CONTEXT: EMERGENT STORIES IN SPACE

What are emergent stories and how does SEED incorporate them? Take a look at this article and find out for yourself!

The Klang Team - 2 min read

Yet again the Russians have run a space race. After sending the first satellite, the first dog, the first man, the first woman into space they have now seemingly made the first movie in space. Last week you may have read that Yulia Peresild, the Russian actress and film director Klim Shipenko returned to earth after 12 days aboard the International Space Station.

They shot over 30 hours of footage for what will become a 30 minute film called The Challenge. Not much is known about the story or the details in general, other than that Perseild plays a surgeon who has to go to the ISS to presumably perform surgery. Shit happens in space, bit like in that other - fake! - film Gravity. Maybe you’ve seen it.

Anyway, this got us thinking about storytelling in space. Because after all, SEED is set in space and we want it to be full of stories, specifically your stories, that you make and create together. We’ve always been clear about the inspiration of Rimworld, not least that it calls itself ‘a story generator’ as much as anything else. We love this. But what we are really excited about is emergent story generation.

A quick sketch of Seedling daily life

Emergence is a pretty unique and wonderful presence in the universe. It helps explain how little things link up and interact to become something much bigger, much more complex. Emergent stories are those that come about in ways that are totally unpredictable and certainly unscripted. With SEED, we give you the player a sandbox to play in, along with a bunch of spades and buckets (let’s call them tools), we also invite in some of your friends and maybe strangers too, and quite quickly there’s a whole scenario playing out that we could never have imagined!

Everything is connected

What’s cool about such stories in SEED is precisely that they’re in space. We are creating a sandbox that is truly unique, with all that entails: a fresh start, a new world imagined on the basis of what has been left behind (the world as we know it today) and what lessons we may have learned.

It’s of course part of the challenge: we’re designing something that we don’t actually know how it will play out. But emergence is everywhere. And with more and more players, more and more complexity grows. How can something be more than its parts? An individual interacts with others to become a group, which joins with other groups to become a society, and that in turn can become a nation. These complex structures are the kinds of stories we have in our sights.