2024-04-06 - Thoughts - Imaginary worlds

Sometimes, I wonder how I would do as a kid today. Of course, we think about the classic screens everywhere, social media, and all the bad things that children are exposed to. But there are also things I would have dreamt to have.

I was very active in a bunch of forums when I was a teenager, and some of them were very focused on role-playing, usually around a video game. I had to write entire stories and dialogs for my online avatars. To do so, I also used to draft character back stories and fictional worlds. I like to think that I was pretty decent at it, and after a while my online friends were asking me to write RP pieces for them.

Also, one important part of writing these was to find the right illustration for them. And when the inspiration wasn't at its peak, a couple of randomly assembled pieces of online art could be the foundation of the story. I remember spending hours browsing DeviantArt, wallpaper websites and such, just to find images that were in the right universe with the vibe I was looking for.

We always want more. So at some point, I tried to start a new forum of my own with a couple of friends that would be set in a world that we would have built from scratch. So again, we started to write backstories, create a bestiary and design a map for our world. It was a huge amount of work that never went through. Eh, we were just teenagers.

Anyway, today I stumbled on this page, showing artwork of a map generated with AI (there are actually hundreds of these).

A map of a volcano in table top format for rpg, in a 2d format

And it brought me back, probably around 20 years ago, laboriously trying to construct a map, heavily inspired by the Middle Earth. It could have been easily done with that technology. Same for RP illustrations. And how about all the living creatures' descriptions?

But obviously, if we had the Internet as it is today, we wouldn't have been inventing entire worlds to post some role playing dialogs in a forum. That's kind of a paradox: the more we have, the less we create. Or at the very least we create differently. That's probably part of the reason why we enjoy Gemini and the small web.