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This scholarly paper presents an innovative conceptual framework that draws upon insights from fictional narratives to inform the evolution of the metaverse, a burgeoning digital ecosystem with transformative potential. The study examines key elements of fictional works, including world-building techniques, social interaction dynamics, narrative structures, and ethical considerations, to illuminate the complexities of designing immersive virtual environments. Our primary findings indicate that consistency and coherence in world-building significantly enhance user immersion and engagement in virtual environments. Furthermore, the integration of diverse cultural and historical elements in the metaverse can foster inclusivity and enrich user experiences. Additionally, ethical considerations, such as privacy, digital identity, and accessibility, are paramount to the development of a responsible and inclusive metaverse. These findings underscore the importance of fiction as a source of inspiration, foresight, and caution for metaverse development. The proposed framework aims to amalgamate the imaginative realms of fiction with the practical applications of virtual environments, thereby facilitating the creation of a metaverse that is engaging, inclusive, and ethically responsible.

Rosi Braidotti's theory of "nomadic subject" (2011) has shifted the focus from traveller in the literal sense of the word to subject as a process; becoming subject entails a denial of universals in the construction of identity which is redefined as situated embodiment in the world, open to the heteronormativity of changing social codes and accepted modes of living or of conceiving otherness. Nevertheless, travel has always been associated with an explicit ethos, whether as a pious pilgrimage, educational world tour or the grand narrative of civilizing mission. Located on various maps, real or imaginary, civilizations are brought into contact by the huge number of migrants, the problems they raise including the relationship between third worlds and metropolitan cities/countries, the migrants' othering by mainstream populations, the migrants' desire to be naturalised and the estrangement from their true selves as a result. By building simulation models, speculative fiction probes deeply into underground concerns which well up to the surface in postcolonial literature, being expected to produce cognitive enlightenment. Relieved from the material deprivations of the colonial past, the postcolonial subject is now caught in the process of identitarian reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article concerns the functioning of selected collectibles in the post-apocalyptic dilogy of digital games The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013-2020). The authors make a typology of collectibles and distinguish among them props that support the gameplay, characterize the characters and extend the storyworld, referring to the prop theory proposed by Kendal Walton. They are particularly interested in the last type of props, which include notes, diaries and letters left in various places of the world presented by anonymous members of the American community. The authors indicate that these props can be treated as specific artifacts of the past, which, although not important from the gameplay perspective, perform important world-creating functions. In this context, they describe collectibles as an element of historical culture (J. Rüsen) and a source of social memory (M. Golka), and discuss their allotopic potential (U. Eco, K.M. Maj). They refer to those props that shape the history and mythology of the post-apocalyptic world, and especially to the notes describing Outbreak Day, the apogee of the pandemic disease that decimated humanity in the game. Written sources are of a personal nature - they present an individual perspective on a breakthrough moment in the history of the depicted world. For this reason, the authors refer to them as ego-props, thus extending the concept of ego-document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speculative fiction is commonly associated with highly involved artistic world-building. Indeed, speculation itself as an artistic practice often involves creation of detailed, grand-scale imaginary scenarios that come across as worlds the reader is invited to interpret as coherent systems. By analysing such grand-scale speculation in Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters (2020/2022), I demonstrate how such focus on modelling an imaginary world makes the novel a vehicle for various kinds of grand-scale thought experiments ranging from exploration of global ethics and meditations on cosmic order to conceptual reflection on speculative world-building itself as a manner of engaging with reality. This analysis offers a view to world-building in speculative fiction as a means for going beyond the everyday scale of human life, viewing the imaginary world as a heuristic model for interpreting our own reality.

Investing in different futures is an existential challenge that much research within and adjacent to Ecological Economics engages with, yet organizations that recognize this social ecological imperative have few options for funding and implementing radical transformations to the needs and well-being provisioning systems that currently exist. Ecological macroeconomic ideas and EE principles of long term well being and justice on a livable planet will be explored in the context of the housing crisis in Canada, and a rural Ontario community organization attempting to find transformative solutions to the lived, local experience of this crisis. Provisioning systems for housing, when tied to real estate markets, debt money creation, land enclosures, and financialized supply chains, contribute to capital accumulation cycles; it is hardly possible to meet our housing needs, in aggregate, without also perpetuating the form of this provisioning system. The idea presented here, that of Capital Sequestration, proposes to remove capital from markets and `invests' this capital in land trusts as an intentional transformation of financial capital into social and ecological values. Through land and housing trusts as well as non-market funding pathways, Capital Sequestration is a method of investing in the transformation of provisioning systems through the sustained and collective boundary management of financial markets and incommensurable values. This practice offers significant promise as it applies ecological macroeconomic theory work, is grounded in the normative goals of and emerges from empirical research of EE, and meets a pressing need within society for imagining alternative economies.

