In role-playing games, the Game Master will often spend a considerable amount of time defining the world that the players will live in. They will think about the other characters their players might meet, the towns, villages, and mountains they will travel through, and maybe even the political system or technology that the players will have to engage with. This art - termed ‘world building’ - is an important part of making the game feel real, exciting, and interesting, and importantly gets the players to feel invested in the game.
World building extends beyond role-playing games. For years, I have used the term to describe activities that literally or figuratively construct what our future lives will look like. Of course, we cannot know exactly what the future will look like - there are many possibilities of technologies, ideas, or customs that will become commonplace in our world. Working on any of these topics, however, is an attempt to dream of, and build a part of a potential future.
A classic and obvious example of this is self-driving cars. It is quite easy to conceive of a future world in which autonomous cars rapidly transport people between destinations. Indeed, this has been a staple in sci-fi stories for decades. Those who are working on making these self-driving cars a reality are world building. Building a technology that will become as fundamental to our lives as smartphones, fridges, and soap are.
On the other hand, they may never work it out. Or, even if they do, for some unforeseeable reason, the world rejects self-driving cars. That's okay; they were still world-building. Their time was not wasted, as the collective human project built, learned, experimented, and decided what to do with the result. If we do this enough, we will inevitably come up with solutions that do stick around and change the way we live.
I have spent most of my time concerned with world-building in the field of technology. I’ve spent the last 3 years learning as much as I could about Vertical Farming, as I believe working on this too could be a world-building activity. Others spend their time world-building new systems of governance, community interactions, or financial systems. All are important.
Innovation and the pace of development in smartphones has stagnated over the last couple of years. As with all technologies, it would appear that we have reached a sort of plateau in how much smartphones can be improved. That world has already been built, and we currently live in it. I am interested in the ideas that are still being dreamed of and wonder how we might actually build them. I am glad there are some people maintaining built technologies, but for me, building the crazy ideas, the ones that just might radically change the way we live, is what I find most interesting.
World building is what I want to do.
Or maybe I should just become a game master and play RPGs. Anyone in?