Thread by @multiplexer

I've been trying to figure out a good model or set of rubricks that would allow me to generate simple, internally consistent fabricated worlds. I went searching on the net and dug through various worldbuilding forums but there wasn't a thing that was robust enough.

2) This thinking led down a rabbit hole of some current popular thinking like Jared Diamond (which I read years ago) and some other half-baked theories but still saying RESOURCES left me cold.

3) From here, I went into a dark world of academic papers and from _there_ into syllabi of graduate seminars in early state formation from various universities. (Thank you people who publish your book lists!)

4) From THERE I went into a dark hole of historical sociology, a hole from whence I have yet to emerge. Now I've read some Karl Marx, and I'm a weirder person for it. But also other authors in the space who have written cool BIG THEORY things.

5) The BIG THEORIES of the state actually totally... work for my purposes. So, full of gumption that I figured out the meaning of life, I started writing it up to toss up on a blog for 10s of people to read it. And then I ran into a wall.

6) The big theories are very elegant -- four levers of clean but overlapping power networks of various push and pull -- and I could not explain them without going into pointy haired engineerspeak.

7) I know this is 7 tweets in but the four rubricks are
- state,
- military
- economic systems and
- ideology.

I have also seen state/military, economic systems, ideology and the press for tech systems late enough to have a mass press.

8) State and ideology have some fine points to them. And the "what is a state" question is an interesting one. (I love Tilly's essay on the State as Organized Crime.) But if you define all four AND THEIR IMPACTS, you get a working little society.

TA-DA

9) And... impossible to explain well in a blog post if starting from the dry technical facts without, say, having everyone read the 500-600 pages of stuff I have now read as well.

So before you read my blog, GO READ THIS BOOK LIST. I will wait.

10) I've figured it out how to explain stuff and I need some writing time. And it's just to make some little bottle worlds and apply it and don't worry about the theory and tack the theory on later.

11) I came up with some utterly horrifying dystopic fantasy worlds by applying extremes to either economics, ideology or state in neat ways. Neat!

12) I'm trying to get time to do writing because I found I can fast iterate in my head but no one can see inside my head which makes this all difficult.

But I think I can de-theory and de-Marx and de-Weber it all and put out a nice model for building arbitrary worlds quickly.

13) Why do I think this is cool?

Have you ever gotten 20K into a world for a game and realized it's not internally consistent? Or it's weak?

Would you like a way to iterate fast?

Yeah, me too.

14) Ultimately this plays into some of my other interests (some IF experiments) but... yeah. That's why I haven't been writing because I've been too busy THINKING.