Until recently I had no idea that game engines are basically eating the world. Urban planning, architecture, automotive engineering firms, live music and events, filmmaking, etc. have all shifted a lot of their workflows/design processes to Unreal Engine and Unity

The Mandalorian and The Lion King were shot almost exclusively using these tools

Even Hong Kong International Airport uses a "digital twin" built on Unity to simulate changes in passenger volume

The popularity of Simulation Theory in certain circles starts to make a lot of sense when you think about how much of Reality is now being created by game design software

The Choose Your Character meme on TikTok seems like a surface level symptom of game engines eating the world. We come to understand our selves as roleplaying in simulated environments. Here's one example of literally billions

The legal name requirement on FB & co. was an attempt at maintaining a clear distinction between game worlds and real worlds, but this dichotomy didn't hold up. Especially now that so many cultural events are Mixed Reality, complete with virtual fans and ~actual~ NPCs

The increasingly blurry boundary between games and life has me thinking about this graphic about Western vs. Eastern conceptions of Playing, from 'The Future of Ritual'. I think digitally mediated reality is forcing us into a mode that feels a lot more like Maya-lila

Behavioral econ is basically the policy layer of the game-engines-eating-reality stack, providing nudges and incentives and levels for citizens to navigate. Not to mention the CCP's social credit system

What's going on in gaming seems like the virtual version of 13 colonies becoming a federation of states. Tim Sweeney (CEO of Epic) talks about the importance of linking isolated systems together, e pluribus unum style

I wonder who are the Hamiltons/Jeffersons of these new worlds

I want to ask gpt-3 Walt Disney what he makes of the game industry's merger with reality. A theme park piped to every living room. "Media" companies become full-stack lifestyle brands—you don't just consume the characters or play with their action figures, you *become* them

I feel like "gaming" is already starting to become an anachronistic category, a throwback to the days when these simulation machines were confined to the world of entertainment

this is an actual slide from an actual geopolitical strategy consulting deck

https://info-gap.technion.ac.il/files/2018/06/milo027slides.pdf

a company called 51 World created digital twins of Shanghai and Singapore, powered by Unreal Engine. city planners are using these SimCities to test ideas before they’re actually constructed