There are many stories like it, but Theodore Sturgeon’s 1941 story “Microcosmic God” goes a bit like this: A lone inventor named Kidder who enjoys creating things, is frustrated at humanity’s slow innovation pace. He builds a generation of small creatures named “Neoterics” that create various inventions. A lot of things happen and eventually the Neoterics become more advanced than humanity and outlive their creator and god.

Kidder, like others, has designed a… System A more practical example is the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who in one of his phases controlled the photo development closely, to produce essentially random results, but through a highly specific process.

Eventually he made sets of pictures that were entirely created by exposing photographic paper to various sources of light in a dark room, then also controlling and introducing various objects and agents in the chemical mix of the development process.

In one of my previous companies, Zivver, the leadership team explicitly acknowledged that. Company comms shifted from “We are a company that makes secure communication products” to “We are a company that builds a team which can make secure communication products”. The actual wording was probably a bit better and it’s still kinda corporate-y, but the message is visible regardless - we’re not building the product, the team is the product.

In Nordic Games Conference 2017 I watched a presentation about Systemic Design. They explained the reasoning and process behind the various systems in open world games which make the world feel more alive: Environment cycles, animal herds, player notoriety. These all help develop richer experiences for the player as they provide much more depth and replayability.