# Everybody Wants to Rule (a) World

Source: https://outlandart.substack.com/p/everybody-wants-to-rule-a-world?r=uiuub&triedRedirect=true
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Everybody-Wants-to-Rule-a-World?index=0x6973efa830b675421eb60f97b882e0285d39efffdf5f740f33bad5a14432ed02128e7c8c
Submitted by misha on 2026-01-23 UTC, 1 upvote, 0 comments

## Summary

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.

## Article

Ian Cheng: Emissaries (2015–17)

In his ebook Emissary’s Guide to Worlding, Ian Cheng suggests that the work of worldbuilders like himself involves “conceiving, incubating, triggering, and nurturing [a World]... that promises to survive its creator.” Cheng’s cosmology of worlding is therefore concerned with autonomy: his systems are designed to persist beyond the artist’s involvement and his programmed characters are meant to experience some degree of generative freedom.

For me, Cheng’s interest in autonomous systems speaks to a broader shift in how both artists and audiences experience agency. For the precarious artist, worldbuilding offers an empowering form of creative expression; for the overwhelmed audience, virtual worlds feed a longing for safer or simpler social enclaves. Within this framing, artistic worldbuilding is just one aspect of a wider impulse toward organized play that extends across games, film, fan fiction, collectibles, tabletop RPGs, LARPing, and MMORPGs. In other words, virtualized autonomy is a panacea for real-world impotence.

This idea has lore. H.G Wells followed up The War of the Worlds (1898) with a slim volume titled Floor Games (1911), a guide to imaginative play that inspired child psychologist Margaret Lowenfield’s “world technique,” a psychotherapeutic trauma treatment strategy involving proxy objects, speculative systems, and hypothetical selves. Lowenfeld’s technique was rooted in what she called “sand play,” which links directly to the computer scientist’s practice of using “sandboxes,” or bubble operating systems, to test code in isolation. Then and now, sandboxes are places of experimentation: oxygenated safe spaces that help us understand how subjects and objects—digital or otherwise—both program and are programmed.

Wells’s Floor Games is often described as a companion to the less whimsical Little Wars (1913), his book of rules for playing with toy soldiers, and there certainly is a seam of military-industrial history running through the sandbox. While playful, Cheng’s systems have something slightly megalomaniacal about them (as do my own crowd simulation projects), recalling Harun Farocki’s claim in Parallel I-IV (2012–14) that digital worldbuilding summons the “child who cuts open a doll to probe the mysteries of representation,” cyberfeminist Donna Haraway’s famous assertion that simulation technologies are a heteropatriarchal “god trick,” as well as the pathology of Ayn Rand’s tyrant architect Howard Roark. What seems obvious is that, as a form of sand play, worldbuilding is alternately recuperative and totalitarian, a space for both the rehearsal of and recovery from harm.

You could speculate that worldbuilding attracts both dictators and caretakers, but my pet thesis is more complex. I think many worldbuilders are attracted to systems design because something about us is naturally at odds with the world as it is, so we pivot to a proxy world for safety, reflection, or simply a feeling of agency. At one end of this spectrum we find the artist designing speculative systems and radical utopias. At the other end we have poor Zuck, coding an interface that mitigates the discomfort he feels interacting with women on campus. Obviously, we diverge from each other in crucial ways, but there’s a shared codebase here: we’re all outsiders constructing formulas to remedy a lack of IRL agency.

One artist that problematizes virtual agency is the intensely prolific Alice Bucknell. Their work includes The Alluvials (2023–24), a Grand Theft Auto V mod about water politics in Los Angeles that blends multiple game mechanics and lets players inhabit nonhuman characters including a river, a fire, a sycamore tree, and a mountain lion. Bucknell’s use of games engines works as a capacious receptacle for site-specific and research-driven interventions, yet in ambitiously kitbashing so much technical infrastructure, their practice also inherits some of the madcap ambition of the neighborhood eccentric who builds a grotto from scrap metal or seashells.

For Bucknell, this is all part of a queer politics that explores the mechanics of failure and impotence. Or as Bucknell puts it in an excellent interview with HOLO’s Alexander Scholz, The Alluvials gameplay intentionally invokes feelings of “frustration, anger, annoyance, disappointment, sadness, confusion and hurt” in order to reflect the powerlessness many feel in the face of climate collapse. On the surface, this janky approach to worldbuilding might seem to have something in common with Cheng’s low-poly, self-sustaining simulations, but there’s a key difference: Bucknell’s work is made to fall apart.

Installation view of Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials (2023–24)

This failure-as-function mechanic comes straight from the queer theory playbook, where glitching a system reveals the fragile illusion of power. Yet glitch as an artistic-political strategy has always elided a more complex truth: the fact that queers (particularly those of us who are trans or neurodivergent) have always been key players in the construction of working cybernetic systems. We’re experts at turning sandboxes into reality. This fact alone complicates the politics of glitch and prompts us to consider how we might not always have to break something to understand its power. Indeed, glitch is a constant in most systems, and our understanding of it emerges naturally through the subjective, interrogative form of accounting that sandbox play involves.

Here, I think of games artist Pippin Barr, whose formalist, open-access work contrasts with the cosmopoietic ambition of both Bucknell and Cheng. He pays a lot of attention to that other, pre-digital sandbox—the white cube. In V R 3 (2017), he references Donald Judd’s canonical installation 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–86), two giant artillery sheds in Marfa that house shiny metal boxes arranged in grids. Barr fills Judd’s cubic forms with digital water, from Unity’s ProWater to Paolo Pedercini’s Low Poly Water and a range of third-party downloads, drawing attention to the various technical hacks used to describe reflectance, color, or surface detail. Much like Farocki’s Parallel I-IV, V R 3 is a worldbuilding 101 project that supplies taxonomical concepts for others to build on.

Pippin Barr: V R 3 (2017)

Barr’s reflexive media-archeological approach doesn’t use Unreal asset libraries and game mods to make a statement about a separate political reality, but is instead engaged with a qualitative interrogation of the stuff games are made of (which is also the title of his excellent book). As such he treats the elemental components of digital worldbuilding with a touch more curiosity than more ambitious worldbuilding projects. Barr’s practice is much more about surfacing the technical antagonisms of an industrial product, offering a way out of spectator/player mode into a more agential state of worldbuilding. And perhaps it’s because I know that worldbuilding truly thrives upstream of spectatorship that I enjoy the generosity of Barr’s invitation to paddle that way.

Cheng, Bucknell, and Barr’s various approaches to worldbuilding show that whether producing critical sandboxes, infinitely generative systems, or failed queer utopias, those drawn to systems-building inherit more than a little from the furtive practices of the miniaturist, the modelmaker, the dollmaker, the puppeteer, or the outsider artist—even what used to be termed the “pervert” or “invert.” This is what unites the artistic worldbuilder with their cousins who design socially destructive platforms, and it reveals that we—the benevolent stewards of proxy universes—are often closer to enemy terrain than we like to think.

Al Warburton is an applied media theorist working directly with CGI, AI, XR, VR, and ML between art, industry, and academia.

alanwarburton.co.uk