(Cinema → Games → AI) [[Worldmaking]] Across cinema, games, and emerging AI systems, a new narrative form is becoming legible, one in which the world itself is the primary intelligence, and humans function as probes, caretakers, or sacrificial nodes within larger systems. This form is not genre-bound. It is a shift in where meaning resides. ## Worldmaking as Cognitive Act In classical narrative, meaning is generated through characters: their psychology, desires, conflicts, and resolutions. In worldmaking forms, meaning is generated through world coherence. Rules matter more than motives Infrastructure matters more than dialogue Constraints matter more than choice The world thinks by: constraining action producing consequences demanding sacrifice enforcing limits Narrative becomes an emergent property of this cognition. ### Cinema Learns to Think in Worlds Certain films abandon character primacy and instead operate at the scale of: cities planets zones systems. These works are often misread as emotionally distant or narratively thin. In reality, they displace emotion from psychology to orientation. Feeling emerges not through identification, but through exposure to scale, inevitability, and cost. Cinema, in these cases, becomes a world diagram: a static but dense snapshot of a thinking system. ### Games as World Interfaces Games go further. Unlike cinema, games allow the world to answer back. A game world: resists the player teaches through failure encodes values as rules remembers actions The player is not a hero, but a perturbation; a temporary intelligence testing the world’s logic from inside. This makes games the first medium where: world logic precedes representation Games do not tell us what a world means. They show us what happens when we act within it. ### Orientation Before Empathy Across worldmaking cinema and games, a shared reversal occurs: Understanding comes before feeling. The inhabitant must first: learn spatial rules accept opacity read systems endure friction Only later does emotion emerge; often indirectly, as recognition, grief, or awe. This presumes a form of world literacy, cultivated less by literature or film than by games and simulations. ### Characters as Functions In worldmaking forms, characters are deliberately depersonalized. They operate as: civic roles ritual functions metabolic components This is not a failure of characterization but a return to mythic logic, where individuals matter insofar as the world requires them. Sacrifice is not moral spectacle. It is system maintenance. The central narrative question shifts from: “What does this character want?” to: “What does this world demand to persist?” ### AI as the Next Worldmaking Medium AI extends worldmaking beyond authored systems into learning systems. Where cinema shows worlds, and games simulate worlds, AI models worlds. AI worlds: adapt over time remember interaction anticipate futures reconfigure themselves Authorship shifts from writing outcomes to designing conditions. Meaning is no longer resolved. It is continuously negotiated. ### From Agency to Stewardship As worlds begin to think and learn, the human role changes. No longer: protagonist master solver But: caretaker witness responsibility node Agency becomes distributed, delayed, and ethical. Games are the training ground for this shift, teaching how to act without full knowledge, how to care without control, and how to live inside systems larger than oneself. ### Working Hypothesis Narrative is an emergent property of coherent, responsive worlds. Cinema approached this limit. Games crossed it. AI radicalizes it. The task ahead is not to tell better stories, but to build worlds capable of teaching, caring, and enduring. Treat the world as an epistemic agent Let characters function as interfaces, not centers Encode ethics in rules and persistence, not dialogue Accept delayed meaning as structural Design for orientation, not explanation If the world is coherent, interaction will produce meaning.