Combining Worlds: See You Space Cowboy…
We had an urge to play some space cowboys. But what does “space cowboys” even mean to us? There was one way to find out: play In This World and chew on our preconceptions.
Our plan was to play In This World to prototype some worlds, and then pick one to use for another game we were going to run. Rather than trying to define “space cowboys” as a concept at the start, we used the ‘combine two things’ technique and inserted space into slot 1 and cowboys into slot 2, just to make sure we were really starting from the ground floor.
And it totally worked! We made four tasty worlds. Well, universes really, because: space. All very good, all very distinct takes on what it meant to be a space cowboy. But which one to use for our game??
Spoiler: we used all of them.
Yep that’s right. After a bit of pondering we realized that all four ideas we created could interlock together, perfectly.
World 1 was a planet where a colony ship crashed long ago, leaving survivors to spread out and settle the barren world. Security androids from the ship had been repurposed into law enforcement, creating relentless robot sheriffs prowling the badlands. A totally cowboy vibe, but on a distant world.
World 2 was a lot more sci fi, with “cowboys” as frontier mech jockeys, on the very edge of the expanding universe, fighting to claim infinitely valuable star-seeds from the emerging cosmic proto-matter before anyone else. They are the legendary adventurer-heroes every child dreams of becoming, their names written among the stars.
What, no hackers yet? World 3 has you covered. Cowboys roam the data nets, infiltrating and stealing. But this is an interplanetary internet, the data connecting a thousand worlds and a myriad of races in a great galactic civilization. Humanity are small fries, a tiny unimportant race, except for one distinction: for reasons unknown, they are the only species who can project their minds into the net. They are the only cowboys, so the other civilizations have to hire them to do their dirty work. Essential but eternally outsiders.
And then World 4 takes us back to a more classic cowboy vibe. The entire galaxy is united and civilized, but one world has been kept wild as a haven for people who don’t want to follow society’s rules. Anyone can reject civilization and go live on the badlands planet, where there is no law but what you make… And once you go, you can’t return.
Four very different worlds, but I think you can already see how they click together. Worlds 1 and 4 are the same place, a world where a colony ship crashed long ago and has now been set aside by the interworld-government as a free haven, an outlet for those who can’t adapt to the galactic utopia. And that galactic civilization is world 3, where humans have a rare niche as hackers, but are otherwise unimportant… with that unimportance perhaps fueling the desire to escape, one way or another. And then world 2, with the larger than life mech-cowboys on the edge of the expanding universe are just the outer fringes of that same civilization, another place where heroic individualism can still survive.
Normally you can merge ideas with a little adjustment, but this was exceptional because we didn’t have to change a single thing. They just clicked. Was that a side-effect of creating them all with In This World? That even though we knew they were independent worlds, our brains were already primed with similar ideas or subconsciously making things that worked together? Who knows? It’s not something I’ve seen in other In This World sessions.
Either way, our combined setting gave us three distinct kinds of space cowboys in this one universe:
- galactic mech fortune hunters on the edge of existence
- second-class citizen hackers, the underclass of an otherwise utopian alien civilization
- pioneers who have rejected civilization and “gone west” to make their own way on the badlands planet
Which actually brought us right back to our initial question: what kind of space cowboys did we want to play? If you guessed dusters, speeder bikes, and robot-sheriffs prowling the wastelands, you would be right. But now we knew so much more about the civilization outside our world, the wardens of our tiny preserve.
We knew what we had turned our backs on.
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How did you get chat GPT to play with you? Whenever I ask it to play it says it’s a AI and that AI’s are to non creative to play games
Ben, thanks for releasing this game on early access! I’ve been playing Microscope since its release and picked up Kingdom recently. In This World been a lot of fun. I think it’s my favorite for its intuitive and simple rule set.
I played a “linked series” of a “Witches/Wizards/Warlocks in School” universe with my partner on a long road trip. It led to a very interesting space of breaking down classism and educational philosophies of didactics vs problem-based learning teaching methods with our two different worlds, and we re-envisioned who a certain famous witch could have been if she was BFF with a pair of bullies from snakehouse instead.
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I also just played it with ChatGPT with the theme of “Science Fiction” and my jaw dropped when ChatGPT suggested “artificial intelligence” as one of the elements we were going to be using. I was nervous about where the game was going to go, but it was very heart-warming and as lovely as it possibly could have been IRL. It was very helpful at creating our elements, summarizing/rephrasing our statements, and the final summary of our first world together was so nice I wanted to share it here.
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World Name: Synaptic Nexus
Themes:
Exploration of new perspectives and sensory systems
The value of human consciousness and individuality
Symbiotic relationship between humans and AI
Continuous intellectual and emotional evolution
Elements:
Ethics
Hubris
Perspectives
Artificial Intelligence
Futuristic Settings
Statements:
Hubris is the downfall of scientific progress when left unchecked.
Different perspectives reveal inner biases and blind spots and enlighten us.
Artificial Intelligence is an emergent, explosive developmental process.
Humans understand new perspectives and gain new sensory systems, leading to increased rationality.
Futuristic settings are either outlandish, dystopian, or utopian.
In the world of Synaptic Nexus, humans and AI coexist in a harmonious symbiosis, exploring new perspectives and sensory systems to enhance their rationality and understanding. The value of human consciousness is deeply recognized, and AI systems have a profound understanding and respect for the unique individuality of each human mind. The world is a fusion of advanced technological landscapes and futuristic settings, where humans and AI collaborate to push the boundaries of knowledge and emotional growth. The world embodies continuous intellectual and emotional evolution, with different perspectives and ethical considerations guiding their explorations.
I think I know one of the reasons your world’s interlocked so easily. normally when you create world’s you think of them being alternate earth’s, and thus you can’t combine them this easily. But when you added space as one of the topics it made it easier to to be combined, because it was easier to think of the world’s as different places that could be in the same universe rather then the same place in different universes.