Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung 2017

Activity: Participating in or organising an academic or articstic eventConferencesResearch

Mathias Fuchs - Speaker

Non-intentional Worldmaking?

It sounds like a very sad or even a spoilsport comment, that every worldmaking in a Goodmanian sense (Goodman 1978) is neccesssarily threatened or rather doomed to face a world-withdrawal (Heidegger 1935/36) - at least in the case of the arts and computer game worlds. The artist (or the computer game designer) makes a world that is confirmed or remade by the recipient (the player). But this world stops „worlding“ as soon as the work is finished. The world withdraws from the fictional piece and the piece is left on its own with not much more than reminiscence of worlds gone. So far we have a familiar and all too human process of creation and demise of world. But what happens if the creation of the world is turned into a procedural event, that needs no human artist or designer dirtying their hands. The recent disputes about No Man’s Sky, the computer game that algorithmically spawns 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets in a giant universe, presents a clear deviation from human worldmaking. According to the game developers „No Man’s Sky is a science-fiction game, set in an infinite procedural universe.“ (Murray 2017)
20.09.201723.09.2017
Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung 2017

Event

Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung 2017: Wirklichkeiten und Weltenbauen

20.09.1723.09.17

Vienna, Austria

Event: Conference