#sandbox world

I've seen a lot of good posts on the subject lost due to deactivated OPs and had a hard time finding remaining ones that cover all this, so I'm making my own post going over common box boy universe worldbuilding.

Since there's not a single central canon to the box boy universe, I've put together an explanation/summary of the common parts of the world, to hopefully make it easier to approach.

But first and foremost: The BBU is a sandbox world, and one of its great strengths is the freedom it gives writers. You can use, change, add, or even entirely throw out any details you so desire! These are common ideas in the BBU, but they are by no means requirements. Each writer will have their own concepts and worldbuilding details for the BBU (including me! but I’ll try to be objective for this post and not inject my own version).

The BBU was initially created by @/sweetwhumpandhellacomf and further developed and popularized by @/shameless-whumper and @/ashintheairlikesnow, but you are not required to credit anyone when creating in the BBU unless you use their specific characters.

Okay here are some common threads I’ve seen in the BBU:

Pet whump world! - The BBU is a sandbox designed for whump, specifically pet whump. As such, there’s a lot of hurt and/or comfort in most of the stories that take place there, as well as the other stuff that usually goes with pet whump, like dehumanization.

Human pets (it’s glorified slavery) - The core idea of the BBU is that human pets are legal. As in, you can own a human being. They’re advertised as “pets” but some are used for various kinds of labor or sex, not just companionship. These human pets are usually just called “pets” or “boxies”. Gender-specific terms include “box boys” for the guys and “box babes” for the gals. I think I’ve also seen “box buddies” for enbies, but it’s not as popularized of a term.

WRU - A major player in the BBU is the WRU: A big bad company that trains and sells boxies. They may be a monopoly or there may be other companies, but WRU is usually the biggest/most powerful. (In the original post that started the BBU, WRU stood for Whumpees-R-Us because it was a joke post. Authors vary in how they handle it, from coming up with something else it stands for to simply not acknowledging that it’s an acronym at all.) In most iterations, the WRU makes an effort to appear ethical and legal on the outside, but secretly does lots of bad stuff like kidnapping people to sell, forcing signatures, and using torture instead of humane methods to “train” boxies. They’re pretty good at getting away with it.

Ordering pets - People with enough money can buy boxies. For additional money, they can even put in custom orders for traits they want. Whether those traits are natural inherited features, body mods, or special training, the WRU will make it happen. (Sometimes they kidnap people to fit a specific order, but that’s not public information). Boxies are expensive. In many versions of the BBU, only the very rich can afford them, though in some versions it’s possible for some of the middle class to put together enough money. The exact prices vary between authors. Boxies can also be acquired secondhand. A boxie who's been returned to the WRU, re-wiped, and retrained is usually called a "refurb," and is often discounted compared to a brand new one. A boxie bought from a former owner or other secondhand source such as a pet shelter will usually still have the training and memories from their previous owner(s) and be cheaper than a refurb.

Signing - In order to become a boxie, a person has to sign a legal document agreeing to it. Once they sign, they are legally not a person. Sometimes the WRU forces signatures using torture or other unsavory methods, then pretends it was voluntary all along. In order to sign, a person has to be of legal consenting age (i.e. age of majority). But the WRU also lies about people’s ages sometimes.

Bar codes & numbers - Once they’ve signed, boxies are given bar code tattoos, usually on the wrist. They’re also assigned a number (most commonly six digits) instead of their name. Their owner may choose to give them a new name once they’re bought, or leave them with just their numeric designation.

The Drip - The Drip is a fictional drug (or mix of drugs) administered via IV that’s used on trainees. In most versions, the Drip induces amnesia to remove boxies’ memories of their life before they became pets. In some versions it helps with conditioning them in some other way. In most versions, the Drip is given to every boxie as part of their training, but in a few versions it may be a measure only used on the more difficult ones.

“Training” (torture and conditioning) - In order to get a boxie to behave how the WRU/owner wants, they go through “training.” The official statement is that the WRU uses humane methods, but really they use a lot of torture and manipulation. Exact methods will vary between writers, but some common ones include white room torture, electric shocks (via batons or shock collars), and drugging. Boxies are called "trainees" while in the process of going through conditioning. The WRU employees in charge of training them are called “handlers”. Desired results of training usually include obedience, submission, gratitude, desperation for/leaning into touch, and certain automatic responses including learned phrases and specific positions. Most of these positions correspond to a number, but they’ll also bow on the floor in response to the word “respect.” Boxies are also made to wear collars, and conditioned to associate wearing one with being safe or wanted. Sometimes they're made illiterate as well. The typical trainee outfit is black shorts, a white t-shirt and a cheap collar or shock collar. The typical food they get while in training is bland and unpleasant. The training facilities generally have white rooms, maze-like hallways, and plenty of cameras. Most boxies are terrified of being sent back to the WRU after they've been bought.

