Things Doing Stuff

Here’s a useful way to think about what video game worlds actually need to capture an audience:

At the most basic level, a world is made of things doing stuff. Things are the entities: characters, factions, economies, resources. Stuff is what they do: act, trade, remember, want, owe, decide, migrate.

A World Model creates a world with no things doing stuff. What looks like a character is not a thing. It has no name, no state, no history, because it is not an individual thing. So nothing is doing stuff.

Classical planners add things that do stuff. However, they don’t simulate the causal relationships that make up real interactions. Each thing does its stuff independently. The stuff one character does has little to no effect on the stuff any other character does. Even if the paths characters follow look interconnected, they’re functionally still separate. They are not a collective.

TILKI is a game model, not a world model or a planner. It doesn’t just create things, and it doesn’t just simulate stuff. Instead, it runs them together. Characters act from memory and obligation, and the paths they follow are affected by their surroundings. They also respond to events and choose fight or flight based on their state of mind. What one thing does changes what every other thing does. That is a world.