Copyright of Theoretical Studies of Literature & Art / Wenyi Lilun Yanjiu is the property of Editorial Board of Theoretical Studies in Literature & Art and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While many pathways to post-fossil futures have been articulated, most fail to engage people in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Following recent calls for more immersive experiences, the 2019 initiative “Carbon Ruins—An Exhibition of the Fossil Era” (Carbon Ruins) is a performance set around a historical museum from the future, which uses recognisable, culturally powerful physical objects to bridge the gap between abstract scenarios and everyday experiences. Through its physical presence and extensive media coverage, Carbon Ruins struck a chord with scientists, activists, creative professionals, policy makers, civil society organisations, and the general public. Like other imaginary worlds, Carbon Ruins is not finished. It is an open-ended process of narrating, imagining, and representing (the transition to) a post-fossil future. In this article we reflect upon Carbon Ruins as a participatory form of world-building that allows for new ways of knowing, and new ways of being, in relation to post-fossil transitions. We discern three different kinds of authorship that were taken on by participants: as originators, dwellers, and explorers. While the originator makes the future world a recognisable place, the dweller can engage active hope in place of a passive sense of urgency, and the explorer can transform resignation into commitment, with a fresh determination to leave the fossil era behind. Situating Carbon Ruins within a critical political tradition, we find post-fossil world-building to be a form of critique that destabilises accustomed ways of thinking and opens up new fields of experience that allows things to be done differently.

The relationship between the fantasy genre and the medium of computer games has always been a very tight-knit one. The present article explores the close connection between fantasy and computer games through different media, arguing that the fantasy genre's specific ‘mode of function’ is the ability to build complete fictional worlds, whereby it creates specific experiences for its users. Based on empirical data from focus group interviews with players of the most popular Western Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) of all times, World of Warcraft, the article develops the concept of worldness as an experiential, phenomenological understanding of player experience. I discuss how this way of framing a core quality of the fantasy genre (of world-building) functions across single fictional universes and aims to grasp a specific fantasy experience of being in the world. This experience works on the level of genre, by anchoring the specific fantasy world in the larger, surrounding fantasy genre matrix.

Immaginare e costruire nuovi ‘mondi’ è da sempre uno dei desideri più profondi dell’uomo. L’insaziabile fame del genio creatore caratterizza, ieri come oggi, l’attività poietica di certi artisti ed architetti. Essi guardano al mondo in maniera immaginifica per dar vita a inediti brani di realtà (o di irrealtà): così, ragione e immaginazione interagiscono liberamente nella mente artistica, scomponendo e ricomponendo frammenti di architetture e paesaggi – urbani e naturali – in nuove visioni. La storia dell’arte è costellata di esempi di artisti visionari che hanno dedicato gran parte della loro produzione alla rappresentazione visionaria di luoghi, dalle scenografie barocche dei Galli da Bibiena, passando per Piranesi e i maestri del capriccio, fino ad arrivare alle futuristiche visioni di Sant’Elia e Chernikhov. Oggi ritroviamo analoghe sperimentazioni nel lavoro degli environment concept artist attivi nell’industria dell’intrattenimento, i quali costruiscono figurazioni di universi immaginari dotate di forte potenza comunicativa e suggestiva, in cui coesistono realtà e immaginazione. Questi ‘visionari della contemporaneità’ guardano oltre il visibile, attingendo a memoria e fantasia, restituendo immagini di luoghi d’invenzione tanto coerenti e realistici da apparire possibili agli occhi dello spettatore.

