villanovan

Villanovan is a living-world sandbox you can watch from afar or inhabit through individual lives.
The current world is a small island of grass, deer herds and wolf packs. Watch it unfold, or live as a deer or wolf. Choose where to go, where to graze or which prey to hunt. Births, hunger, ageing and drought shape the world around you.
The ambition
The ambition is to bring human lives and civilization into that same world. People, villages and the wider civilization systems are not yet implemented.
I have tried in Villanovan to accomplish a small part of a pleasant assignment which I have laid upon myself: to create a little world in which something of civilization may come to life.
I wish to evoke as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the possibilities that genius and labor open to mankind: to witness and shape, in their causes, character and consequences, the advances of invention, the varieties of economic organization, the experiments in government, the fellowship and conflict of peoples, the growth of custom, and the uses and abuses of power. I wish to follow the work of human hands from the first shelter to the busy harbor; to see necessity give way to comfort, knowledge become capability, and the strength once spent upon survival set free for enterprise, enjoyment, and adventure.
I do not need to be told how absurd this enterprise is, nor how immodest is its very conception; for it is clear that no little world can contain the fullness of our own, and that no arrangement of its parts can adequately compass the lives it seeks to suggest.
Nevertheless I have dreamed that, allowing fun and fantasy their freedom from the obligations of realism, this small creation may offer something of the pleasure of discovery, the fellowship of labor, and the exhilaration and temptation of growing power. I have hoped that to live among its people, to share in their dependence and enlarge their possibilities, may evoke emotion and invite reflection in those upon whom curiosity has laid the desire to see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and understanding through play.
Wouter Weynants
Adapted from Will Durant's preface to Our Oriental Heritage.