The Village Villages
The Village Villages
I will turn 58 in a couple of months. I’m not old (despite what my kids say), but I am not young. Time is short. Palpably short, now.
At almost 58, I just finished a two-year custody battle to keep my kids. That might have something to do with what I feel now. It’s hard to put into words precisely. It’s a certain sharpening. A quickening, an awareness of exigence.
Now one question runs in a loop. “What happens when I am gone?”
Recently I wrote about making a game. Classic “I made a thing.” It is a game, and its name is Perilous Delve. And so at the risk of delving perilously into chthonic water I’ve no business sounding, here we go.
In Perilous Delve, you live in a small village. You descend into the dungeons under the hills and fight what baddies live thereunder.
Assuredly, I did not start building this game with my angsty existential question in mind. I started with a dungeon. Then land above the murky caves. Then a village. So with accretion, not so much a clear north star, I find I have made a machine which asks my question. It asks the player. It asks the player to ask my question, “What happens when I am gone?”
Standing back from the work, it seems to me this machine, the game, circles agency, memory, intentionality, and consequence. In Perilous Delve, you are no hero. If you are anything, you are the dangerous neighbor in a small world, and that world turns without you, but your choices are consequential for the little toy world.
None of this would have been possible without an AI coding assistant. Here in late 2026, some people find that repugnant.
Elon gesticulates about datacenters in space, yet the rule seems to be this: AI that replaces artists is like clubbing seals. AI that replaces programmers is acceptable.
I, a lifelong programmer, used AI without a second thought for the code. I started with art from a human artist’s tileset, but at this point I have augmented it with a lot of “AI SLOP” art. By the rules of late 2026, AI has tainted this entire endeavor, rendering it repugnant beyond redemption.
Many would say I’ve cheapened the thing I’m building. Have I, though? This thing would literally not exist, were it not for these tools.
I don’t think the objection is about labor. It is about authorship. Or effort. Or both. We disclaim the resultant work without examining the effort of intention and authorship. The claim is that the work is somehow less mine, or less legitimate, or less worthy, despite the depth of the effort poured into authoring a thousand thousand consequential choices.
The joke is a prompt: “Make me GTA IV. Don’t make any mistakes.” GTA IV is a name for thousands of decisions that other people already made. My game has no such name. Outis, be thy game.
None of Perilous Delve’s decisions existed until I set them in motion. I made thousands of choices, large and small. The assistant implemented them. When I did not make a decision, it was because it was not consequential to me. So the assistant made it. Sometimes its answers were good. Some were wrong for this game, and when they entered my awareness, I addressed them.
And yet this remains less-than?
The assistant freed me from semicolons. I give my attention to intention instead. Far more important, it has also given me a way to leverage time, which I have less of, every minute, every year.
Apparently, that is a sin? Teilhard de Chardin enters the chat, says more-or-less “Breathing is complicity.” Hard to argue with.
Lemme give you an example. Here is one rule: noise attracts monsters. Sounds like one sentence of work, right? No. Not by a mile.
The monsters come from Niloc’s tower on the surface. They walk across the wild, strange land to the dungeon mouth. They know where the noise was, but not where you (the dangerous neighbor) are.
If you stay put on that floor of the dungeon, they hunt you by your footsteps and torchlight. If you go to another floor, they wait at the door for your return. If you leave the dungeon, they cease their pursuit and instead occupy the dungeon, settling.
See how much intention was encoded in this one teensy corner? Each answer is a decision. A different answer makes a different game. Yet because an agent placed the semicolons, it’s slop?
Anyhow, under all of those decisions lies that pernicious question. “What happens when I am gone?”
I gave the village its own answer, too. While you are gone, the village villages.
Villagers cut wood, sell goods, and drink at the tavern. When they have no coin to spend, they sit at the campfire. When the woodsman cannot sell his wood for three days, he gets pissed off and no longer adds it to the common pile. He keeps his own stack at the tree line.
Sometimes, your little delver dies. Death in Perilous Delve takes almost everything you carry. You keep a few slots, and the game calls them Forever marks.
An item in a marked Forever slot survives death and does not change. You start with one Forever mark. You can earn up to four. You choose what goes in those slots, and you choose before you die.
Things beyond you survive. The village stays. The character does not.
I survive. I am in the game. In no small way, I am the game. The antagonist is Niloc. I’m sure you can figure out who that is.
Niloc sends the patrols. He sits behind the things that happen when you are somewhere else. His tower becomes a network of strange places across the land. You do not defeat him. You cannot encounter him, but you can find his marks, one place at a time.
I won’t claim this cameo is clever. More like goofy. And yet… My decisions, my realized intentions, however flawed, are the game. Every rule embodies a choice I made about how this little world works.
So which demiurge am I? The demiurge of Plato is a good craftsman. He looks at the Forms and makes the best world that the material permits.
The Gnostic demiurge is a lesser maker. He traps souls in matter. He thinks that he is the only god.
I give my name to the antagonist, the author, and invite you to the same question, “What happens when I am gone?”
Is this even a game?
There is no win. Death is a setback, not an end. You do not become powerful. What lasts is in the village, not in your little character, but in the choices you made while playing and the ripples in the little world.
Maybe it is a question that you can hold in your hands. You enter a world. You change it. You leave. The village villages.
A player can close the game and return. I cannot. None of us get four slots.
You can download the game here.
Colin Steele writes about things he has no business writing about at colinsteele.org. He published his first TTRPG in 1989. He still hopes you try out his game.