Everybody Wants to Rule (a) World

Art writer Al Warburton argues that artistic worldbuilding, from Ian Cheng's autonomous simulations to Alice Bucknell's deliberately failing game mods, is closely tied to the sandbox play of games and to a wider urge to find agency in virtual systems. Warburton says the impulse links artists to outsiders who design socially destructive platforms, such as Mark Zuckerberg, whom he describes as coding an interface to ease discomfort around women on campus. He contrasts Bucknell's The Alluvials (2023–24), a Grand Theft Auto V mod about Los Angeles water politics, with Pippin Barr's V R 3 (2017), which explores the technical components of digital water rather than a political reality.