Arium: Lean World-Building
Extracurriculars
The process of going from drivers to scenarios necessarily involves a creative leap - turning attributes into a world people can imagine and ideally visit in some approximate way. The overlap with role-playing games (RPGs), where people collaboratively and actively imagine how people would behave in an imagined world, really stands out to me, so I am exploring whether any RPG lessons in world-building can help with scenario design.
Arium is an indie RPG I picked up from Adept Icarus. At present there are two modules/books, Arium: Create and Arium: Discover. Discover is the role-playing module, and reads quite a bit like the Fate system. I know there is a place for role-play in futures work, but my main interest was in the Create module, because it consists of a procedure for world-building that is more organized and collaborative/participatory than I've seen in other systems.
The process consists of the development of a fictional world through seven steps, each of which consists of the same three phases. The steps are: deciding what topics and subject matter are not in the world being created (what's often thought of as “safety” in modern RPGs), the genre or tone, the backdrop and scope, the culture and organizations of the world, specific relevant landmarks, specific people inhabiting the world, and narratively important things like vehicles, gear, etc. It's easy to see how things in each step build off the previous steps: organizations that are relevant given the scope, gear that the specific individuals would use, etc.
The phases for each step draw inspiration from corporate meeting facilitation techniques1 and use sticky notes and markers. First, participants generate up to three ideas each for what they'd like to see in the phase. Then, the ideas are brought together and similar ideas are grouped together. Then people are allowed to vote for which of the idea clusters they'd like to see, and things with enough support go forward. The last moving part is that each participant starts the process with three Creation Tokens, which they can use to modify any idea on the board in a “yes, and” manner.
When I tried out the system with a small group, I made a few adjustments to the standard process. Because I had a specific scenario in mind, I fixed the exclusions (“no angels, no aliens”), the genre (20 years in the future, realistic), and the backdrop (mirroring a scenario created by students in my Intro class, a world with severe urban water shortages and militarized robots), and then collaboratively built the rest.
The process took about an hour and went reasonably well. The process flowed well, didn’t cause conflict, and was mostly robust to a rogue 15-year-old boy actively trying to create goofy ideas. The process is pretty easy to explain and grasp2. Nobody in my group ended up spending their Creation Tokens without some coaxing, which I could see being a general problem.
Here’s a list of what we generated by following the process (again, for a future 2043 with severe urban water shortages and militarized robots):
Culture/Organization: company that harvests water from the ocean with a lower class doing the dangerous work (Saltdogs), a cult convinced the water shortage is God's punishment (Christ's Blood), water pirates (the Aquamarines), a company providing robotic armed guards (Automated Security Solutions or ASS3), greywater used extensively for public and private needs.
Landmarks: local neighborhood atmospheric water extraction tower (Tosche Station), the Green Dome Arcology, a scrapyard of broken ASS bots4, big salt stacks by the ocean, robot charging station covered in graffiti and dried blood, the last tunnel before town (a convenient ambush point).
People: Marley, the Aquamarines block captain with a sick mother; Gerard Howe, who maintains the local charging station to make ends meet but his neighbors hate him for it; Old Pete, a Saltdog with a debt to the Aquamarines; Sanderson, who makes buildings out of the salt stacks; Dr Gina Tran, working to harvest robot scrap for cybernetics as an alternative for expensive surgeries; Lucy Stilson, an ASS engineer and daughter of a Saltdog who is experimenting with modding the militarized bots to do the most dangerous Saltdog work.
Goodies: a mobile robot retrofitting bus (converted school bus); an armored water delivery truck; a Saltdog's power lifter exoskeleton; a nerve stitcher that enables cybernetic surgery (requires anti-rejection drugs); Aquamarine guns with thin bullets to puncture metal and minimize blood (i.e. water) loss.
Overall, I think this is a decent collection of artifacts to write a scenario around. Doing it again, I would definitely tie it much closer to an existing place to better ground everything and make it more believable5. I tried feeding the elements above into ChatGPT to get it to write a narrative scenario, which only confirmed the “bad generic sci-fi story” level of quality, like a first draft of Waterworld or Jupiter Ascending6. Another limitation is that the method can easily create a lopsided world, with some facets of the world well thought out and others neglected; one option might be to explicitly reference a sensemaking framework like STEEP or STIRDEEPER and then allow for more than 3 ideas, especially for the culture/organization step (or maybe even a backdrop session before that with the two drivers locked in as organizing principles). I plan to keep tinkering with this, because the benefits of a group feeling like they built the scenario together should be pretty high.
I know this makes it sound extra boring, but remember these are techniques developed to keep people engaged even though they are talking about boring stuff in a boring conference room for hours at a time.
The book even includes an intro exercise to acclimate people, which I would recommend.
OK, not all the goofy stuff got filtered out.
I’ll decline to include some of the tentative names for this place.
This is done well by Karl Schroeder in Stealing Worlds with settings firmly grounded in Dayton, Detroit, etc.
Representative paragraph: “As Marley passed the towering stacks of salt, a reminder of the desalination process, she noticed the graffiti-covered robot charging station nearby. Dried blood stained its walls, evidence of recent clashes between the Aquamarines and the enforcers of the corporations. Gerard Howe, a wiry man with a scruffy beard, maintained the station, striving to make ends meet while the rest of the neighborhood despised him for his association with the despised ASS bots.”