AR6

Inquiries · open · since 4 Oct 2026 · last tended 10 Oct 2026

What makes an invented society plausible, and what does belief do in it?

A culture is plausible when its institutions change what people can do, and when every event has a cause in its history.i

  1. det. 10 Oct · interpretedTwo outside reports agree: family, religion and regime describe cultures but do not act yet; rights, debts and successions must change what communities can do.
  2. det. 10 Oct · correctedMeasured against the rule: 17 of 82 quarrels and 15 of 91 alliances had no cause. Removed in version 17.
  3. det. 10 Oct · interpretedRule of the generator: everything is deduced from history.
  4. det. 4 Oct · interpretedA game concept: generate communities and their centuries of history.

Opened by Choosing a game project: a world whose societies are generated, not written. Roots: How ordinary people produce collective meaning (legends, rites, feasts, forms without a state), and what belief does, since 2023.

Trained in history at university (DEUG). Used here: the corpus is read page by page, in the text: Wickham, Scott, Ostrom.

Position

An institution must change an action, a beneficiary or a consequence, not only a word. Belief is judged by its function: to console, to contemplate, to transmit, to overturn.i

What it refuses to claim

  • No learned “interest score”, no general story solver: both reports judge them premature.
  • No academic work on generating religions was found; the belief rules start from scratch.

Experiments

1 done · 0 running · 3 proposed m

  1. proposed

    A typology of beliefs against ethnography. Does an eleven-axis typology hold against documented counter-examples (Pulotu, SCCSR)?

  2. proposed

    Plausibility judged by readers. Pairs of generated worlds judged by readers: which measures follow the variety a reader perceives?

  3. done

    Two author tests of the belief rules. Written cases checked by the author: no signal either way.

  4. proposed

    The market after the succession. Three houses, counted grain, a contested passage, a debt and a market: three shortages of the same size with different causes.

What it could lead to

  • already feeding Palimpseste, the world and society generator. · Palimpsestei
  • sought A game in design, of which Palimpseste is the world.i

Reading

A read corpus of about twenty books and games, then two reports with about 120 references.

Read page by page for the corpus; the reports’ references are kept, mostly not read yet.

  • Chris Wickham, 2009. The Inheritance of Rome
  • James C. Scott, 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed
  • Elinor Ostrom, 1990. Governing the Commons
  • Emmanuel Todd (used from memory, to verify). Family systems

Crossings

In the register

  1. correction Palimpseste

    Palimpseste’s rule, everything deduced from history, measured against itself: 17 of 82 quarrels and 15 of 91 alliances had no cause. Removed in version 17. m