Moving Castles- Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses

link:: https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles published:: Aug 2nd, 2021 tags:: #article, #cozy web, #dark forest

• A growing number of subcultures, digital communities and guilds have turned their back on ad-supported social media and migrated their social and cultural activities to semi-private digital spaces, chat rooms and Discord servers. We believe these spaces have the potential to become decentralised institutions that are financed, owned and governed by their own members. To support this vision we propose Moving Castles, an organisational metaphor and real-time media type which combines collective agency and public participation in modular and portable multiplayer miniverses.
• Not islands or dark forests, but vehicles
  • what Yancey Strickler calls Dark Forests.
    • According to him these are “spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments”.
    • The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
  • Ribbonfarm’s Venkatesh Rao has another term for it:
    • “the Cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams”. Where Dark Forests are characterised by their intentional withdrawal from social media, the Cozyweb is non-indexable because of a lacking interconnection between material, creating unintentionally disconnected islands populated by isolated communities.
    • The Extended Internet Universe
  • The characterisation of these communities as isolated islands or dark forests, while useful in describing our current media landscape, sits uneasily with both our experience of participating in Trust, and our hopes for these spaces developing into democratic social institutions which have a relationship and responsibility to the public. As a recent post Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods by Laura Lotti, Sam Hart and Toby Shorin points out, we need new articulations of how decentralised online communities interact with the public, and attached conceptions of the public good, one that as they put forward, should to be framed around positive externalities rather than internal interests.
  • Full customisability is achieved by using real-time rendering softwares, such as Unreal Engine. These allow the community to commission, create or reshape the components of their Moving Castle themselves. As a result, Moving Castles are not hermetically sealed, self-ossifying spaces, but instead can be swapped, combined and merged in a modular fashion. This scrappy, constantly re-assembling amalgamation of rooms, mechanisms, community members and portal doors is what we define as a Moving Castle.