Prologue: Go Wayback! – PlayerUnknown’s glimpse of a digital future that teaches us to survive in the present

thesixthaxis.com:

Prologue is the start of something. When you understand what Brendan Greene and the team at PlayerUnknown Productions are attempting to create – its ambition, its scope, its real-world applications – then you can understand both the blazing focus of Greene’s vision, and why Prologue: Go Wayback! is a compartmentalised start within a new digital world.

Brendan Greene is a modern day video game rock star. There’s little other way to describe a man who redefined the online shooter, first via the modding scene for Arma and DayZ, and then by building PUBG Battlegrounds. It’s afforded him a unique position, creating PlayerUnknown Productions, and letting him head off to experiment and explore what is possible, not just within video games, but in the way we communicate and interact with each other digitally. It’s wildly ambitious, and almost too big for even his own team to fully grasp. But first, there’s Prologue.

Prologue is a survival game, set within a map that changes every single time you play. That, in and of itself, isn’t particularly groundbreaking. We’ve seen No Man Sky, Valheim and others match survival crafting to a procedurally generated world, but Prologue is taking a different approach to it because this is, the team hope, a new beginning for the creation of worlds.

Prologue marries machine learning with procedural generation, systems that are interlocked and intertwined in such a way that they can create surprising, meaningful landscapes. The difference here is scale. While Prologue’s map is an ‘achievable’ 8km x 8km (for context, that’s the size of Skyrim’s map), it’s also a proof of concept that sits alongside the Preface: Undiscovered World tech demo, with the end goal of creating a system that can form and create whole planets, whole ecosystems – sitting down to talk, Greene utters the word ‘Metaverse’, but is obviously conflicted about doing so.

He leans in, broadening the scope of what they’re working on, saying, “I hate using the word Metaverse. I really