Thoughts on Artifexian Retiring

If you’re engaged in worldbuilding as a dedicated hobby in any capacity, you know who Artifexian is. Before I spin this into extended word vomit, my “thoughts”, or “opinion”, if it even matters, is that I sincerely wish him and his family the best, and that he’s done an incredible service for worldbuilding resources for well over a decade.

And being engaged in worldbuilding spaces for this long, his retirement has made me think of a lot of things beyond his videos.

This is also where an important definition needs to be made. I’ve been specific in the opening line, with “worldbuilding as a dedicated hobby”. If you’ve made a fictional story in almost any capacity, you have engaged with worldbuilding. Even if you think your contemporary short story set on your street doesn’t. What parts of the modern world do you or do you not include? Which parts are amplified? Which parts are modified? That’s worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding as a hobby—what might be more useful to describe as “worldmaking” and “worldmakers”, implying a level of creating and making from the ground-up, rather than building on foundations—is another beast entirely.

The hobby saw a massive surge in popularity during the 2010s. Primarily, this was centred around the eponymous subreddit, and satellite subreddits that sprung up around it.¹ Here, worldmaking “canonised” into a specific method, where certain things must be made explicit in order for a world to be considered functional; if it didn’t, it simply wasn’t worldbuilding. To create any kind of fantasy story, required training yourself in an A Level education in geology, hydrology, astronomy, biology,  zoology, chemistry, very specific moments of history (which could mean nothing), cartography, adding “speculative” onto everything we’ve just gone through, much more we don’t have time for, and potentially spending years applying that education to make sure your rivers don’t split on your maps before you even think of developing narrative in any capacity.

This is where my tension with this comes from, particularly with it being the “mainstream” method. Some were absolutely here just for the sake of creating a planet, but many wanted to write their Tolkien-esque fantasy novel, saw what everyone else was doing, and thought they simply had to do that as well. Entirely neglecting the one thing they want to do—write—and instead found themselves jumping down rabbit holes they will never come out of, all in service of misunderstanding Köppen classifications, and ultimately not serving their narrative desires in any capacity. I’ve touched on how much I dislike this method in the postmortem of Diet of Worms, and how the whole project was, in essence, a way I saw to push back against it. If you don’t have time to read the postmortem right now, I derogatorily branded this as “Reddit worldbuilding”.

And one of the spearheads of Reddit worldbuilding, was Artifexian.

The channel was run by Edgar, creating videos about worldbuilding in a casual capacity since 2014, the channel quickly becoming the darling source of the subreddit, and later turning into a fulltime gig with a Patreon in stride. Its primary goal was to fill what was, as Edgar saw back then, a gap in worldbuilding resources that tackled the “scientific” side of creating a world. This saw edutainment bites of astronomy to create solar systems, how to outline habitable planets, how to map out climate zones to determine where people should live, how to apply real-world linguistics to create conlangs. Some would even go to extremes, such as tools to create thousands of stars as a stellar neighbourhood, and google sheets churning through degree-level mathematics to generate luni-solar calendars for any kind of planetary orbit.

So it seems like I should despise Artifexian and all it stands for. If someone wanted to make a world, they were pointed to Artifexian. All Reddit roads led to Artifexian.

Which I absolutely don’t.

As I touched on before, Artifexian was a landmark resource in 2014. At the time, Edgar was filling a niche that did not exist in most worldbuilding circles. Instead of starting from “culture” based on contextless aesthetics, and just trying to -punk your way into something people should care about, why not consider the bigger picture? Why not consider planets that weren’t just Earth with a different coat of paint? Why not consider real-world natural systems to do that? For that, his videos were wildly inspirational, broke down those systems into easily usable chunks, and helped worldbuilders look at their work from different perspectives.

And annoyingly, everytime I see Artifexian mentioned in the wild, I see someone dazzled by the presentation, following tutorials blindly, without ever asking the most important question of why. Does your world really need a full GPlates simulation? Does your narrative hinge on knowing if this one spot dips to -50 in the winter instead of -40? No? You’re doing it just because everyone else is? Then why?

These tutorials were not gospel, nor were they a requirement to do worldbuilding “correctly”. They were simply someone filling a gap, and in filling the gap, fully exposed a creative dead end.

