What English speakers call ‘imagination’, or ‘seeing with the mind’s eye’, the philosophers of ancient Greece called ‘phantasia’. Their word also gave us fantasy, phantom, fable, and fairy, and is a distant cousin to phenomenon, prophesy, and fate. One way or another, all of these concepts are central to my life’s work, and to this project.
Hello, I’m Steve, and welcome to Phantasia; an exploration of imagination, simulation, fantasy, and philosophy.
Background
I guess I’m part biologist, part computer scientist, and part game developer. I prefer to think of myself as a cyberneticist, but not many people know what that means. For roughly half a century, I’ve been fascinated by the computational nature of life, and especially the nature of mind.
Nearly 30 years ago, I wrote a successful computer game called Creatures, which synthesized everything I knew about biology into a complete simulation of artificial life – cute, furry animals with their own genes and biochemistry, plus brains made from hundreds of neurons. This may sound a bit sciencey, as if a lab coat would be required, but honestly, cute furry animals are just cute! And furry. They were made to be played with, not to take part in an anatomy lesson.
The important thing, though, was that these were not ‘fake’ creatures, programmed to behave as if they were animals. They were assembled from thousands of simulated biological building blocks, whose collective behavior was completely emergent. They were as real and ‘honest’ as I could make them at the time, and people really took this to heart. As it happens, many of these people – from children to professional scientists – decided to study their anatomy anyway; or rather their genetics and biochemistry. They are still doing amazing things, three decades later, and many of them know far more about my creatures than I do. But my goal was really just to make beings that people felt they could legitimately care about, and this meant I shouldn’t lie to them.
I’m interested in how arrangements of mere neurons and chemicals can gain the ability to imagine the future, using their collective mind’s eye.
Anyway, my ideas have come a long way since 1996, and so have computers! Phantasia is my attempt to synthesize everything I’ve discovered since then, focusing in particular on how creatures (both natural and artificial) are able to develop simple intentions, feelings, hopes, and dreams. In other words, I’m interested in how arrangements of mere neurons and chemicals can gain the ability to imagine the future, using their collective mind’s eye.
Needless to say, this is a massive undertaking. I’ve worked on it for more than a decade already, supported initially through Kickstarter donations, and latterly through wishful thinking. It still has a very long way to go, but at last I’ve reached a stage where I feel I can open the project up more widely, to other sympathetic people. It isn’t a finished game by any means, but the destination isn’t really the point; it’s the journey.
The what society? Frampton who?
As the great Spike Milligan once eloquently put it, ‘Everybody’s gotta be somewhere’, and this applies equally to artificial life forms. But where, exactly? Why are they here? What should they look like? Who are they? Come to that, who are we, in this context?
Without answers to these questions, nothing would make sense, so I had to distill an infinity of possibilities down to just one. This is not a role-playing game; there’s no objective, no rules, everything is entirely up to you, including whether you take any notice of my chosen backstory. But I knew I had to have one, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to make coherent choices.
For reasons now lost in the mists of time, I decided these creatures should live in a little nature reserve, near to a small English village that I named Frampton Gurney. It sounded quite cozy, and reminded me of Doctor Doolittle. I like cozy, and I know many of my supporters do, too. Real life is just too stressful and overwhelming, so I want this to become a relaxing place in which to hang out with our creatures and watch the sun go down.
But who are these creatures? What should they look like? While I was thinking about this, I began looking at old fantasy stories from the 19th and 20th centuries – Doctor Doolittle, Narnia, Wonderland, even Middle Earth. Few people read such books any more, and so I found myself wondering what had become of the creatures in them, now that nobody seems to care.
I imagined the nobler species of unicorns, and the more ferocious kinds of dragons, would easily have found work in the modern computer games industry, where they’re now gainfully occupied fighting Orcs, or something. But what of the less popular, less self-assured, slightly oddball ones? What became of the borogroves, or the poor pushmi-pulllu? Were the slithy toves simply too slithy for their own good? Who looks after the marsh-wiggles, now?
Well, here was I with a handy nature reserve, and nothing to put in it. So that was convenient.
It was a time when perfectly respectable ladies would suddenly hoist up their skirts and wade deep into mud, in order to sketch a new species of bog myrtle.
Which left the question of who would have built such a sanctuary? I decided it was founded by a kindly young cleric, in late Victorian times, who I named ‘the (not very) Reverend Samuel Dunmore’, on account of him being much more interested in the natural world than the supernatural one that was supposed to be his job. In my imagination, Samuel had unexpectedly inherited some mock turtles, from an elderly lady known to the village as ‘Miss Alice’, and he needed somewhere to keep them.
It turns out it was Samuel, not me, who had begun to worry about the fate of other such creatures from fantasy stories. And so, to that end, he had set up a local society in the village, with the noble, if slightly forlorn aim of “caring for and studying fantasy creatures, while there is still time.”
This was a period when local societies were very popular; a time when studying Nature became important, and accessible even to citizen scientists; a time when perfectly respectable ladies would suddenly hoist up their skirts and wade deep into mud, in order to sketch a new species of bog myrtle. I was even once a member of such a society myself.
And so it was that I found my backstory.
Later, when I came to build this new website, I realized I wanted it to be a ‘membership site‘. These are a great way for people to join in with something and become part of a community, in return for a small membership fee (in this case to support my work). But if such sites are for members only, I thought, what are we going to be members of?
Oh, wait. Yes. Of course.
If you, too, would like to become a member of the Frampton Gurney Phantasmagorical Society, simply click the button below. As a member, you’ll be able to download the latest versions of the game, and step into the ever-evolving world of Phantasia! Alternatively, if you’re intrigued but not yet ready to take the plunge, why not sign up for a free visitor pass first? Then you’ll be able to access the members’ area and find out more about us.
More about the project
FAQ
