Immersive Worlds for Play and Training

Endless streams of emergent characters and stories for interactive fiction, games, and training applications. Causally coherent responsiveness to player and agent actions. Culture Engine can breathe life into any world at a fraction of the cost of ML-only systems.

Our worlds feel alive and lived-in because they are alive and lived-in.

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What We Do

1. Blank Page

Let's start with a thought experiment. Ready?

Tell me an emotionally impactful story set in an original world. The story should involve characters that have complex lived experiences rooted in the specifics of their culture, and its resolution should have consistent impacts on the world.

You have ten seconds to brainstorm. Go!

2. Creative Seeds

How was that? For most people and all language models, that's a really hard exercise.

So let's make it easier. The story should be about a mathematician in a culture in which logic and mathematics are considered profane. She lives in isolation but yearns for connection. Unbeknownst to her, she walks past the house of a kindred spirit, a soulmate, every day, but they have never met.

Do the outlines of a story begin to form?

3. At Scale

Constraints of this sort lower the cognitive burden for creating immersive and impactful narratives for human and artificial worldbuilders alike.

Culture Engine can produce them at scale, and with far greater depth than this example. It can interweave millions of characters and stories, as well as the impacts of player and agent actions on those characters and stories, into a coherent fabric of cause and effect.

What could you do with Culture Engine?

We have developed a first-of-its-kind engine that can simulate dynamically evolving constraints for any kind of world, from prehistory to the present and fantasy to sci-fi. It's not a wrapper around language models; it's an independent system that can be used directly by humans or integrated with language models to make worldbuilding and narrative tasks easier while reducing environmental and unit costs.

Now we are building interfaces to let anyone use the engine, from writers and game masters to developers and researchers.

Use Cases

Artistic Inspiration

Whether the medium is literature, visual art, music, games, etc., creation is ultimately rooted in lived experiences. Culture Engine gives you access to a bottomless well of lived experiences.

Being able to dive into a coherently evolving world, pick out characters and stories, make changes, and explore consequences can help you uncover new subjectivities, fill out your vision, or point the way to an entirely new creative path.

Interactive Fiction

The best kinds of worlds are those that people want to keep exploring long after they've turned the last page or the end credits roll. With Culture Engine, worlds can take on a life of their own, tranforming any work into a collaborative exchange between creator and audience.

Whether you have the seeds of an idea or a fully fleshed out setting, Culture Engine can help you grow it organically along with your audience. You can retain significant narrative control or hand over the reins; either way, giving your audience agency will enrich the experience for everyone.

RPG Campaigns

From sketching out a world to fleshing out story opportunities and keeping it all consistent while adapting to player choices, Culture Engine helps GMs every step of the way. Regardless of your setting or system, you can shape and access massive populations of NPCs with their own lives, goals, and relationships that continue evolving between sessions.

You can pick out and curate the most interesting emergent storylines, focusing on what matters most: creating unforgettable moments with your players.

Game Development

Players expect living worlds that respond meaningfully to their choices. Generating immersive physical environments is becoming increasingly easy; populating them with interesting people and cultures is the next frontier.

Whether you're building an indie narrative game or populating an AAA open world, you can use Culture Engine to generate meaningful emergent content while maintaining narrative coherence. Ship games where every NPC has genuine motivations and every player action creates authentic ripple effects.

Synthetic Data

Training models and human operators requires diverse, realistic scenarios that capture the full complexity of human behavior and social dynamics. Culture Engine generates synthetic populations with an unprecedented level of cultural, social, and behavioral depth.

From training language models on nuanced social exchanges to preparing human responders for complex interactions, our systems provide controllable, ethical training data at scale. Generate massive populations of unique individuals with layered psycholgies and lived experiences for any situation you need to model.

World Models

World models are increasingly able to infer causality and project impact within physical systems. It is now critical for them to understand the potential breadth and complexity of human behavior, which far outstrips that of any physical system, and in turn for us to understand how they may impact diverse human contexts.

Culture Engine can create reproducible environments where models encounter millions of dynamic, causally coherent scenarios. Train models to navigate cultural nuance, ensure they maintain alignment across different contexts, and uncover edge cases.

Our Technology: Culture Engine

Culture Engine uses anthropological first principles to simulate massive populations and coherent evolution with unmatched computational efficiency. The result? Higher-quality interactions, fewer hallucinations, reduced costs.

Massive Populations

Culture Engine can simulate 1M+ individuals at high speed, each with their own personality, aspirations, and lived experiences. Each with their own stories.

The engine maintains causal coherence regardless of population size, ensuring satisfying butterfly effects and reproducible results.

Infinite Diversity

You can seed the engine to produce realistic characters and narratives for any kind of world, from prehistory to the present and fantasy to sci-fi.

Or let yourself be surprised—Culture Engine gives you the keys to an infinite cultural space.

Reduced Costs

Innovative algorithms founded on anthropological first principles ensure we can produce natural-language narrative constraints extremely efficiently.

Our systems can be integrated directly within MCP architectures, resulting in significantly reduced environmental and unit costs for narrative generation.

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