In media art, worldbuilding refers to the practice of using game engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine as a direct medium to construct a world from scratch. Rather than merely parasitically appropriating or critically dismantling commercial games, this approach moves toward building philosophy, social systems, ecosystems, rules, dynamics, and environments anew. Hans Ulrich Obrist described worldbuilding as an agency that does not simply inherit existing worlds, but creates new ones, framing it as a practice for exploring alternative possibilities beyond the given reality.
In this context, a work is not just a narrative setting or a game space, but a self-organizing environment in which agents continue to respond, or an ecosystem that evolves autonomously. The context describes a 2010s onward tendency often called worldbuilding, live simulation, or post-player. Artists such as Cao Fei, Ian Cheng, and Lawrence Lek are presented as key figures in this shift. Their works reconstruct contemporary political and social issues—such as surveillance, AI, migration, and online communication—inside virtual spaces, making worldbuilding a platform for reconfiguring reality through art.
The term is also linked to a curatorial and historical reorganization of game-related media art, from a history of games as works to a history of world-generation techniques.