions and reactions into their performance. If this is true, then the idea of a singular author dictating the narrative is a more modern invention.
The author has been sitting alone in his chair for quite some time now, comfortably narrating the epics of great Heroes, Kings, Warriors. Of Achilleses and Parises, Kenobis and Palpatines, Potters and Voldemorts, Disneys and Bezoses. Before we knew it, our “stories had all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero”. **But it was never really our story, it’s always been his. In it, we, the audience, are to grow from the story, but never make the story grow.
We are entering an age where the audience, again, can transform the underlying structures and narrative logics of the Worlds they inhabit. Real-time rendering engines have offered a first glance into these Worlds; on-chain autonomy will slam their gates open.
To help dissipate the thick fog of war blanketing this new era, we have begun to map its fruitful yet labyrinthine lands, and compiled an archaeological record of the times preceding it.
Disney (and it is no accident that his films are drawn) is a complete return to a world of complete freedom (not accidentally fictitious), freed from the necessity of another primal extinction… A fictitious world. A world of lines and colours which subjugates and alters itself to your [the animator’s] command. You tell a mountain: move, and it moves. You tell an octopus: be an elephant, and the octopus becomes an elephant. You ask the sun to stop, and it stops.
The era of Worldbuilding is characterized by the prerendered and steadily progressing arrow of the Hero’s Journey: a circular narrative starting from the beginning and, intuitively, finishing at the end. It is a centralized, top-down model of creation, one in which the author acts as a supreme gatekeeper of what can and cannot enter the World’s walls. The author is a genius sculpting the World out of time—to use Andrei Tarkovsky’s analogy—the only individual with agency and control over his creation. The World itself has no autonomy to change or evolve. It remains immutable, preserved through aeons in an amber shell.
These are the immortal Worlds of Mickey Mouse, Harry Potter, and Lara Croft, hosting audiences as temporary inhabitants—or rather tourists—eager to consume their epic narratives.
Worldbuilding is an activity streamlined for success and capitalization at the expense of the inhabitants’ agency, which is reduced to the mere passive consumption of the World’s events. While this consumption might induce some emotional assimilation and produce byproducts (think of “apocryphal” fanfiction) these will never be accepted as canon to be reintegrated into the World itself.