Copyright of Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we compare the languages each of the authors invented as prehistoric languages for popular culture media. Schreyer's language, Beama, was created for the film Alpha (2018), while Adger's language, Tan!aa Kawawa ki, was created for a television series on how early hominins spread throughout the world (the series was green-lit but then cancelled). We argue that though this creative process may seem far removed from classical research paradigms on language evolution, it can provide some insight into how disparate research on the possible properties of prehistoric languages can be brought together to illustrate how these languages might have worked as whole linguistic systems within these imagined worlds, as well as in prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many pathways to post-fossil futures have been articulated, most fail to engage people in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Following recent calls for more immersive experiences, the 2019 initiative "Carbon Ruins--An Exhibition of the Fossil Era" (Carbon Ruins) is a performance set around a historical museum from the future, which uses recognisable, culturally powerful physical objects to bridge the gap between abstract scenarios and everyday experiences. Through its physical presence and extensive media coverage, Carbon Ruins struck a chord with scientists, activists, creative professionals, policy makers, civil society organisations, and the general public. Like other imaginary worlds, Carbon Ruins is not finished. It is an open-ended process of narrating, imagining, and representing (the transition to) a post-fossil future. In this article we reflect upon Carbon Ruins as a participatory form of world-building that allows for new ways of knowing, and new ways of being, in relation to post-fossil transitions. We discern three different kinds of authorship that were taken on by participants: as originators, dwellers, and explorers. While the originator makes the future world a recognisable place, the dweller can engage active hope in place of a passive sense of urgency, and the explorer can transform resignation into commitment, with a fresh determination to leave the fossil era behind. Situating Carbon Ruins within a critical political tradition, we find post-fossil world-building to be a form of critique that destabilises accustomed ways of thinking and opens up new fields of experience that allows things to be done differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In keeping with the purpose of the Mythopoeic Society—“promoting the study, discussion, and enjoyment of fantastic and mythic literature”—this selective list examines a few of the authors and works Ursula K. Le Guin acknowledged as being influential or among her favorites, and to which some connections might be traced in her own mythopoeic and cosmopoeic works. The list includes Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Lord Dunsany’s A Dreamer’s Tales, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An article in which two teaching assistants and six students of a university course taught inside a correctional facility, "Writing as Activism," collaboratively examine their experience as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom. Fostered and framed by their instructor’s critical and transformative pedagogical approaches in this course, the authors locate integrated learning and collaborative writing within carceral classrooms as sites for intentional and resistant futures to be enacted and embodied as a practice of post-carceral world-building. The students enter their individual narratives into this location of their experience of envisioning and enacting resistant futures together in this space as a student movement dedicated and equipped to bring a world beyond prison into being.

The essay presents an overview of the possible meanings and applications of the newly-coined term 'ludotopia', i.e. a "dialectical entanglement of game and space" -- which challenges the boundaries of two neighbouring worlds: storyworld and gameworld. Seeking to trace the limitations of a thus defined gaming space, the author proceeds by reflecting upon the end of the game, or, more precisely, the endgame, in order to reconcile it with a notion of horismós (oρισμoς) popular in more hermeneutically aligned video game studies. While doing so, the paper delivers an analysis of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey showing three distinct stages in which a ludotopia can be opened towards more advanced world-building: (1) exploration and map reveal; (2) synchronisation of intelligible tags; and (3) renewal of narrative motivation. Thanks to a world-centered approach to the interpreted video game, the essay addresses how players inhabit, traverse, explore, and understand the surrounding ludic reality, rather than focusing on video game mechanics or procedures that affect their gameplay. In the end, a precise distinction between the storyworld and gameworld is introduced in order to reevaluate the ways both terms overlap with the aforementioned interpretation of ludotopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the early 21st century, world-building has become more visible as imaginary worlds move into mainstream entertainment, leading to an exciting and emerging field of worldbuilding studies. The purpose of this study is to explore the imaginary world of The Little Prince novella, a significant literary work by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, through its nonnarrative structures and its narrative. The entire text was extracted for data collection and analysis. The types of secondary world infrastructures identified were space, time, characters, nature, culture, language and philosophy. These infrastructures were found to form the imaginary world by constituting its locations, temporality, populations, materiality, customs, mode of communication and truths. The physical events and the mental events of the dynamic component of the storyworld were found to form the world through the progression of the narrative in the wide frames of past and present, as well as through the narrow frame. This study has implications for the type of works examined and the method employed in world-building studies, as well as for creative writing, content creation and literature education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article offers an analysis on how comics authors can employ architecture as a narrative trope, by focusing on the works of Tsutomu Nihei (Blame!, Sidonia no Kishi), and the duo of Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peeters (Le cités obscures). The article investigates how these authors use architectural tropes to create speculative fictions that develop renditions of cities as complex narrative environments, and “places” with a distinctive role and profile in stories. It is argued that these authors exploit the multimodal nature of comics and the potential of architecture to construct complex worlds and narrative structures.