What I think is the final nail in the coffin of Reddit worldbuilding (and also, bitterly poetically, the channel itself), was Artifexian’s Worldbuilder’s Log. This was a series that, in essence, was a “build with me”, where Edgar would be building a world fully from scratch, putting in every bit of detail that he could, and seeing where that took him. Completely unbeknownst to Edgar, it would be the best representation of what almost everyone goes through following this method without question.

It was a crystalised perfection of it. Every aspect of the world considered to such degree that every video came with at least 5 academic papers below it. Almost every video starts with a follow up on the previous, citing an expert making corrections to his hobbyist understandings. Going through the channel, six months of time is spent developing a full geographic history of this planet with 850 million years of tectonic plate history. Ten months to get world temperatures and climate regions, to end with a footnote that they aren’t representative of biomes, because biomes require speculative biology, another full year of work to reach a point where that could begin, and then it ends. His retirement announcement posted with the series unfinished. Three years after it began.

Edgar claimed Worldbuilder’s Log was a low(er) effort attempt to keep Artifexian running in light of his new responsibilities as a carer, deliberately shrinking his workload to balance this out. And to that I’ll say, if that is a minimal level of effort, I dread to think how much was put into his older videos.

There was literally no other way this series could have ended. Unceremonious unfinished worlds, or something that just isn’t as realistic as you feel it could be, even if it’s beyond your knowledge. One of the things Edgar mentions in the retirement announcement, is that he feels he’s now “outclassed” as a generalist. He cites a host of “experts” in respective fields who relate their expertise to worldbuilding, many of which he was in direct conversation with during the series. You can see this, in many ways, during Worldbuilder’s Log. Often new parts would be denouncing his prior videos and their inaccuracy, instead citing a host of newer materials and creators, or combining their methods into something new; perhaps driven by a guilt that he feels he’s not “contributing” anything new. What was the point of him doing all this work? In his own words, “Once you feel like you’re purposeless, it’s very hard to derive meaning.”

And that’s all it is, isn’t it? This is obviously in relation to him producing videos that are supposed to be educational pieces, but it’s an unfortunately precedent parallel of how Reddit worldbuilding goes. It’s impossible to be the one who understands everything to the ultimate end-point accuracy Reddit worldbuilding demands. This pursuit will only leave you realising how futile that is, and unsatisfied with your output as a result. But I then ask again, even if you could, for what? If you’re doing all that just to tell a story about elves, how does that make your narrative any stronger?

Worldmakers need to, ironically, stop focusing on the world. What we have is an incredible set of tools to produce fascinating, engaging, experimental narrative, and instead all I see is cookie-cutter worlds all drawn from the same sources, to have someone unsatisfied that it doesn’t fit the thing they have in their head, restart it all over again, increasing frustration in the “fun” work being pushed further and further back, until they just… stop. And hopefully, rediscover why they wanted to do this in the first place.

Maybe Artifexian’s retirement is a symbolic end to this. But more likely, this is wishful thinking on my part. Reddit worldbuilding is as strong as ever, even with the apparent decline of the subreddit that spawned it. But the other thing I want to stress here, as much as I have my grievances with it, the approach itself isn’t strictly the issue. If it was, I wouldn’t have the respect for Artifexian and Edgar that I do. Methods should never be precious, and that goes both ways. Instead, it’s the attitude you bring to those methods, and a misunderstanding of what you’re doing and, once more, why.

One aspect, that I rarely see people mention, is how Reddit worldbuilding can be very useful as a seed for creativity. Instead of fighting against what these methods give you, as you already have the world you want in mind, you’re dancing with it. Unsure what this continent should be like, to contrast an island you’ve put years of thought into? Why not let the land and planet dictate the climates? Why not leave which cultures are hit by regular hurricanes up to the diceroll of nature? Taking the bits that serve you while re-interpreting the parts that don’t, or just abandoning them wholesale. It’s fantastic at clearing out blocks for things you aren’t sure where to take, and then seeking real-world inspiration to support the story you want to tell. So, why are people not mentioning this? Why is the focus instead purely on “realism”, and the pursuit of this as the highest goal of worldbuilding, as if there’s no other reason to make a world?

The “scientific” method, as is any method, isn’t the problem. The problem is enough people aren’t asking why they’re doing it.