The world underneath the story

I had this idea for an essay earlier this year on what generative AI means for the niche of ambitious procedural world generators like Dwarf Fortress (which seeds history with “a giant zero-player strategy game”) and Ultima Ratio Regum (its goal being “nothing short of the procedural generation of culture”). I’ve always been fascinated by traditional procedural generation and how a bunch of simple rules can come together to create emergent storytelling and infinitely replayable games like roguelikes.

Anyway, the piece never quite came together, but the subject is relevant again with the Any Human Ever historical simulation (the site is down as I write this—probably exceeded its token budget). The premise is simple: the simulation plucks you out of a place and time at random, spits out a few demographic tidbits about your character, their life, and the lives of the people around them, and then tells you how you died (usually at six months of starvation).

It’s an interesting idea, of course, but as pointed out in the Hacker News thread, the vibe-coded factual grounding of the simulation leads to a lot of anachronistic or contradictory results. A more interesting project is historian Benjamin Breen’s Universal History Simulator (context & GitHub), a sort of drop-yourself-anywhere-in-history roguelike grounded in a database of real primary sources.

I don’t think this post has any grand point, other than highlighting two interesting projects. But I do have one worry about what this shortcut to historical simulation might do to the ambition of traditional procedural generation projects.

The appeal of something like Dwarf Fortress or Ultima Ratio Regum is not just that it produces absorbing stories, but that these stories actually emerge from the game’s systems. Lifelike worlds come out of stacking simple rules on top of one another, sort of like the apparent synchronization of a flock of birds whose members are in reality following simple local rules.

LLMs let you skip all that and shake a narrative directly out of a black box that sounds like the outcome of a complicated simulation.

Maybe that’s enough for most cases, but I’d hate to lose the world underneath the story.

Hat tip to thinkingemote on Hacker News.