This article aims at reworking the notion of « interwoven storytelling » (Breda, 2015) by developing new theoretical propositions to analyze complex TV series. More precisely, we will question the contribution of this narratological approach in order to study the televisual adaptation of a science fiction novel. We chose the example of The Man in the High Castle (Amazon, 2015-), based on a novel by Philip K. Dick (1962).Switching from a short narrative to a longer and serialized format enables, in this case study, to apply a « narrative lining ». This new textile metaphor is supported by the means of diagrams inspired by the sociological graph theory, giving flesh to the multiplication of connections between characters and storylines over a long period.The narrative expansion through seriality participates in a world-building activity, creating a whole fictional world, both « populated » and geographically all over the place. The fact that The Man in the High Castle belongs to an « imagination culture » and to the uchronia genre enables, on top of it all, to move from a « possible world » to a multiverse, adding yet another lining layer to the complex storytelling.

The current narrative environment sees as protagonists of the production and distribution of content, important franchises, able to colonize the imaginary built on media representations, saturating also the conversations on social media. Think, for example, of memes, videos and UGC that have as a reference such narrative universes. In this context, it is possible to note a structural transformation of the original concept of transmedia (Jenkins 2006), in function of two variables: the circulation of stories through different media, the multiplication of the possibilities of creation and diffusion of the narrative universe by users (Scolari 2013). Such a scenario determines a new balance between producers and consumers, in relation to the dynamics of access to the fruition of the storyworld (Ryan 2014), by virtue of a multiple authorship (Wolf 2014) and a non-sequential narrative (macro-history, interstitial stories, parallel stories, peripheral stories, UGC). In the light of these changes, the paper proposes a reflection on the distribution of transmedia content through screen-based media, privileged points of entry of the narrative, thanks to its intrinsic characteristics (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2011). In particular, the case study "Star Wars", a paradigmatic example of classical transmediality and, at the same time, of evolved transmediality, is explored in depth. Through an analysis of the different productions activated starting from the acquisition of the brand by Disney, a specific parallelism between narration and screen emerges: macro-history produced for cinema, interstitial stories for cinema and television, parallel productions for television and videogames (consoles), peripheral stories for video, social platforms and videogames (consoles and apps). The analysis returns the dimension of a transmedia cultural interface (Manovich 2001) built by screens, which stands as a continuum between the immersive experience of cinema, of collective nature, and the interactive and participatory dimension given by mobile devices, of individual nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaginary worlds and how they are constructed are central to fiction. The term world-building, however, has been applied so broadly in scholarship that it has become ambiguous and difficult to use in critical discussions. Aiming to contribute to greater clarity in the critical use of the term, this article introduces the concept of critical world-building. This is distinguished from other types of world-building, such as that performed by an author or reader, mainly by the fact that a critic analyses a world through a combination of their sequential presentation, as complete world, and with critical interpretation and theoretical filters in place, applying all three perspectives simultaneously. Two possible approaches to critical world-building are presented, based on the functions of a world’s building-blocks and how to interpret those functions. The first approach focuses on a world’s “architecture” – its structural and aesthetic system of places – and the form, function, and meaning of those places. The second emphasises the dynamic interplay between building-blocks and their interconnections in a web of explicit, implied, and interpreted information about the world. The authors base their discussion on textual, secondary fantasy worlds but invite applications of critical world-building to other genres and media.

Objective: to analyze the dependence of world-building (oico-nomics) on the formation of the European worldview, to comprehend the role of elites and social mentality in the world-building process and in relation to the formation of the Russian reality and its current state. Methods: an integrated approach to the analysis determined the range of specific research methods: systemic and value analysis from the standpoint of geo-economics, geo-culture and geo-anthropology, hermeneutic comparative analysis, philosophical reasoning. Results: the paper substantiates the critical role of elites and knowledge systems in the genesis of the complicated organization of the society; the features of world-building practices in Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox mentality are defined; the role of geo-economics as a relevant concept for the analysis of global processes, and Russian reality, is highlighted. Scientific novelty: the article considers the specifics of Russia's destiny as a continental geo-economic space, introduces into scientific circulation the concept of geoanthropology to determine the role of anthropological factor in the totality of processes and situations that arise in the allocation and reallocation of human resources on the planet with regard to their quality characteristics. Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the research are relevant to the scientific research and pedagogical work, as well as for the development of the methodology of the Social Sciences and Humanities. It is of interest when considering the prospects of Russia's development in the challenging circumstances of the 21 century.

