Making the Imaginary : Worldbuilders, and the Art of Ontogenous Play

Sammanfattning: How we imagine and the potency of alternative imaginings to socio-political concerns are vital questions for social science, and worldbuilding is a particular and understudied method of doing so. It is the creative making of fictional, imaginative worlds, offering a potential alternative method to imagine otherwise. This paper ethnographically explicates this craft through detailing how creators, known as worldbuilders, make their worlds, demonstrating how it is generative and impactful for them emotionally, intellectually, and politically. It is based of three months of online ethnographic/netnographic fieldwork across the multiple online ‘sites’ worldbuilders are active, particularly a forum and chatroom, as well as digital interviews with sixteen individual worldbuilders. I argue that worldbuilding is a process of toying with ontologies, which I call ontogenous play. I explain this through detailing what is dubbed making the imaginary – the worldbuilding process – going through the particulars of the process and the experiences of interlocutors, demonstrating how one achieves situated transcendence through it, and the generativity of that. In light of these observations, I also argue that worldbuilding is an art, attending to the ramifications of that designation. I draw upon anthropological understandings of making, processes, liminality, and ontologies to advance the argument, as well as the emergent scholarship on worldbuilding from ‘sub-creation studies’, and the erudite hypotheses of my interlocutors.