What does worldbuilding mean when the real world is collapsing?
Drawing on their animated, fictional documentary Acid City, Hornet animation director Jack Wedge and game designer Will Freudenheim consider what “worldbuilding” means when climate collapse makes reality feel stranger than fiction.
)
Worldbuilding has become one of the creative industries' favourite buzzwords, from worldbuilding fellowships to major art exhibitions exploring how artists appropriate gaming aesthetics to build digital universes.
Studios pitch "transmedia worlds," agencies promise "immersive brand ecosystems," and every franchise aspires to Marvel-level world expansion. At Laser Days Studio, we've built our practice around this very concept: creating what artist Ian Cheng calls "worlding": living systems that can "survive their creator and continue generating drama."
The irony weighs on us: we're using cutting-edge tools to imagine climate scenarios while the present becomes increasingly unimaginable.
But as Jack and I spent nearly 3 years crafting Acid City: an animated documentary focusing on a fictional city, we kept asking: what does it actually mean to build worlds when the real world is fundamentally changing around us?
In our studio, we used game engines, real-time rendering, and motion capture to construct a megacity situated in the middle of a great acidic ocean, where residents queue for clean water while acidic rain eats away at crumbling infrastructure. We treat our digital environments as living characters, not mere backdrops. Yet during our production, New York City - where we live and work - was reclassified from temperate to subtropical. The irony weighs on us: we're using cutting-edge tools to imagine climate scenarios while the present becomes increasingly unimaginable.
Above: Stills from animator/director Jack Wedge and game designer Will Freudenheim's animated, fictional documentary Acid City.
Tools for impossible worlds
Acid City began as a narrative film following a single protagonist through this water-stressed world. After a year of development, we realised the story wanted to be bigger than any individual character could contain. The breakthrough was embracing the documentary format, which let us weave together the multiple perspectives and environmental themes we'd been struggling to fit into conventional narrative structure.
We'd design sequences about extreme heat causing social unrest, then watch similar scenes unfold on the news.
Our process became deliberately hybrid. We recorded unscripted interviews with real New Yorkers - kids playing in parks, heat emergency workers, strangers we met on the street - then re-contextualised their voices as residents of Acid City. We built procedural systems that could surprise us, environments that felt both fantastical and disturbingly familiar.
As we researched real cities facing water crises - Karachi, Jakarta, Dhaka - our speculative fiction increasingly felt like documentary footage from the present. We'd design sequences about extreme heat causing social unrest, then watch similar scenes unfold on the news.
When reality becomes science fiction
This temporal collapse appears everywhere once you notice it. Miami builds sea walls while Hollywood makes climate disaster films. Architects design floating cities while insurance companies quietly retreat from coastal markets. The climate crisis has always seemed paradoxical to us. It's the most important and dangerous issue facing humanity today, yet it still feels inaccessible to many people's imaginations. What happens when that distance collapses? When the abstract becomes visceral, daily, undeniable?
we found ourselves processing an already-transformed present rather than imagining futures.
Writer Amitav Ghosh argues that climate change breaks traditional narrative forms because it operates on scales both too vast and too fast for human storytelling. Perhaps the problem isn't that climate change is unnarratable. Perhaps climate change has become the meta-narrative, the science fiction story we're all living inside.
During Acid City's production, we found ourselves processing an already-transformed present rather than imagining futures. The "speculative" elements of our film - water mafias, climate refugees, cities as organisms - were compressions of current realities into fictional form.
The new creative mandate
This distinction matters for how we understand creative work in the climate era. Traditional worldbuilding assumes stable ground to build on: reliable physics, consistent social systems, some degree of predictable cause and effect. What happens when that ground shifts in real-time?
Anna Tsing writes about "the art of living on a damaged planet," suggesting we need new ways of making meaning in ruins. For creative studios, this might mean shifting from worldbuilding to what we could call "world-processing": finding ways to metabolise and make sense of our rapidly changing reality.
Acid City became our attempt at this kind of processing. Instead of constructing a fantasy world, we built what felt more like a translation device, a way to render visible the systems of climate change that usually remain abstract. The city's water distribution networks, its social hierarchies, its architectural adaptations all became ways of making the overwhelming complexity of climate systems more comprehensible.
In a world that feels increasingly fictional, we need fictions that can help us practice the art of thriving in the ruins.
So why do we make science fiction in a moment when the world itself is changing into something unrecognisable? Perhaps because the traditional tools of realism are no longer adequate for describing reality.
If climate change is indeed too large in scope to wrap your head around, like an incomprehensible truth, a myth, then perhaps we need mythical tools to process it. Animation, game engines, AI, virtual environments: these are instruments for engaging with realities too complex for unaided human perception.
How do you craft narratives about tomorrow when tomorrow feels fundamentally uncertain? After finishing Acid City, I keep thinking about something our water scientist collaborator told us during field work in the caves of Tennessee: ecosystems are most resilient when they're most diverse. Maybe the same is true for the stories we tell. In a world that feels increasingly fictional, we need fictions that can help us practice the art of thriving in the ruins.