Using Star Wars and the Marvel Extended Universe as primary examples, this essay explores the ways that transmedia storytelling practices have altered Hollywood entertainment, resulting in a stronger emphasis on world building and a more participatory relationship with its audiences. Transmedia in its contemporary form assumes a networked audience that is actively seeking out information about entertainment experiences they care about, resulting in much more extensive use of paratexts to signal what we might expect from upcoming releases, more blogs and podcasts that recap and interpret cult media texts, and more informal spaces where people can debate, pool knowledge, share their own grassroots creations, and otherwise participate in the fan phenomenon that grow up around such works.

An article in which a faculty member, a university staff member and former student, and a currently incarcerated student and teaching assistant collaboratively examine their experiences as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom, and as co-authors of the article itself. Fostered by the faculty member’s pedagogical approach and design of the course, the authors pose that critical practices of writing and learning are dynamic sites of imagination and collaboration, and in turn, avenues by which informed and intentional futures can be enacted. Locating their practice and experience of partnership within a prison, the authors enter their co-created and individual narratives into a discussion of the liberatory potentiality of written and collaborative “world-building” to identify, resist, and replace mechanisms of harm and oppression, effectively bringing a post-carceral world into being.

El concepto de transmedia storytelling introducido por Henry Jenkins (2003, 2006) ha sido ampliamente desarrollado académicamente en los últimos años, popularizándose y redefiniéndose con el tiempo. Dentro de la propia definición del transmedia storytelling se observa la centralidad del concepto de mundo, que desde una perspectiva teórica y crítica ha sido menos desarrollado que la relación entre la narrativa y los medios presentes en las narrativas transmediales. El presente trabajo recoge y sistematiza una selección bibliográfica de los principales autores que han definido la naturaleza, límites y transferibilidad de los llamados mundos transmediales, estableciendo conclusiones relativas a la necesidad de observar el citado fenómeno de las narrativas transmediales, sus elementos constituyentes y los procesos en los que éstos se ven envueltos, con la finalidad de elaborar unos criterios previos para su análisis y consideración como pieza fundamental de este fenómeno. The concept of transmedia storytelling introduced by Henry Jenkins (2003, 2006) has been widely developed in the academic field, getting popular and being redefined with time. In transmedia storytelling’s definition we can observe the focus on the concept of world, which from a theoretical and critical perspective did not had the development that the relationship among narrative and media had. This work gathers and analyzes a selection of references from the main authors that have defined the nature, limits and transferability of the so called transmedial worlds, proposing conclusions related to the need to observe the phenomenon of transmedia narratives, its founding elements and the processes related to them, with the aim to elaborate a catalogue of criteria for the analysis and consideration of key element of transmedia storytelling.

This essay asks how religion and theological ideas might be made manifest in video games, and particularly the creation of video games as a religious activity, looking at contemplative experiences in video games, and the creation and world-building of game worlds as a form of Tolkienian subcreation, which itself leads to contemplation regarding the creation of worlds.

Names play a significant role in the development of the characters and cultures of the imaginary worlds envisioned by science fiction and fantasy authors. Rather than creating new languages, as J. R. R. Tolkien does inThe Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert accomplishes his world-building inDuneby choosing existing names that evoke a recognizable medieval, feudal setting and depict a desert planet inhabited by a quasi-Arabic and Islamic tribal people. Although names serve to juxtapose the Fremen as an exotic Other with the Western Atreides family, they also gesture towards a possible re-envisioning of this polarized relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of transmedia storytelling introduced by Henry Jenkins (2003, 2006) has been widely developed in the academic field, getting popular and being redefined with time. In transmedia storytelling's definition we can observe the focus on the concept of world, which from a theoretical and critical perspective did not had the development that the relationship among narrative and media had. This work gathers and analyzes a selection of references from the main authors that have defined the nature, limits and transferability of the so called transmedial worlds, proposing conclusions related to the need to observe the phenomenon of transmedia narratives, its founding elements and the processes related to them, with the aim to elaborate a catalogue of criteria for the analysis and consideration of key element of transmedia storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]