Designations - Boxies are given specific designations depending on their training and expected duties. The typical designations are Domestic (menial labor, usually household chores), Romantic (sex), Platonic (non-sexual companionship or aid), and Guard Dog (bodyguard). Some writers also use other specialty designations. Boxies can also be combinations of multiple designations.

Delivery in boxes - Here’s where the name comes from! Once a boxie is trained and matched up with a buyer, they’re typically delivered to the buyer’s home in a box. The buyer opens the box to get their pet, and usually there are some certain steps the WRU recommends at this point, like testing their responsiveness (by hitting them) or getting them some water.

Ownership - Once a boxie is bought, they are legally owned by that person. They can basically do whatever, because after signing the boxie is legally not a person and does not have human rights. In most versions I’ve seen, boxies don’t even have animal rights. Typically there’s a three month return period, and after that it’s the owner’s business how they treat their boxie. Owners are expected to be responsible for their pets’ behavior outside the home though. Since they’re legally not people, boxies may be banned from certain establishments, both private and public, just like other pets. (For example, often human hospitals won’t take them and they have to go places specifically for pets.)

Matt Brown at AIIDE 2006

Notes from Matt Brown's (EA/Maxis) invited talk at AIIDE 2006, entitled "The Power of Projection and Mass Hallucination (Practical AI in The Sims 2 and Beyond)".

The general gist of it is that The Sims 2 is a sandbox world that provides some small bits of narrative-promotion to try to encourage emergent narrative sequences to actually emerge, by matching them against pre-authored snippets that seem desirable. In general, Matt Brown has a very AI-minimalist style of AI design.

Some points and claims:

Perception is key: how to seem intelligent, not how to be intelligent ("Big A, little i")

Complicated behind-the-scenes computation is usually interpreted as random behavior by the player, so don't bother

Players have short memories and quickly move on, so your AI should too

Correlary to the above: Local intelligence is good enough, at least for something like The Sims. Just focus on making sure everything makes sense in relation to what comes immediately before and immediately after, and players will fill in appropriate long-term stories themselves.

Consistency leads to player storytelling and ascription of personality

Some randomness helps avoid brittleness; keeps you from getting stuck in repeated or easily exploitable weird behaviors

The Sims/NPCs react to player-driven momentum, rather than initiating much of anything

Much of the local behavior is organized around story trees

Story trees are explicitly authored bits of story, very short

In their experience, the important thing here was the authoring tools, not the AI: given good tools, a few human authors can quickly create and maintain lots and lots of story trees. Important features were sorting of story trees by roles, easy searching/comparison/etc., batch creation/edits, and variable bindings.

He was pretty adamant that it's much easier to write authoring tools to make writing extensional definitions of "good story" feasible than it is to build a generative system with an internal notion of good story, since you'd have to do a lot of manual fiddling on the latter anyway.

Events are matched against all tree prefixes simultaneously, and of high-matching trees, the events that that tree says would come next in its story snipped is scored against a model of player interest ("player likes [x] events") and personality of the NPC, etc.

Players find it easier to give specific outcomes rather than traits — answering "likes hiking (y/n)?" is easy, while "x/10 for extrovert?" isn't.

Focus the player on the details you will actually use; in character design and personalities, don't try to faithfully model things that don't matter very much to your game

Anecdote: They had a complicated model for which urinals Sims would use: if there's 3, and someone's at the leftmost one, the Sim is supposed to use the rightmost one, not the middle one, unless they have some sort of weird personality. It wasn't reliably getting the responses they wanted, so they ripped it out and replaced it with a random-number generator, which people were just as happy to make up stories about and ascribe personality to.

A bit of an admission in the conclusion: As a sort of aimless "sandbox game", The Sims only really needs to make sure something interesting happens, but it hardly matters what. The player is responsible for making up stories (this is their sandbox after all), so the story-AI part of The Sims is only intended to provide some prompts and play off what the player does. That might not be the case in other types of games.

Follow-up: Maxis ended up deviating significantly from this view of Sims narrative with The Sims 3, bringing in Richard Evans to do a less AI-lite version of the AI, which included longer-term planning rather than purely emergent narrative. Evans has given a number of talks on that, which I unfortunately don't have good notes on, but here (archived) is a brief writeup someone else did of his AIIDE 2007 talk.

Mark J. Nelson, 2006-06-21.

<Note index>

Comments welcome: [email protected]

Many thanks to @andrevasims for searching in this post:

Some people live in a bubble. Then their are people that really live in bubble. Bubble Tree is a new way to live within nature. The only problem I have with this is bird poop. One other little thing. SHARP OBJECTS!